Between Dynamic 365 and Einstein the Disruptive Strategy Emerged to the Surface

Business transformation and digital disruption are the most Buzz words we are hearing lately. These terms have been over-hyped. The question is what does it really mean? And where are they going to take us?

Let’s first define the Business transformation, which is the operational steps a company takes to evolve their business models to adapt to the new trends, practices, and standards to continue doing what they used to do before but with faster, smarter and more efficient way and sometimes it reflects to transform your business to a completely another business.

Nowadays the modern digital technology is imposing new rules, where connecting to the cloud, mobile, social media, data analytics and sensors are facilitating in staying competitive. The new digital technology disrupted the old business functions and enabled technology even to transform and to enter entirely new markets used to be unreachable. However, we are in the phase where the Information Technology incumbents such as Microsoft and Salesforce have finished the digital preparation to aid firms to take these steps forward. How did they build their products? What is their competitive advantage and does the modularity approach helped in disrupting the current practices?

Regardless of the two products capabilities, what I care for is what type of investments IT incumbents are seeking for and how these products are evolving the companies standards and practices. As per Clayton Christensen, every product or service has an “architecture” each land somewhere on the spectrum between purely interdependent and purely modular. The architecture of a product or service determines how each component in the system must fit and work together to achieve the targeted functionality.

One example of modular architecture is the power outlets where anywhere you go in the “United States,” you’ll find that power outlets in walls are exactly the same. The interfaces between power outlets and devices are highly defined and modular. On the other hand, interdependent interfaces are those like iPhone chargers, iPhone Chargers that you must use the charger specifically designed for the iPhone. If you try to use a Samsung phone charger, it won’t work because the interface is interdependent for specific phones.

Anyway, I don’t want to go away from our main topic, Microsoft and Salesforce are building their solutions based on a modular architecture having one platform that contains multiple components that work together in well-understood and highly defined ways. In a modular world, the overall functionality of the product is good enough, and the basis of competition is now speed to market, convenience, customization and price.

Microsoft corporate VP for cloud and enterprise Takeshi Numoto found that “In order to drive impact, businesses need to be able to modify and innovate on a range of products, not just in silos.” Microsoft is working on natively embed its Power BI and Cortana Intelligence technologies to the variety of applications such as, Sales, Customer service, Operations, financials, Marketing, Project Service Automation. Also, to access IoT data inside Dynamics 365 for Field Service. Moreover, they have created the AppSource away to create, to build or to find the right app for your business need.

I believe that the real reason behind buying LinkedIn for more than $26 billion was to provide clients with the real smart and intelligent digital transformation using a modular architecture where they will disrupt the market by serving the unserved customers and by avoiding falling into the trap of having overserved customers. Thus, to satisfy the job to be done “Help me to get the needed application that help me to transform to the new practices.”

I can tell that the competitive advantage through the coming years and the real investment will be on how we are taking advantage of the new emergent opportunities taking into consideration the new trends. For the IT services companies that already started with the offshoring services using the online sales as a primary sales channels and virtual teams as an approach for delivering, operation and supporting their customers will outperform the traditional IT services companies by having fewer overheads and bigger gross margins. The investment in the Software as a service will be in the peak starting 2017. We might witness specialized strategies while having a different type of Saas. For instance, Finance as a Service, Security as a Service, Marketing as a Service, Management as a Service, 3D printing as a Service, etc.

Related posts:

An Australian native (which explains the accent) the Leafy Seadragon is among my very favorite undersea creatures. I was really thrilled to see one during my visit to the New England Aquarium in…

When extending libraries and smart contracts on StarkNet, storage variable clashing can easily occur without proper precautions.

Give everyone a monthly subsistence stipend? A monthly gift card to a high end organic grocery chain to buy high quality food? Or build these stores in poor cities and counties? How about post high…