This is the second part of our two-part series on mobile transformation.

Mobile solution providers are chasing what may be the fastest-growing and biggest market in human history.  We’ve done a number of case studies on their offerings and three strategies emerge that lift results from good to great.

Much is at stake:  a U.N. study notes that more people on earth now have access to cell phones than toilets.  Of 7 billion on the planet, 6 billion have access to mobile phones.  The challenge for mobile service providers is how to break out of a highly competitive field while showing profit.  We’ve seen three strong ideas:

No longer a luxury, mobile phones allow all segments of the population to get on with their daily business.

Automate everything: profit where margins shrink

In India’s rural areas, customers spend as little as $1.25 per month on mobile calls.  But Bharti Airtel can afford to add 3 to 4 million of these rural customers a month. To keep the low-revenue-per-user segment profitable, Bharti uses IBM service oriented architecture (SOA) and other technologies so it can outsource IT to IBM and other partners. Nearly all customer transactions have been automated, streamlining customer service and keeping costs down.

Differentiate by being first with new services

Mobile voice and data services have become commodities in many markets, including Pakistan.  However, while much of Pakistan has cell service, many areas in the country have no banks. Telenor Pakistan made the investment to become first to market with mobile financial services. Its “easypaisa” mobile banking is a hit: as much as 90 percent of the adult population was not using a bank, but 62 percent use mobile phones. The rapidly growing service is a boost to the economy.

Spot new needs and fill them virally

In North America, Keek Inc. saw another opportunity in mobile service innovation: with smart phones and social networks becoming ubiquitous, people want to share video updates with their friends via Twitter, Facebook and other networks all at once. Now they can do so with the new Keek mobile app, which is driving triple digit growth.

Organizations that seek to pioneer new mobile service offerings do incur more cost and risk, Symantec notes in a study, but early adopters also reap big benefits and more profits. Being cautious about mobility is okay, the study says, but being resistant is not.  With six billion customers having access to mobile services, we expect to track and measure many more case studies about mobile innovation.

Alan Drummer is Creative Director, Content at NAVAJO Company.

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This is part one of a two-part series on mobile transformation.

Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of employers will have employees supply their own devices for work purposes. That means fast growth for centrally hosted virtual-desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions, which let employees access their work desktops from almost any device.

VDI adoption has been slow for years, but now it is accelerating.  One key reason is that strong business cases for adoption are emerging.  The VDI-related case studies that we develop for clients show a number of different kinds of ROI:

Work or learn from anywhere, saving six figures

Users want mobility; organizations want lower capital expenditures (CAPEX).  The University of Connecticut is getting both. It turned to VDI to give faculty and staff anytime, anywhere access, from PCs, Macs, or mobile devices. Users are no longer confined to a physical PC in the lab or office, even for complex statistical or data mining applications. The school has trimmed five-year CAPEX by a projected $318,000.

Integration headache transformed to 22,000 hours saved

Joining up is hard to do. For instance, Commerz Direktservice, after a merger, needed to integrate two different call centers.  By turning to a VDI infrastructure, the company unified the call centers, cut compute costs by 50 percent and reduced boot-up from 10 minutes to 1 minute, reclaiming 22,000 hours in employee productivity.

VDI is also opening up powerful new revenue models for IT solution and service providers:

Bumping up revenue by 33 percent

For small businesses, equipping every employee with a computer can be costly. So DirectNetworks launched a cloud-based VDI service that delivers a desktop and applications via a Web browser, enabling small business employees to use their own computing devices.  The result? 10-fold growth in users and 33 percent more revenue.

VDI for SMBs means eightfold growth

Eshgro provides small businesses with online workspaces that employees can access from any browser. Business clients can add applications to the workspace by renting them from Eshgro for a flat per-month per-user fee. Eshgro has grown eightfold.

Build your cloud on a cloud

Eshgro has also saved 20 to 30 percent of its internal costs by not having to purchase infrastructure. It stages its cloud service offering on another company’s cloud.

Show them the money

The Gartner report notes that mobile initiatives are often exploratory and may not have a clearly defined and quantifiable goal, making IT planners uncomfortable.  The report urges organizations to plan and demonstrate measurable benefits. We’ll be doing our part as we prepare VDI and mobile-related case studies for our clients.

Alan Drummer is Creative Director, Content at NAVAJO Company.

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In its role as a sales tool, a customer-reference case study works best when it provides quantitative benefits, such as ROI, cost savings, improved uptime, or shorter lead times. Numbers lend themselves to comparison of competing offerings. They are seen as more credible and compelling than word-of-mouth testimonials of business success.

So, it’s understandable that some B2B marketers want to see quantified business benefits in every case study. We advise our clients to seek out these metrics early on, when qualifying references for case studies. When we interview client account teams and customers, we probe for any savings, revenues or other quantified benefits that can be attributed to the recent technology implementation. Sometimes, we even ask customers to calculate dollar or percentage figures, when these are pertinent to understanding the business impact of the new technology.

On the other hand, we’ve interviewed quite a few happy customers who couldn’t provide a single quantified benefit of using our client’s products. Yet they chose our clients all the same and would heartily recommend them to others. Why? Because, the interviewees say, our clients “understood their needs,” “exceeded their requirements,” or “were willing to go the extra mile to make their project a success.”

So how do you reconcile this emotional value with the corporate demand for rational (read: numerical) evidence of business success? What do you do when an otherwise valuable reference doesn’t meet this criterion?

Take a deep breath. Resist hopping on the numbers bandwagon. And stay real. Your prospective customers know that it takes time to realize the business benefits of new technology. They understand that plenty of big-ticket tech purchases have more to do with routine capital upgrades than strategic new applications. They don’t expect every case study they read to have benefits in the order of six-figure savings and 100 percent ROI in two months.

What they do expect is to understand why other customers chose your company. Whether those reasons are rational or emotional, they can make a significant contribution to closing a sale when they are perceived as sincere—as if your customer were talking to your prospects directly.

Keeping it real may not be the holy grail of customer reference programs, but for those of us who produce case studies, it’s fairly high up there.

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There’s never been a better time for a little guy to bring down a big guy. The Internet offers collaboration and cloud services capabilities that act as force multipliers, a modern-day equivalent of David’s slingshot.

When it comes to cyber security, unfortunately, both black hats (cybercriminals) and white hats (security analysts) have been developing their own digital slingshots. Black hats have collaborated to hack into and steal from a number of large organizations. White hats have collaborated, across normally competitive security vendor lines in some cases, to identify and close down several large, illicit botnets and spammers.

Which side is getting ahead? The race see-saws daily. As we prepare security-related case studies, articles and white papers for clients such as Symantec, IBM, and Dell, we’re noting milestones like these:

Advantage black hat: The online underground economy keeps growing. It’s a hidden market of servers and forums that makes it easy for cybercriminals to buy and sell attack toolkits. These are pre-written, customizable bundles of malicious code that can be used for different purposes such as stealing sensitive information or driving a botnet.  Fueled in part by these toolkits, the number of malware attacks increased by 81 percent in 2011, Symantec notes.

Advantage white hat: Managed security services, offered through the cloud, are helping to offset a number of risks. Small and midsize businesses, such as a growing community bank in Mississippi, can now use managed services to afford 24×7 intrusion prevention monitoring from experts. It’s cost efficient as a managed service, and they could never provide it themselves. This case study we developed for Dell shows how the bank was able to deploy 24×7 monitoring, block 50 to 150 attacks and scans a day, and cut security costs by 60 percent, saving enough IT staff time to be able to launch six new IT projects and services.

Advantage black hat: You may guard sensitive information on your premises carefully, but how is it treated by the organizations you share it with online? This white paper we developed for IBM notes that two thirds of Web applications have security vulnerabilities and three out of every four attacks on information target the Web application layer, which is difficult to defend.

Advantage white hat: To minimize risks, businesses can turn to expertly secured Web applications that are offered as cloud services. An example is Q2ebanking, an online banking platform offered as a service to small banks so they can use it to win customers away from the largest banks. This case study shows why Q2ebanking, powered with online authentication from Symantec, has been among the 500 fastest growing companies in America for the past two years.

Who will get ahead tomorrow? Along with our clients, we are watching.

Alan Drummer is Creative Director, Content at NAVAJO Company.

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Hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive an invitation to an online event of some kind: podcast, webinar, virtual trade show, and the like. Sure, it can be challenging to weed through the constant barrage of email offers. But what could be better for a content professional like me than to simply click my way to broader horizons? My boss can’t complain, either: For the price of a few tidbits of my contact information, I get free professional development, with no time away from the office.

Considerations such as these may be one reason virtual conferences and trade shows are becoming more popular. (Market Research Media Ltd. forecasts a 56% compound annual growth rate through 2018.) The question is: Do virtual events deliver the same level of intellectual enrichment and business opportunity as their real-world counterparts? Or, do they sacrifice face-to-face relationship building on the altar of cost-efficiency and technophilia?

Recently, I participated in a virtual trade show sponsored by B2B Magazine and delivered through ON24, a provider of cloud-based webcasting and virtual communications solutions. My impression was that, in their zeal to deliver an experience that rivaled a brick-and-mortar event, the sponsor delivered many of the advantages—and some of the disadvantages—of the trade show experience.

How “live” is a talking head?

The event’s live seminars were delivered in a web conferencing format, with one window showing a live headshot of the speaker, another showing the presentation slides, and a third allowing audience participation. Although I am comfortable with web conferencing for meetings and education, it seemed to significantly compromise the benefit of attending a presentation in person, where I would be able to read the presenter’s body language and visually gauge the reaction of those around me. (ON24 offers various presentation formats, but I assume the event sponsor chose this one for bandwidth considerations.)

The side-scrolling trade show game

In the exhibit hall, I was able to scroll quickly across the line of vendor booths, which allowed me to optimize my time on the floor. (No exercise benefit there, but then again, I wasn’t indulging in any hotel breakfast buffets.) The trade show booths were a pleasant surprise in the degree to which they allowed presenters to introduce themselves and their offerings, answer my questions and provide me with relevant marketing collateral. The avatar-enhanced chat format allowed for both private and public conversations, but here is where mimicking the real world became a disadvantage. At one booth, the simultaneous conversations quickly became overwhelming, as more participants “arrived.” At that point, I took my virtual tote bag full of handouts and headed to the lounge.

Virtual coffee klatch

The event’s lounge area was a meeting place where participants could network, trade business cards, and even transact business. Not surprisingly, ON24 implemented this area using a messaging environment. No sooner had I entered the lounge, than I was approached by several other participants with requests to exchange business cards. Very little time seemed to be spent in relationship-building chit-chat, a phenomenon I found rather unfortunate, albeit time-efficient as far as superficial information gathering goes.

Although the compressed timeframe of the virtual event made it feel rushed, I left with the sense that I had learned a bit and made a few good connections. Some of these connections have since benefitted my company. As I attend more virtual events, I will probably become more adept at making the best use of the various virtual environments to achieve my objectives in the time allotted. So, I’ll reserve judgment on the lack of human contact. It’s a tradeoff that works for me—for now.

The author is a senior writer at NAVAJO Company.

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Big data offers a way out of complex quandaries faced by Antarctic researchers and others.

New insights are emerging fast these days because many organizations can now analyze larger and more complex data sets than ever before. It’s the era of “big data,” and one result is that weather predictions are more detailed. Another is that election forecasting is more accurate. (Nate Silver, a New York Times forecasting guru, correctly predicted all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election.) As we develop case studies for clients such as Dell, IBM, and Symantec, we’re noticing five other areas of impact.

1) Discoveries: new light on the universe’s darkest mystery

One of the biggest questions of all time may soon be answered. The universe we see and detect makes up just four percent of all matter in existence. The other ninety-six percent consists of dark matter and dark energy, which we know little about.

Neutrinos could shed light on this topic. They are all around us and are the fourth elementary particle besides electrons, protons, and neutrons. Their source is cataclysmic phenomena in the universe such as exploding stars and black holes—and one of the most innovative ways to detect neutrinos is a project that has put more than 5,000 sensors 1.5 miles below the Antarctic ice. Analyzing the data those sensors capture takes a heroic and creative effort by a University of Wisconsin team, using technology from Dell.

2) Cures: 250 nanoseconds that change a life

Another mystery is what causes a particular form of muscular dystrophy that strikes young people who were athletes and dancers in their younger years. By their early 20s, the disease can put them in wheelchairs.

Texas Tech researchers can now process a simulation using Dell technology that helps them see what they couldn’t see in a physical lab: a span of 250 nanoseconds (a lifetime for a protein) in which differences emerge between a mutating and normal protein. Studying those differences may provide the key to a cure.

3) Jobs: better odds of success for college graduates

You can almost hear the sighs of relief: more than 93 percent of Robert Morris University (RMU) alumni have landed a job in their field of choice within six months after graduation. They benefit from a focus at RMU of not just educating students, but also making them marketable in their career paths.

One way the school supports this result is by using business intelligence software to analyze data on student demographics, enrollment and retention when they make admissions and curriculum decisions. The infrastructure to do this was cost-prohibitive until Dell suggested an innovative solution using Microsoft SQL and Dell technology.

4) Decisions: wiser targeting in product investments

Long before “big data” was a big topic, The National Purchase Diary (NPD Group) was gathering point of purchase data from more than 900 retail partners, including Walmart, Nike, Sony, and Intel. Analyzing the data helps reveal customer preferences and buying patterns.

The company processes more than 100 terabytes per week, resulting in more than 1.5 petabytes of data managed. Yet with Symantec solutions, just two people can take care of all that data, while maintaining 99.999 percent uptime.

What kind of insights emerge at NPD? The biggest day of retail purchases in 2012 (in total dollars spent) wasn’t Black Friday; it was Christmas Eve, even though Black Friday had more purchases. And the most popular music genre of 2012? It was country music, which surpassed classic rock. Companies come to NPD to understand fast changing marketplaces, and they use what they learn to give consumers more of what they want.

5) Quality: Better products

Mobile is changing everything, and several of the world’s most successful corporations are in a high-stakes race to keep advancing its capabilities. Qualcomm is one of them. It’s a leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies, and the company found that an IBM data warehouse appliance can answer internal queries up to 600 times faster and reduce time to market from months to days. Being able to fit more product development cycles into a tight schedule is bringing better products to us all.

It will be interesting to measure more of the impact that big data can make in the months ahead.

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It’s amazing to see the strong gains and better outcomes that information technology is bringing to the healthcare industry. At NAVAJO Company, we interview healthcare organizations on how they’re using  solutions from clients such as Symantec, IBM, Dell, and HP. We work with the healthcare organizations to identify and measure the gains being achieved.  We’re seeing five top areas of improvements.

1. More time for care
At one of the leading hospitals in the United States, doctors have more time for patients because they can sign on to needed applications just by waving their hospital ID in front of a card reader at a workstation. Up comes a virtual desktop with their personalized applications. When they finish and walk away, the card reader detects they left and securely closes the session. At the next workstation on their rounds, a swipe of their badge brings up their desktop right where they left off. As a result, the clinical staff is reclaiming 20,000 hours a year for patient care.

2. New practices easier to launch
Mental healthcare providers can now launch an entire practice quickly from  anywhere they have Internet access. They open a virtual desktop that contains all the applications they need to schedule appointments, maintain secure patient records, handle payables and administer billing.  These services are available at a fraction of the cost of hosting the applications on site, and they enable individual practitioners and small practices to be served by automation they couldn’t afford otherwise.

3. Innovation accelerated
The largest healthcare company in the nation uses a converged, virtualized infrastructure that lets their R&D teams set up test environments in minutes instead of days. As a result, they’ve doubled the number of environments that are active, speeding product development cycles, supporting better outcomes and saving millions of dollars each year.

4. Patient safety enhanced
The first-ever e-prescription system for controlled substances now has federal certification. It eliminates paper documentation and saves time. It also checks for errors and potential drug conflicts automatically, helping to reduce the 15,000 overdose deaths from prescription painkillers that occurred in 2008. The new process also protects against fraud and substance abuse.

5. Lives saved
New IT architecture transmits EKG data between ambulances and hospitals to shorten delays for treatment of heart attacks, minimizing muscle damage, and helping to cut a heart attack patient’s risk of dying by 40 percent.

Despite these advances, the healthcare industry is known to be conservative and slow to change its ways. It takes an average of 17 YEARS, a study notes, to put significant medical discoveries into routine patient care practice. We believe that the industry can now transform itself much faster. It just needs more documented evidence of better outcomes and efficient return on investment.

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As data analysis tools have gotten better and better, companies have harnessed them to improve everything from market forecasts to operational processes to relationships with customers and suppliers. At the same time, researchers continue to explore vast new pools of data, and consumers have begun producing online content at unprecedented rates, generating up to 12 terabytes a day just in Tweets.

The information available for processing is growing exponentially, with no deceleration in sight. According to one IBM study, 90 percent of all the data in the world today was created within the past two years, and the volume continues to grow at a rate of about 2.2 million terabytes per day. Much of this information resides not in databases but in unstructured forms, such as emails, videos, and Web postings.

That’s why more and more organizations are trying to derive intelligence from “big data,” commonly defined as a data set so large and complex that it is difficult to process using traditional database tools. A McKinsey Global Institute report calls big data “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.” But many organizations are looking for assistance as they take the plunge.

Every aspect of managing big data can be challenging, from capture and storage of the information to search, analysis, and application of visualization techniques. Demand for hardware, software, and services in big data administration is growing rapidly. IDC forecasts that the market for big data technologies and services will reach $23.8 billion by 2016, growing about seven times as quickly as the technology market overall.

This is great news for vendors of storage, software, and servers designed to manage huge data sets, but tapping into this market requires specialized expertise. IBM is supporting big data analysis by employing Watson (the computer system that competed on “Jeopardy!”) to help bring research in healthcare and other fields to real-world application. For example, in a research partnership with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Watson has “analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy,” according to a recent Forbes article. Options derived by Watson lead doctors to have more confidence in their treatment decisions for patients.

It’s a market that’s wide open for companies with the right expertise. Watch out for this topic in the coming months—particularly with retail, financial services and healthcare companies.

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“Storage” is not a good name for what IT customers really want. It’s like calling a car a parking space. Parking data is not what customers really want when they talk “storage.”  They want data on the move. It’s valuable only when it’s reaching people who need it right when they need it.

We get many views into the world of storage at NAVAJO Company, as we develop case studies, white papers and videos for some of the biggest names in technology. As we talk with IT decision makers worldwide, we see a few patterns emerging. The best “storage” thinkers begin by analyzing data in motion, with a perspective much like that in lean manufacturing: What is the flow of data through an organization? How is value added? How can inefficiencies be removed?

Storage vendors have responded with technologies such as virtualization, deduplication, thin provisioning and automated storage tiering. The end result is that data in motion is doing increasingly amazing things.

When organizations can see and control data better across the wide assortment of arrays that most have, they can pull six and seven figure savings out of existing storage in this article for Symantec. Organizations can automatically destroy data to minimize risk in compliance with global retention policies, in this case study for IBM.

At one of America’s premier ski resorts, data and pictures flow from mobile devices in skiers’ pockets through sensors on the mountain and on to social networks, giving skiers new ways to connect with the mountain and their friends, in this case study for Dell. Other Dell storage technology is helping companies crunch through massive amounts of complex healthcare billing data to find and reduce overpayments.

To make animated feature films, as much as six terabytes of data can be required to produce rich new levels of detail in just one 10-second scene. That’s making possible some of the highest grossing movies of all time, as documented in a case study for HP. Other HP storage technology can help identify and indict multi-million dollar fraudsters seven years after their crime, through enhanced data analysis, or cut the costs for a call center in half with faster virtual desktops.

On the water, measurements can flow from 350 sensors on a radically designed sailboat to help it move two and a half times the speed of the wind, and bring back the oldest trophy in sports, in this case study for NetApp.

“Storage” deserves more respect than the name implies.  Under the hood, it’s sexy and dynamic. Don’t call it storage–at least not to its face. But we know you will.

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Most successful businesses throughout history have tried to provide great customer service. Happy customers often become repeat customers, and repeat customers are usually less expensive to sell to than new prospects. Not only that, but referrals from current customers are a great way to gain new business.

While customer references have always been helpful, they are gaining in importance in the digital age. That’s because social media and other online tools can spread opinions about a company more quickly and more broadly than ever before.

When an opinion is negative, well, just ask Christopher Dietz what can happen. He’s a Washington, D.C.-area contractor who was hired by Jane Perez to do work on her townhome. When she was unhappy with his services, she posted a review on Yelp claiming that he had damaged her home, had invoiced for work he hadn’t performed and was likely responsible for the disappearance of some jewelry. Dietz is suing Perez for $750,000 in damages because of the impact he says her review has had on his company. It’s an example of the damage a disgruntled customer can do. As the Washington Post explains, “Business owners such as Dietz say they are forced to take extreme legal measures because the Internet has made defamation that much more damaging. A single false post can live virtually forever on a site and reach millions, causing untold harm.”

The upside to negative online reviews is that the company has an opportunity to mitigate the damage. A poor newspaper review of a product or service provides little chance for rebuttal. And, obviously, face-to-face conversations among customers give an organization no room to even know which customers had a bad experience. In contrast, a negative Yelp review presents the opportunity to contact an unhappy customer and either attempt to make amends or at least let the individual know that his or her voice was heard and that the company will try to prevent similar situations in the future.

More important is the potential of a positive customer reference. One happy customer can express online, potentially to millions of people and virtually forever, not only the benefits of a company’s products or services, but also the enthusiasm with which a real customer endorses that organization. Finding the right customers to provide references and then helping those individuals get the message out is a key marketing strategy in this day and age.

Happy customers have always been valuable. The Internet has made them, and their stories, invaluable.

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