Welcome to the first issue of The Broker, Softlyze's news roundup powered by our Partners and their moves in the market.
Here, you can hear all about the cool things are Partners doing and get tips on how to optimize business operations with their products and services.
Let's start with news from the one of the biggest tech conferences.
Signature News from E3
Dell unveiled its Alienware Legend laptops along with other gamer focused upgraded products at E3 this week.
Also just announced Alienware 7.1 Gaming Headset (AW510H) and Alienware Stereo Gaming Headset (AW310H) will not only join the rest of the already existing peripheral portfolio, like our Alienware Wireless Gaming Headset (AW988), but these two headsets will be the first to bring the Legend design to the portfolio – while still delivering unparalleled clarity, ultra-comfort and fully immersive audio experiences.
Partner Updates
JAMF - News from WWDC - Apple operating system upgrades
As expected, some of the biggest news to come out of WWDC was the reveal of new versions of macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. It is an annual tradition at this point to see previews of the new features and functionality that will be included in the forthcoming fall release window.
What was unexpected — in the best way — was the announcement of iPadOS, a brand new operating system built on the foundation of iOS explicitly for iPad. For years, there have been reports of a supposed imminent merger between macOS and iOS, which Apple has denied time and again. Apple has consistently highlighted the unique use cases that the platforms serve, and therefore the unique value they continue to deliver to the market.
Furthermore, any idea iPad would become a Mac replacement was also put to bed with the announcement of iPadOS. It is clear that Apple has a strong vision for supporting and growing all their platforms, including iPadOS. The unique need for and experience of using an iPad as a daily driver isn’t going away and neither is the unique value of iPad. more
Apposite - Lose the Lag: Guarantee Performance of Your Online Video Games
In the online gaming industry, an industry worth $134.9 billion according to gamesindustry.biz, user experience is king. Most games, regardless of genre or platform, are now expected to have an online multi-player component and that gaming experience is directly affected by a user’s network connection. But with 2.5 billion players spread across the globe, how are video game companies ensuring their product will work for everyone at the same time? Players are not going to continue playing a game that feels unstable or unfair, so for online gaming companies, it is imperative to understand how network limitations impact video game performance and how to work around them to guarantee a good user experience.
How Network Conditions Impact Game Play
Probably the most critical network issue affecting online video game performance is latency. With players connecting on a global scale, companies must find a way to compensate for each user’s varying degree of latency. For live action games like 1st person shooters or fighting and racing games it becomes especially important. At what point does the latency cause a user to experience lag? 20ms, 40ms, 60ms? Finding and working around that threshold is essential for upholding fair game play conditions. And what about bandwidth limitations? Does a player with higher bandwidth have a better gaming experience? more
At A Glance
Microsoft. For the past couple of years or more, CEO Satya Nadella has touted his company’s cloud-optimized Dynamics 365 SaaS apps as the modern alternative to what he calls “monolithic” app segments of the past. But of even greater significance has been Microsoft’s willingness to enter into a deep partnership with SAP to the point thatMicrosoft’s sales team is now selling SAP’s cloud applications. It’s not just the products themselves that are changing—it’s the go-to-market approaches that simply would never have worked in the on-premises era. Along those lines, Microsoft has pioneered the remarkable approach of selling software created by its customers and by its partners!
Salesforce. After a very busy last week in which it rolled out not only strong quarterly numbers but also a repositioning of the company around its Customer 360 initiative but also expanded the concept of “customer” to include “employees,” the world’s largest SaaS company started off this week with a boom by agreeing to buy data specialist Tableau for a whopping $15.7 billion. And Salesforce sure as hell isn’t shelling out $15.7 billion help businesses more tightly “manage” their customers, as the CRM model states. Instead, it’s buying Tableau to help businesses be able to deliver new and better experiences to their customers by understanding those customers more deeply. “Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, and the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer's data,” Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block said in a press release.
SAP. This is the company at the forefront of toppling the old models and ushering in a new, modern and customer-centric view of how businesses work. (It’s elegantly ironic that this is the same company that, 40 years ago, created the mechanistic enterprise-apps business: SAP’s Brilliant Transformation: And They’ve Only Just Begun.) Early last year, SAP set out to redefine the CRM category by infusing ERP data into its CRM offerings to allow more-complete views of and understand of customers. And then late last year, SAP agreed to acquire Qualtrics, which gives it the ability to blend in customer-oriented experience data with business-centric operational data. SAP is actively fusing the Experience Economy with the Intelligent Enterprise to yield an entirely new view of what enterprise software should deliver. That will soon include Qualtrics-powered views of employee experiences as well—a move that Salesforce is emulating with its newly expanded Customer 360 program.
Oracle. While Oracle’s been more of a follower than a leader in this revolution, the announcement last week that it had agreed to a broad partnership in the cloud with Microsoft was a real shocker. And although that deal at this time doesn’t directly shake up the traditional ERP-HCM-CRM categories, the partnership with Microsoft surely *does* indicate that Oracle is willing to take different approaches—and for a confirmed go-it-alone isolationist like Oracle, a radically different approach—as the digital economy unfolds.
Announcing New Partners
- MicroStrategy
- Tableau
credit - Bob Evan IT CloudWars, Apposite, Dell, JAMF - News