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.”
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.”
On this episode, Chris and I chat with Ian Story (Principal GPM for Syntex) and Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Founder of analyst firm, Deep Analysis) to go behind the scenes of this exciting new “Content AI” category and solution. You’ll hear more about what’s new for Syntex, insights into what’s most valuable for customers, and a breakdown of the direction and goals to help humans manage content at scale.
“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.”
In the last few years, Microsoft, Google, and others have steadily advanced AI technology with new systems that show the power of AI. However, they have largely failed to show business users how those tools can apply in their day-to-day jobs, Pelz-Sharpe said. “There’s a recognition now with the big cloud companies that if it doesn’t connect into those workflows that bring actual business value, then nobody’s going to use it,” he said.
“Automation Anywhere seems to be just on the same path as it was five or six years ago,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst and founder of Deep Analysis. “It’s the last of the RPA companies that are focused on RPA.” Unlike five or six years ago when it was more stable, the RPA market is shifting, Pelz-Sharpe said. Instead of focusing just on bots, vendors in the RPA market, including Automation Anywhere and UiPath, are targeting process management and discovery technology. Automation Anywhere would do well to focus more on process management than pure RPA going forward, he said.
OpenText was mum about the planned acquisition because the company is in a regulatory quiet period. While acquiring Micro Focus may look like a financial stretch on paper, the deal will pay for itself in just a few years through services renewals, according to Deep Analysis research. Cross-selling OpenText security, content management and ERP to Micro Focus customers will likely fuel growth. “They’ll get the money back in four years just by doing nothing, so financially, it’s a very sound investment,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis. “It brings a lot of products with it. There is a big job to go through and rationalize them. But the truth is, if you’ve got 300 products, you’ve probably got some stars in there. Micro Focus was totally managed for years, so OpenText should be able to bring some order to that chaos.”