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Interesting take on a very big and complicated market.

We think everything is going to change, but for different reasons.

1. One size has never and will never fit all. If I was an advertising agency, my job is to provide creativity and innovation to my customers through appropriate media channels. The job of the enterprise vendor in this case is to deliver the back end functionality to help make this as profitable as possible in these hard times.

2. The big vendors will bring out online versions of their often sophisticated and complex software platforms and bundles at a price that will be hard for smaller companies to match. i.e. Microsoft launching Office 365 - in the UK this is at £15.75 per month for Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync AND most importantly, a fully licensed copy of the ubiquitous Office 2010 suite.

This is a tough act to beat if you live in the world where the majority of IT skills rest in the Office space i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. Whilst Microsoft is playing catch up to younger vendors, they do have the weight, the resources, the finance and the tenacity to compete in this market.

Whilst Office 365 is not perfect, it does offer a comprehensive cross platform framework from a trusted source that can now be improved by iteration as all other platform.

3. Consumerisation of the enterprise, users bringing their own technologies is on the rise, but we believe that corporations have a large number of moral and legal obligations that don’t go away with this model. Structure and control help with society and also help in organisations. Enterprise tools bring this to smaller and larger organisation with a cost of administration.

4. MultiPlatform delivery. The growth of smartphones and tablets are producing a generation equipment that is shaping the view of the future of computing. It is essential that touch and gestural interfaces provide as much productivity as possible and should be as usercentric as can be.

In order to keep up with the varying platforms and devices available, you either make your platform fit, or you leverage the investment that companies have invested in making their products fit for purpose. Activesync’s ability ot wipe a users phone if stolen is one example of a truly enterprise feature that has been given to all thanks to the new cloud model.

5. Specialists will appear to take each platform and deliver true value on top of the generic offering. This will include customistation and pre-made modules that fit the vertical and enable the business to have very tailored enterprise software at a fraction of previously available costs. We specialise in the media field, advertising, marketing, design, PR and research companies where we see a direct fit between the flexibility offered by the cloud based on familiar tools and the customers working practices.

We think that vendors of the individual solutions will need to remain agile and open up their offering to fit with the larger organisations like Microsoft, SAP and Google to name just three in order to survive. A great product will have a stronger prospect in the market if it aligns with the bigger vendors.

Good luck with the self service model, a number of companies will jump at the chance, but we think that as the years go by, good old fashioned personal service and understanding of the client business will overtake the latest fad and make the next step in computing the most exciting ever seen.

We believe that Microsoft Office 365 is a sea change/rift in the whole IT world. With its launch today, Microsoft is betting its future viability on this product.

We think communications agencies should care because advertising agency software needs to allow for collaboration at its core, Microsoft Office 365 has this. Internal and external audiences including clients, creatives, designers, printers, writers can all access, with security, the right documents for them.

There has never been such a familiar, yet new take on the office productivity market that allows your business to save cost with out of the box functionality whilst offering a scalable platform to build vertical line of business applications in the same subscription.

Please contact us if you need anymore information on the Microsoft Office 365 platform and its use within your advertising, design, marketing, PR or market research agency business.

There is a huge amount of information out there today, so we have pulled together the various reviews from around the web to help you decide from your perspective

Read this first!
Infographic explaining Microsoft Office 365 http://bit.ly/lMe4bZ

For

• Microsoft Office 365 – review - guardian.co.uk http://bit.ly/kpvZYo
• 13 cool features of Office 365 | ITworld http://bit.ly/k7U8qY
• There’s A Big Thing Missing From Microsoft’s Office 365 - other applications :) http://bit.ly/jdsht5
• Concentra Blog » Office 365 is the best way of buying Microsoft Office 2010 http://bit.ly/kISbJB
• Office 365 Vs Google Apps: Top 10 Enterprise Concerns-The BrainYard- InformationWeek http://bit.ly/kFcpO9
• Microsoft launches cloud version of Office - FT.com http://on.ft.com/kxOlBK

Against

• Official Google Enterprise Blog: 365 reasons to consider Google Apps http://bit.ly/mjYpTz read comments
• Microsoft Office 365 goes into battle with Google Apps - google biased
  http://bit.ly/mu6d73
• Google in preemptive strike on Microsoft Office 365 • The Register http://bit.ly/iOk18L
• Don’t be fooled: Office 365 is basically useless on mobile - some items to consider http://bit.ly/mvhVqn

Upcoming discussion

• Does Office 365 keep its promises? 13:00 29th June BST - discussion - The Register http://bit.ly/kxWfsL

50-100 Advertising, Design, Marketing, PR and Market Research Agencies from around the world, have a unique opportunity to specify, free of charge, what they require to improve customer experience and manage their businesses and have it built on the new Microsoft Office 365 platform.

There is a revolution in business and consumer technology happening that is opening up new and innovative ways for advertising, design, marketing, PR and market research agencies to work at a lower cost.

Social media has provided a model for the ease with which people can communicate to one or many people at any location via a PC or Mac, or mobile devices like iPhone, android and blackberry.

The cloud is a game changer for the hardware and software required to run many businesses, improving productivity, customer experience and introducing resource and cost savings.

Management and software development specialists Akeman Solutions realised that this change would have a profound impact on how agencies run their business.

This ambitious project is to use Twitter and LinkedIn to engage agencies in defining what will be a world leading advertising agency software solution for their businesses. Akeman wants agencies to contribute to fresh’s development and benefit from sharing their key business requirements to produce a solution that allows them to manage their business end-to-end, simplify process, encourage collaboration and increase margin. 

All advertising, design, marketing, PR and market research agencies need to do is to register on Akeman’s web site, http://www.akemansolutions.com/products/fresh.aspx  and complete a simple questionnaire to establish eligibility.

Akeman founder Tim Butler says: “As agencies are expected to provide a fantastic customer experience, be more transparent and cost effective, it is more important than ever to have an end-to-end business solution that is accessible on the desktop, at home, on mobile and tablet to support these objectives.”

“Through fresh, agencies will be able to collaborate more easily with customers, suppliers and remote workers. In a crowded market, competitive advantage can be obtained by being simply better at your key tasks as well being able to perform more complicated tasks, easily.”

Akeman Solutions has a fresh approach to agency management software for advertising, design, creative, marketing, PR and market research companies that allow anytime, anyplace any device access for you, your clients and partners.

http://www.akemansolutions.com/products/fresh.aspx for more information and to join your program

Akeman Solutions believes that only ‘living by the sword’ can it provide its customers with true insight into the advantages and compromises required to exploit the new range of cloud solutions now available.

Akeman has been ‘living by the sword’ since our inception using Microsoft BPOS service and it has proved reliable and functional if a little lacking in the features that are required for a full, end-to-end business management solution. We have had no downtime that we can recall, the tools that make up the suite are solid, and considering that we are based in rural areas of the UK, our connectivity has been robust.

As our prime focus is providing end-to-end business management solutions to agencies of between 10-250 people, we are looking at collaboration, customer experience, customer relationship management, account management, creative management, production management, campaign management, time management and billing. Effectively, full end-to-end management of the process of acquiring and servicing customers in the new cloud based era.

The last 6 weeks has been fascinating as we can now access the full public beta of Office 365 and put into practice the solution design that we have been preparing for the previous 6 months. The new Microsoft Office 365 takes the whole experience to another level, and the integration with desktop applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint makes for a brilliant combination.

The major benefit of this approach has come from the multi-platform nature of Office 365. It can be accessed and used from PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and any other device with a standard browser.

We rapidly developed a top level demo using the underlying technology and found it to be robust and fully functioning in most areas. We are now on our second iteration and will soon be looking for advertising, marketing, creative, PR and Market research pre-launch partners to help us develop this exciting proposition.

The experience so far has been liberating, the key business benefits have been:

• A very low IT cost per person
•  No need for support costs due to the infrastructure being outsourced
• Remote working has been easy at any location on any device
• Collaborating with others has been simple, even simpler now using the new Lync tool
•  SharePoint online provides an ideal document store with straightforward document management
• SharePoint Online is a great platform for building real world business process and workflow with direct writing to all the standard file types

The key drawbacks have been

•  Waiting for the new Office 365 to be available
•  Office 365 is a large and complex product that can be very daunting to start, but once configured provides a stable and robust business infrastructure that improves productivity, is easy to use by your colleagues and is scalable.

Our recommendations for implementing would be as follows:

• Take a deep breath, think how your business would work if was easy to collaborate and share with your colleagues, customers, partners and other suppliers easily and cost effectively?
• Find a great partner who understands your sector and can help translate current needs to the new platform (anyone in advertising, creative, marketing, PR or market research can give us a call J)

Good luck with the cloud and Microsoft Office 365 – we believe that it is the future of IT infrastructure for SMEs.

Presentation from today’s successful Screen Media Expo - lots of people wanted it, so please find it here!

Yesterday was an interesting day for Digital Out of Home, Online and Mobile. The upwards trend of both Digital Out of Home and Mobile is amazing in it’s severity and opportunity.

Digital Out of Home is now a mature, successful medium with many well executed and researched campaigns under its belt. The growth last year proves that the demand is there even without the big 3 investing heavily over the last 12 months.

Mobile is a fast growing medium where convergence of content, payment and communications is happening now.

Joining the two together is the next challenge for the advertising industry as the  whole will surely exceed the sum of the parts.

The newly renamed Outdoor Media Centre (previously the Outdoor Advertising Association) published the end of year figures for the industry in the UK.

Outdoor finishes 2010 up 12.5% - Digital outdoor revenues now top £100m

“Digital continued to show good growth, beating market growth with 17% growth in the quarter. Digital revenues passed £30m for a quarter for the first time, and for the year also passed the significant threshold of £100m for the first time, reaching £101m for the calendar year 2010. This gives digital a 12% share of all outdoor revenue for Quarter 4, and 11.4% for the full year. Digital Outdoor now wins £1 for every £8 spent on outdoor as a whole.”

The growth over the previous 8 years has been from £11 million to £100 million in 2010.  UK Digital Outdoor Revenue growth figures can be found here.

Digital futures - What you need to know for 2011 on www.utalkmarketing.com covered various topics including :

Location Based Services/ M-commerce

“The prolific rise in the number of consumers using smartphones, and their eagerness to access the internet via them, has set the stage for an exciting year in terms of m-commerce opportunities. Figures released this week by ForeSee suggest that one third of shoppers in the UK are now accessing retailer websites through their handsets”

“AdMob, Google’s mobile advertising network, now receives more than two billion requests for ads per day. To put it into context, that’s four times more than the number of requests the company was getting just a year ago.”

Other areas covered include Social Commerce, Social Media Optimisation, Apps Vs Websites, Search and Local Results, Real Time Marketing, Digital Experiential, Interactive TV, Social Gaming and Branding through digital reaches a tipping point driven by FMCG.

As it is the time of year for all things predictive, we thought that we ought to put our stake in the ground for the next 12 months.

We believe that the world we have come to know and love is going through a change that will have a profound effect on the way we live our lives. We think that this will make all people and business revaluate what is important to them, how they live; work and most importantly, survive the next five to ten years of austerity brought about by the banking crash and the following bail outs.

Transport cost rise – revaluate the sense of travelling long distances to work

Austerity measures in the UK are increasing the cost of everyday items at a time when wage price inflation is fairly low. Over the past five years the cost of petrol has risen from 88.2 p per litre to 122.1p per litre in the UK  and this is before the end of year tax increase. In the UK the balance between private transport and public in 2009 is 5,721 miles in private with 5,323 miles in cars as driver or passenger and 1,025 miles by public transport. The cost of a rail season ticket on some commuter routes is the equivalent of 20% of the national salary.

For the employer, there is a need to rethink the rationale for having people travel from a long distance to work for them. There are alternatives, the employees could work from home or from a more local office, both of these options offer significant cost savings in terms of rent and rates of city centres locations.

For the employee, there is the need to weigh up the salary against the cost. They need to understand the true cost of working in a major metropolis. It may be that it is better for them to move closer to work and use the savings to afford an apartment/house and potentially gain on the value of the house price rise over time. This may not be as strong an argument over the next ten years as it has been over the past ten.

We think that travelling huge distances to the office when there are many tools to allow people to work more locally to where they live is an out-dated and wasteful mode of employment that needs to be overturned. Either place the offices where the people can afford to live and work or allow the people to live or work where they are and telecommute into the offices.

Technology changes - The plumbing is now owned and run by someone else!

This year brings another inflection point in the growth of technology as the central tool for communication around the western and developing world. Nicholas Negroponte famously outlined in Being Digital, the switch from services being delivered over wires becoming wireless and services delivered wirelessly being delivered through wires, i.e. telephone becoming wireless and the television being fed through cable, now the internet.

The next phase is now happening where everything can be delivered either by wires or wirelessly. Mobile is the buzz of the year with unprecedented growth in handsets and services predicted over the next few years.

Gartner predicted at the beginning of 2010 the following two items in Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond.

“By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.”

“By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.”

These two predictions, which have been echoed by many over 2010, are based on current trends. We believe that technology enhances all areas of life, and we are seeing that the consumerisation of technology is showing the way. In house IT departments or entrepreneurs can now focus on bringing true business value into the organisation through intelligent analysis and development of core applications that truly build a point of difference for their organisations.

Business based capital - market research and funding in one!

The banks have recently pledged more money to small and medium sized businesses but have in fact reduced the loans and asked for greater surety than ever before. This makes it harder to start a business that relies on external funding.

There are new ways of funding a business emerging that entirely bypass the traditional friends and family, business angel, venture capital and bank routes. We love the The LunaTik World of Commerce where Scott Wilson of MINIMAL, a talented design company used KickStarter to raise funds to produce the most excellent TikTok and LunaTik watchstraps for the Apple Ipod Nano. They were looking for $15,000 and had pledged $941,718 when the item closed on the 16^th December 2010.

A new or growing business needs to take on board that the technology their old companies have been using for the last ten years is about to become obsolete and for them this is great news. A company can now buy the same services that the big corporations use at a price that makes it feasible to build a service based business with virtually no capital.

This opens up the opportunity for many of the people made redundant, moving on from a large corporation, or have been waiting to branch out on their own, to utilise their skills, knowledge and contacts to build great companies of one, one hundred or one thousand from a cost base of less than £50 per person per month!

The three Akeman Solutions predictions summarised

• More people will chose to work closer to where they live or actually where they live!
• Small companies will start to use the new, cheaper online technology to outwit larger companies and gain significant advantage in their markets.
• Starting a business will be an option of choice for many now that there are low capital requirements or where a product can be designed and sold directly off plan to its customers.

Follow Akeman Solutions here >, on twitter > or have a look at our business solutions for small and medium sized business at www.akemansolutions.com >

Who would like to be in a market whose device base is larger than the currently installed base of PCs and is set to grow by 4.5 times in the next 3 years?

I attended the Mobile Cloud Computing Forum last week thanks to Chinwag, and these predictions, based on a Gartner paper made me sit up and listen. There are currently close to 5 billion mobile phones in the world, this is going to rise to 6 billion in 2013. In 2013 there will be 1.82 billion smartphones on the planet, up from 400 million today, and surpassing the 1.78 billion PCs predicted for then. Advertising globally is worth some $368 billion with $1 billion being spent on mobile. This is set to rise to $30 billion in 2013.

Machine to machine communication has a potential for up to 60 billion devices.  This market is yet to take off but does have some interesting applications within vending, gaming and smart monitoring, so one to watch for the future.

The rise of portable devices has given the cloud a new purpose. If we want to be able to view content on our mobile, desktop, laptop, netbook, tablet in the office, at home, at work and in a remote office it makes sense to put the data into a secure cloud environment along with some of the tools to work with it.

The economics of cloud based computing are already well known. The cloud offers the base IT infrastructure needed by most consumers and businesses to reside in secure, scalable, backed up environments that are managed by engineers who only focus on keeping the infrastructure running. The cost associated with managing the centres is significantly lower than running your own servers and the model is a pay as you use per person, thus removing capital expenditure need from many businesses. Currently up to 80% of the IT budget is spent on infrastructure, money that would be better spent delivery flexible, collaborative environments for business and their partners to share and work smarter.

Connection and security were a recurring theme. If you lose connection, can you still function? If you keep local copies of data, are they secure? How much data should be allowed on each machine? Can you remotely wipe data from lost devices? How is the data stored on the device? Is it encrypted?

My take was that a local copy is important to allow you to work where you have lost connection, developing countries were mentioned here, but in London we can’t get a signal on the tube or in many offices and houses, so it is as relevant in the “developed” world as the third world. It is also important to have apps that allow you to work on the device, it may be a limited client, but it should allow basic editing and saving. The final need is to be able to remove sensitive data from devices, both corporate and personal, when they get stolen or the employee leaves the company.

Mobile carriers are upping their game by opening up their systems through secure APIs that will offer developers the chance to use the carrier’s information and systems within their applications. This offers a huge opportunity within the location based space.

Develop once, run on many was another recurring theme, with HTML5 placed as the way forward for this type of work. It offers geo-location services, canvas graphics capabilities for games, and data caching up to 5mb per page. These three items offer a potential for some very clever, fast, multi-platform applications that will start to change the way we use information on and offline.

In summary, there is an inflection point happening caused by advancing technology, external financial pressure and consumer uptake of new devices that will save companies and individuals money whilst increasing their access to information and entertainment which in turn boosts their personal and professional productivity. In order to deliver on this promise, companies need to develop and aggregate these services to allow business people to get on with their business.

A great looking watch that is actually a Apple Ipod Nano watch strap - brilliantly conceived product design. What is more interesting for me is the way in which they raised the money using KickStarter. Have a look - I think I have just found my watch!