Adobe just announced its partnership with hybris earlier this week. This deal has been a poorly kept secret as Adobe waited to make public announcements at its customer summit even after it has been out selling the joint solution and working with partners. Adobe is integrating the hybris commerce platform with the Adobe's Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions, an artist formerly known as Day CQ5. This is intended to add commerce capabilities to the CMS/CXM solution represented by WEM. Companies should consider a number of things when evaluating this product relationship between hybris and Adobe, including:

• There is a lot of overlap in CMS capabilities, evaluate your real needs carefully. As with other leading enterprise commerce platforms, hybris has many WCM capabilities to support site management, merchandising, landing pages, etc. With Adobe’s WEM there will be many overlaps with the hybris capabilities. While the CQ5 product is a leading WCMS solution, notable benefits of Adobe’s WEM over hybris may be primarily limited to workflow and rich content repository. While growing in importance, these capabilities may go underutilized inside many eCommerce teams and multichannel solutions today. This same question will be important for companies evaluating Oracle's ATG, Endeca, and Fatwire solutions together, or other combinations of commerce platforms and WCMS or CXM solutions.

It seems online marketplaces are cropping up everywhere. Retailers, software companies, media companies and consumer electronics makers are using marketplaces as a means to enhance and augment their own offerings with products made, owned, and distributed by third party retailers, distributors, developers, and brands. The most successful examples of these today are of course Amazon’s Marketplace, eBay, Apple’s App Store, and Valve’s Steamworks. But based on numerous inquiries of late, soon we will see many, many more marketplaces online. Key reasons why we are seeing the proliferation of marketplaces in the next 18-24 months:

• For retailers, it’s about growing the assortment without the inventory risk. Larger scale pure-play online retailers and multichannel retailers look to the significant growth of Amazon.com’s marketplace - which today comprises approximately 35% of Amazon’s gross retail sales – and wonder if they could also benefit from a marketplace. Adding a marketplace provides the opportunity to extend the product assortment and available pool of inventory without taking on the inventory risk and expense of merchandising, buying, warehousing, and shipping an assortment in unproven categories. For some it may be even a way to bring licensed products under a brand-umbrella. Amazon’s model is to take roughly half the margin of the products sold - based on expected margin by category - as the fair value of driving that demand, but they bear none of the inventory sourcing, carrying, or logistical costs.

For many years, security professionals have lived by the three pillars of risk management – AVOID, TREAT, ACCEPT.  These great tenets have served the profession well, enabling CISOs to build appropriately secure networks at a tolerable level of cost. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the litany of security breaches we have seen over the past 12 months, it’s clear that the landscape is changing.  More than ever before, security is clearly a ‘no-win’ game.

The high profile attackers, state-sponsored or otherwise, are one threat – but it goes deeper than this.  The keys to the kingdom are no longer in the hands of the generals and policy makers; their decisions and discussions are enabled by email, IM and IP telephony, all of which sit firmly in the domain of the IT department and system admin – and stressed, poorly paid employees do not make the ideal custodians of such critical information. As an example, Anonymous claims to have access to every classified government database in the US, but they didn’t hack them – disaffected system administrators and employees simply opened the doors for them, or sent them the access codes. 

As the broadening gap between our ambitions for a secure enterprise and our abilities to deliver on such a vision become self-evident, the time has come to pay equal attention to the poor cousin of risk management, “TRANSFER.”  For many CISOs, risk transference is a topic that is largely theoretical as, even when a task is outsourced, the risk associated with a breach commonly remains with the data owning organisation. Cyber insurance offers a different solution.

It's been three months since we published "Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement," and we've learned a lot by listening to CIO customers and industry professionals talk about the stories and strategy of mobile engagement.

The thing that leaves people scratching their heads is the mantra, Design for mobile first! "What does that mean, exactly?," they ask. "Is it about user interface design?" The industry answer is that it's about user experience design, but that's not quite right. Design for mobile first! is really about business design. Let's start with a thought experiment to re-imagine what's possible on a touchscreen device:

Imagine that your service is in your customer's pocket at all times. Imagine what you could do with that honor.

You could serve your customers in their moments of need. You could use data from device sensors and your own data to understand their context, the time of day, where they are, what they did last time, what they prefer, even their blood pressure, weight, and anxiety level. You could design your mobile experience to be snappy, simple, and built around an "action button" to (you guessed it) help them take the next most likely action.

With the right data and predictive analytics, you could anticipate your customer's next move and light up the correct action button before they even know they need it. You could serve them anywhere at any time. Not just give them self-service mobile access to your shrunken Web site or forms-based transaction system, but truly serve them by placing information and action and control into their hands.

One of the key things that differentiates mobile phones from any other device is their ability to deliver a constant stream of real time data coupled with the processing capability to help consumers make a wealth of decisions based on this information. Tablets — we're going to leave home without them, and the majority of connections are over Wi-Fi. Wearable technology collects real-time information and may have applications/display, but we aren't yet seeing devices with the same flexibilty as the phone. The highly anticipated Pebble may yet be the device, but for today, it is the phone. (My colleague Sarah Rotman Epps writes a lot on these devices — see the rest of her research for more information).

With that fact established, my open question is, "Who is making my life better with this ability to process information near instantaneously to help me live a better, healthier life . . .  or at least how I choose to define it?" I think the key to measuring mobile success must lie here — from the perspective of the consumer first before mobile will deliver huge returns in the form of revenue or lower operating costs.