A
BriefingsDirect interview on the growing need for mobile apps and
Kony's newly announced tools to help the line of business go mobile.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special
BriefingsDirect interview, coming to you from the
Kony World 2015 Conference on Feb. 4 in Orlando.
I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions,
your host throughout this series of penetrating discussions on the
latest in enterprise mobility. We're here to explore advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full
spectrum of
edge devices and operating environments.
For our next interview we welcome
Burley Kawasaki, Senior Vice President of Products at Kony.
Burley Kawasaki:
Hi, thanks, Dana. Glad to be here. It has been
an exciting week. There
are lots of great
customer discussions and partner discussions going on.
Gardner:
Before we explore the
Kony World news, what's going on in the enterprise mobility marketplace? What are enterprises looking for in their mobility strategy?
Kawasaki: Obviously,
mobility
has proven that it’s not just a passing fad. It's really evolved over
the last four or five-plus years. Initially, most companies were just
trying to get one or two
apps out in the public
app store.
Many started with some type of branded consumer apps, what are called
business-to-consumer (B2C)
applications, and they were willing to make the investments to make it
have a fantastic user experience. They would try to make this a way for
customers to experience and engage the brand. A lot of times you saw
this being built and launched by the marketing organization inside an
enterprise.
Now, what we're seeing is a shift. As
people are looking for the next set of ways to exploit mobility, they're
looking internal, inside their enterprise. They're looking at what I
refer to as or
business-to-employee (B2E) applications.
But
instead of one or two apps, there are literally dozens or hundreds of
mobilized processes and applications that most larger enterprises are
looking to build as they start looking at all the internal processes. It
could be mobilizing sales or employees, looking at support out in the
field with field technicians, or providing self-service access to
vacation requests.
There are a number of challenges
this creates. One is lack of skills. If you're building one or two, you
can probably muster the technical expertise or you can outsource and
hire an agency or someone to build it. If you're looking to supply
dozens -- some larger enterprises are looking at hundreds of
internal-facing mobile apps -- that really highlights the imbalance
between the demand from the business stakeholders and the supply of IT
skills, resources, and technical talent.
Gardner:
So, it's important in the marketplace for enterprises to recognize that
this is a problem, this gaping hole between what is demanded in terms
of
mobile apps and development and what they can deliver. How are Kony
and others in your ecosystem, your solution partnerships, coming together
to allow them to leap that hurdle?
Build applications quickly
Kawasaki:
Kony, since day one, has focused on how to drive faster and faster
acceleration of the full development process. That's part of our core
value proposition of rapidly delivering great mobile apps by providing
tools and platforms to help build applications more quickly.
When
we talk about building anything custom, there is a certain amount of
time, typically three to six months that you spend, not just for the
development, but to map out the requirements to do all the testing and
final deployment. And with any custom software development, you can only
compress it so far, and there's a certain amount of skills and
expertise that you need.
To answer your question, we
think that there needs to be other types of models for ultimately
creating these internal mobile applications. The trend that you're
starting to see, and that we believe is really going to take off, is a
move away from custom, bespoke development of each and every app, to
much more of an assembly and configuration model.
If
you look at building a home, for example, there was a time where you had
to custom build all of the parts to your home. You would go out, cut
down the trees, and do everything from scratch, but that was a hugely
inefficient process.
Now, essentially, homes are componentized. You can find standard sizes lumber parts. Large parts of your home may be
prefabricated and it's just a matter of assembling and configuring them to meet your needs.
Many industries have realized the benefits of moving to assembly and configuration, as opposed to custom built.
We've
seen the same assembly across a number of industries, like the auto
industry. Many industries have realized the benefits of moving to
assembly and configuration, as opposed to custom built.
We're seeing this in software as well. There was a day where everyone used to build their own
enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system or their own sales automation system. Now, people have moved to
the configuration of packaged software. Mobile applications are now at
the tipping point where they need to have a different way that will
address the explosion in demand that I was describing.
There
are a couple of things that we think are required to create this new
model. One is that you need to have an ecosystem that provides pre-built
components. Obviously, you can't assemble things if there is nothing to
assemble from. So there needs to be an ecosystem of components.
Then,
there needs to be some type of tooling that allows you to assemble the
components without having to be a developer, but more of a visual drag
and drop type of composition experience.
And then once
you have done that, it can't just be a pretty picture. It needs to
actually somehow run and make its way down to your phone or to your
device. So there has to be some type of execution or dynamic run
capability behind the description of what you have created.
Those
are the three requirements. Of course, we have just announced this week
some software that addresses each of those categories.
Major announcements
Gardner: Well, let's delve into them a little bit. There were
three major announcements around your
Marketplace, your
Modeler, and also an example of how these come together in your first prepackaged application called the
Kony Sales App.
Kawasaki:
I'll talk about each of these. I'll start with the Marketplace. As I
said, to make this practical and useful for our customers, we need to be
able to create a way to find and discover pre-built components. Some of
these components Kony may build ourselves, but we're also working with a
number of very talented leading edge partners of ours --
independent software vendors (ISVs) and
systems integrators (SI’s), who are also contributing prebuilt components.
This week, Feb. 4, we launched Marketplace. If you go out to
community.kony.com/marketplace,
you can browse. We're adding partners on an ongoing basis, but you'll
see some of the early solutions that are available in the Marketplace.
That’s the first part of the announcement.
The second
piece is around how to assemble these into an actual application, a new
product called Kony Modeler. Unlike some of our prior products, our
developer tools, these do not require development backgrounds.
The typical profile of a user of Kony Modeler would be either a
business analyst
or someone closer to the business who knows how to drag and drop, to
define what the end-user experience should be for your mobile app, knows
how to describe the process or the workflow that has to occur, knows
how to take those forms that they've painted, and be able to map it to
some backend business data, coming from a system like SAP or Salesforce.
Unlike some of our prior products, our developer tools, these do not require development backgrounds.
As
long as you can do that, you don’t have to be a developer and drop into
code. You can describe this visually. You can drag and drop. Then, when
you're done, the important thing is that it’s not just a picture that
you print out and you throw over the wall to your developer. This
description of your application then gets pushed out instantaneously to
our
cloud run time.
We've extended our backend-as-a-service, what we call
Kony MobileFabric,
so that it takes this model, this description of the mobile app, and
will download it to your device and run it. Then, the next time as an
end-user, if you are using one of these apps, you just automatically get
whatever changes or updates have been made. You don’t have to go out to
an app store and find a new app. It just automatically is part of your
app.
As an analogy, in the same way if I use any
software-as-a-service (SaaS)
software, I won't have to install a new app on my laptop. I just go out
to my web browser, and next time I log in, it's always up-to-date.
Gardner: It sounds as if this has some of the greater elements of
platform-as-a-service (PaaS),
but the tooling is designed for that
business-analyst level. It also
gives you some of those benefits of rapid iterations. You can change and
adjust. You can customize to different types of user within the group
that you're targeting. And all of this, I assume, is at also low cost,
given that it's a SaaS based approach. Tell us a little bit about why
this is like PaaS, but PaaS-plus.
Non-developer experience
Kawasaki:
PaaS typically has been targeted primarily toward developers. And it’s
maybe a higher level productivity for developers, but you still have to
write code against
software development kits (SDKs) or other
application programming interfaces (APIs). Kony Modeler provides a non-developer experience.
The
other big thing, and you pointed it out, is that it really does lower
all of the infrastructure, hardware, and software costs that are
required, because it’s purely cloud-based. It makes it not only lower
cost from a
total cost of ownership (TCO) standpoint, but it also accelerates the whole development cycle.
I think about this as a shift away from a classic
waterfall-type model, to much more of an
agile model.
In the old model, you spend three to six months trying to go through
and nail the requirements and hand it off to your dev team. Then, they
go off, and you find out, only when it's in final
QA, that it doesn't look right on the device, or it comes back and the business has changed their mind. That never happens, right?
It
makes it not only lower cost from a total cost of ownership (TCO)
standpoint, but it also accelerates the whole development cycle.
Modeler
allows you to very quickly iterate a working application to release in a
matter of days and be able to do testing with your end-users. Based on
their feedback, I can make updates on an agile basis and continuously
iterate on functionality or enhancements to the application.
Gardner: Burley, it also sounds like you're able to bring
A/B testing
type activities to a different class of user, where you don't always
know what your requirements are precisely, but you can throw things on
the wall, try them out, see what works, and iterate on that. I don’t
recall too much of that capability being available to a business analyst
type of user.
Kawasaki: You're correct.
Usually, there is this very extended process, where a business analyst
has to document everything in some thick specification, and even if you
have it wrong or you are uncertain, whatever you communicate out to the
dev team is what they go off and build.
So it’s not
that this does away with requirements, but it does allow more
flexibility to change or to test. And I'd agree. I think the
responsiveness will allow much more experimentation and innovation. It's
better to fail fast. If you have tried something out and it's not
delivering the results, you haven't invested a huge amount of time and
cost to learn that.
Gardner: And another appealing aspect of this for IT and operations is that this isn't
shadow IT.
This is under the auspices of IT. They can bring in governance. They
can audit as necessary and make sure the right backend sources are being
accessed in the right way, with the right privilege and access
controls. They can monitor security. We talked about how it's better
than PaaS, but it's also better than shadow IT for a lot of reasons.
Lack of skills
Kawasaki:
It is. We were talking earlier about the skills shortage, and if you
look at the stats or the data, most industry analysts predict that up to
60 percent or 70 percent or more of mobile development is outsourced
today, to either an interactive agency, a systems integrator, or someone
else, because of lack of skills.
So it has been
outsourced to some third party, and who knows what technologies they are
using to build the app. It's outside the typical controls or governance
of IT. So it's not only shadow; it's dark matter. You don't even know
it exists; it’s completely hidden.
Yet, at some point,
inevitably, those apps that you may have outsourced for your first
version, it’s not just a first version release. You want to update it
sometimes monthly. So it has to come back into IT at some point, for no
other reason than it's connecting and talking to enterprise data in the
back end. It's connecting to other IT controlled systems, and so there
is a huge amount of risk and costs associated if these things are
completely hidden off the grid.
Gardner: Let's
take this from the abstract to the concrete. We actually have an
application now in play called the Kony Sales App. Who is that targeted
to, how does it work, and what do you expect to be some of the proof
point metrics of this in usage compared to how organizations conduct
themselves with
customer relationship management (CRM), especially if there is multiple CRMs in play in an organization?
Kawasaki:
That's a great point. First of all, this is the first of a series of
what we call ready-to-run applications. And the reason we call it
ready-to-run is that it's a packaged app. This isn't a custom or bespoke
app, but it's pre-connected and pre-integrated to the common back end,
in case of CRM what most companies are using, something like
Salesforce or
SAP on the back end.
So we've taken a task-oriented approach and created a modular micro app
approach that really is meant to be very easy and engaging for the
end-user.
So it comes ready to run, but like
packaged software or SaaS software, it allows you the ability to
configure and customize it, because everyone’s sales processes or their
user base is going to be different. That's where the Modeler tool allows
you to configure it.
So when you purchase Kony Sales,
you get not only the application, but the use of Kony Modeler to be
able to customize and configure it. And then, as you make changes, you
push it live, and again, it deploys using the SaaS model you were
describing.
To talk a little bit more about Kony
Sales, we think it's a new style of mobile apps, what I will refer to as
a micro app. Historically, people thought of CRM software, and I am
overgeneralizing, but as big, somewhat monolithic, applications.
One
of the historical challenges with CRM usage is that you had to bring
your laptop with you, and sales reps are notorious at not completing
data in a timely fashion. It takes a lot of mandates, top-down from the
sales leadership, to get data into the system so you can get accurate
reporting. It's one of the age-old problems.
We
believe that if instead of trying to get the whole CRM application
crammed down onto a four-inch screen, with all the complexity that it
requires, you target very specific action-oriented micro apps that a
sales rep can do very quickly on the go, that doesn't take a lot of
training, and doesn't take a lot of thought. They can very quickly look
up and see their accounts, or they can very quickly log a call they have
made.
So we've taken a task-oriented approach and
created a modular micro app approach that really is meant to be very
easy and engaging for the end-user, which in this case is a sales rep.
User experience
Gardner:
And again, for the understanding of how this all works across multiple
endpoints, regardless of what your sales force is using for their mobile
device, this is going to come down. They are going to get that user
experience and that interface that the craftsmen behind the app demanded
and designed.
Kawasaki: That's right. Kony Sales is multi-channel. It works across
phones,
tablets,
iOS,
Android,
and importantly, it does not replace your existing CRM data. It extends
the CRM systems you already have, but makes them much, much easier to
very quickly get access to.
Also using Mobile First
types of approaches, and by that I mean if you are a sales rep, very
likely you are on the road or in an airplane. How many people have tried
to use whatever CRM client, even some of the web mobile experiences, to
get data into Salesforce or SAP? It's all web-based,
HTML5-based, and it doesn’t work if you're not online.
One
of the things we designed in from day one was that you have to be able
to operate in an "occasionally connected" mode. So if you are offline,
either because you're out in the field talking to your customer, or
you're in an airplane you can still have the same easy access. Then,
when you're connected again, it will synchronize and handle updating SAP
or Salesforce in the background.
Gardner: We're
almost out of time, but I wanted to look a little bit to the future
roadmap. Now that we have the model of the Modeler, the Marketplace
and these ready-to-run apps, what comes next -- more apps, bigger
marketplace, or is there another technology shoe to drop?
Kawasaki:
It's more apps certainly, and not just from Kony, but from our
partners. When we did some of our initial planning and research, the
most commonly mobilized processes were ones that were customer facing or
customer impacting, just because of the benefits and the ROI.
So
we started with sales. We're going to release our next one, which will
be around field service. It really helps engage at the point that you're
supporting and serving your customer.
It really helps engage at the point that you're supporting and serving your customer.
There
are a set of these that we are working on, but I think also
importantly, we're working on really making our partner ecosystem
trained, ready to use Modeler, and to build very unique and
differentiated applications to publish to the marketplace.
We
have a couple of examples of these ready-to-run apps that are
compelling from our partners that you will hear more about, and that
list will continue to grow over the coming weeks and months.
Gardner:
And of course there's a lot more information online at
kony.com about
these products and services that you've announced. And you are going to
be taking this out on the road to Frankfurt, Europe, Dubai, and the
Middle East quite soon.
Kawasaki: That's right.
It's going to be fun getting to engage our global customer base and talk
about some of the innovations and get their input on what types of apps
they're trying to build.
Gardner: Well, very
good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning more
about how advancements in mobile applications’ design and deployment
technologies are bringing new productivity benefits across the growing
spectrum of edge devices and use cases. And we have seen how quality,
speed, and value are rapidly increasing, thanks to the Kony mobility
platform approach.
So a big thank you to our guest, Burley Kawasaki, Senior Vice President of Products
at Kony. Thank you, sir.
Kawasaki: All right, thank you, Dana.
Gardner:
And a big thank you also to our audience for joining this special
podcast series coming to you directly from the Kony World 2015
Conference in Orlando.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
Kony-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT mobility discussions. Thanks again for
listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.
A
BriefingsDirect interview on the growing need for mobile apps and
Kony's newly announced tools to help the line of business go mobile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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