“Further complicating matters, a large amount of customer data still lives in departmental silos, with sales, marketing, and customer service each supplying separate customer experiences. Those databases can easily grow stale or become inconsistent, since customer information owned by one department is often not shared with others. Keeping it up to date is an even more formidable task –– even a monthly update isn’t always frequent enough to keep up with the important life changes that can impact marketing decisions.”

All the tech-driven competition in hotels:

“We have seen more and more business shift to our direct channels. We’ve seen loyalty continue to drive a higher share of the business that is coming into our hotels. And we think we’re competing or we compete against these platforms quite well.”

"Over the next decade, the electricity industry is predicted to unlock approximately $1.3 trillion in value through development and digitization of infrastructure, including platforms, devices, as well as cloud and advanced analytics."

With the "greatest opportunities are predicted at the retail (8.5% EBIT improvement) and generation (6.6%) levels."

“More specifically, our definition will include leveraging technologies, such as AI, machine learning or robotic process automation, but it’s really about data and how we’ll utilize it. Like most insurers, we have decades of outcome data. Now, with evolving capabilities, the availability of new data sources and advances in analytical modeling, we can marry historical data with real-time data to create something more powerful. The ultimate goal is establishing new ways of working that are more data-driven in order to become more proactive and valued in our customers’ lives.”

"Thirty-six percent of those reported premium over $1 billion per year; those companies also said they planned to increase IT budgets by about 11% on average. Carriers between $500 million and $1 billion in premium plan an average increase of 5%."

‘The promise of the IoT was always to create “smart” objects – it is certainly nice to get data from the physical world and gain more insights, but ultimately the whole point is to act on that data, ideally in an automated, real-time and intelligent way. This is exactly what AI enables.’

Also, some notes on VC investments and startups: 'As in previous years, one of the peculiarities of the IoT VC market is that the most active investors in the space are disproportionately corporate venture arms.'

"IDC predicts the cloud computing market to reach about $70 billion this year and the number of new cloud-based solutions to triple within the next four to five years....the biggest cloud computing verticals worldwide will be discrete manufacturing, banking, professional services, process manufacturing, and retail. IDC expects the five verticals to represent 45 percent of the market's total spend."

Citrix has a new DaaS service provider survey out. I’m often overly harsh on virtual desktops and, by extension, DaaS. I’m always curious who actually uses this stuff, so the vertical breakout is interesting: The largest number of service providers who responded listed financial services, healthcare and manufacturing as the vertical markets they served. This is an interesting change in the vertical market ranking compared to the December 2011 Citrix Service Provider survey. In 2011, service providers indicated their leading verticals were healthcare, legal and public sector/government. Manufacturing finished fifth in the 2011 survey ranking of most popular verticals and third in the 2014 survey. The growth of manufacturing as a DaaS vertical is a keen indicator of new trends in the vertical market ranking, which is usually dominated by healthcare and financial services. Citrix has, of course, chosen to not sell DaaS directly but rather be a supplier for others who’d like sell DaaS. Amazon and VMware, and others, have gone the opposite route. We’ll see what happens.

The deal is one of the best and most lucrative examples so far of applying a Google-style data-science mind-set to an existing industry — in this case, the world’s oldest and most popular: Farming. Verticals, man.

Selling vertical focused stacks of open source. Related to IBM's recent "8 areas" of OSS.