“This is a slap in the face to Silicon Valley,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and analyst at Deep Analysis. “But I don’t think it will have a long-term effect, to be honest. There’s a short-term effect in that people can’t get their money overnight.”
“The perceived threat from China is almost certainly a driver here, but I am not sure it is the primary driver,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “It’s more that technology — AI particularly — is moving at such a pace and having such an impact that the government feels compelled to address its many problems.”
Many organizations feel caught in a bind—they want to migrate to something more effective but migrating a legacy system to the cloud fills them with fear. They’ve heard that it may all go wrong or be expensive, complicated and risky. Ten years ago, those were valid concerns, but today, a migration to the cloud is much more straightforward than you may imagine. It also typically brings a wide range of immediate benefits, including lower costs, increased security, the elimination of tiresome maintenance and updates, and easy access to content—anywhere and anytime.
Over the past few months, my colleague Matt Mullen and I have been taking briefings, researching academic and industry sources, and brainstorming a new area we call “work intelligence.” It’s not something we have invented: It’s a movement we have watched emerge during the past couple of years.
Yet some experts believe the fine and Google’s commitments aren’t enough to change location tracking practices at Google or other companies. “$400 million is around 0.1% of Google’s annual revenue,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of market analysis firm Deep Analysis. “More importantly, it’s actually incredibly costly and complex to eliminate tracking of users once it’s deployed at scale.”
Similar technologies have become available for other markets to fill in labor gaps and move people out of repetitive tasks, said Matt Mullen, an analyst at Deep Analysis. “Textract Analyze Lending looks especially interesting in that it recognizes the need for specifically verticalized industry solutions,” Mullen said.
Whistleblowers can impact not just a company’s profitability but future employees and partners, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of market analyst firm Deep Analysis. Whistleblowers have an impact “by informing others of the true nature of the business,” he said. He added that the tech sector is “rife with issues” that many employees are many employees are uncomfortable with, and he expects to see more whistleblowers.
The release isn’t only important, it’s potentially a game changer according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the founder of Deep Analysis. He explained in a newsletter update that the analyst firm had “stuck our neck out this week” and described it as “the biggest [news] since SharePoint in our industry.” He offers a more detailed analysis of the release elsewhere, but for brevity his newsletter statement summed it up: “Microsoft has announced a massive expansion of functionality to SharePoint, providing tools for document capture, assembly, summarization, translation, and processing. But the question is, what does that mean beyond the Microsoft customer base itself?”
“Building on the massive market that they have, Microsoft comes along and adds — pretty much in one fell swoop — all the tools you actually need to automate document processes. That’s huge,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “Even things that seemed simple — time and expense claims forms, accounts payable, contract management — today you need to go out to multiple vendors to get that done. Microsoft’s basically saying, ‘Here’s all the tools, you can do that.’ That’s going to rock the market.”
Content Insights may also be a boon for Box admins who need to analyze what’s going on in their increasingly expanding content repositories, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis. “Box deployments are now pretty big; they used to be just departmental, and who cared, right?” he said. “But now you’ve got a lot of companies with a lot of stuff [in Box], so they need that sort of more enterprise-grade management capabilities to find out, you know, exactly what’s happening, who’s using what, and where it is.”