You may recall we talked about Toyota in an earlier post about their impressive use of cloud services to drive back-office transformation.  We’d like to shift gears (pun intended) to the front-office to talk about how Toyota is using cloud to transform the customer service experience and how it engages with its customers.

Toyota’s vision for next generation customer service is built on the idea of creating a private social network for car owners, dealers and Toyota service agents.  This private network is actually based on three different cloud platforms:

Telematics platform – the first component is a cloud-based telematics platform based on Microsoft’s Azure PaaS environment.  The platform combines data from GPS systems, energy management and other monitoring applications that provide raw data on vehicle location and performance.   The concept is being introduced in with Prius and other Toyota electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids.  The reason for the initial focus on EVs?  To make it clear to the car owner how much battery time is left, and how far it is to the next charging station.  As shown by the recent dustupbetween Tesla and the New York Times, this is a non-trivial issue for EVs.

Toyota “Friend” network – the second big component is the Toyota Friend network developed using Chatter.   With Friend car owners can create profiles and join a community of broader Toyota car owners, experts and dealers, which has particular value for EV owners.  Profile pages can also capture car ownership and service histories, and also track current information about cars through integration with the Azure telematics platform.  Car owners will be able to track and selectively share streaming information including:

• Vehicle location
• Fuel level or battery charge (for EVs)
• Vehicle status, indicators and warnings

With the Friend network, Toyota also offers a Chatter-base iPhone app that provides car owners the ability to access online video self-help manuals, replacing the 300 page book that everyone always gets with a new car but never uses.  The iPhone app also lets owners access all the information above around location, service history and vehicle status.

Service agent environment – the final component is based on Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, which integrates the Service Agent into the Toyota Friend network.  Vehicle information from the telematics platform and data from the car owner’s Toyota Friend profile can be integrated into Salesforce’s sales agent app, which creates some really interesting synergies.  Imagine when a vehicle develops a wheel alignment issue.  The vehicle, as it’s part of the Toyota Friend network, can itself “tweet” or indicate to the owner that an issue has come up.  In addition to notifying the car owner, the notification can create an incident in a Service Agent’s queue, either at Toyota or for the local dealer.   The service agent can proactively reach out to schedule a service appointment, or for simpler issues forward the car owner a link to a video or guide explaining how to fix the issue.

The network is still being deployed in Japan, so there aren’t any real results to point to yet.  But presuming car owners can get comfortable with some of the data privacy implications (e.g., sharing of geolocation data), it’s clear to see how this platform can transform not just service, but Toyota’s broader customer engagement model.  We haven’t touched on sales, marketing and product management, but it doesn’t take that much of a leap to see how Toyota could further leverage the data and insights from this next-generation service model.  It’s been quite awhile since anything close to transformation has hit the automotive industry, particularly around sales and support.  It’ll be interesting to see if Toyota can make it happen with the cloud.

Interested in other enterprise cloud transformation case studies?  Check out our recent posts on how State Street and Domino Sugar are using cloud models to drive wide scale IT transformation.

About Scott Bils

The new report, “Cloud Computing in Pharmaceutical Research and Development – Virtualization of Data through the Cloud Optimizes Next-Generation DNA Sequencing and Clinical Trials Data Management”, states that the advent of genomics will change our understanding of biology and human diseases, but cloud computing must step up, to store and share this enormous amount of data.

Research in the pharmaceutical industry has moved towards next-generation sequencing, and research centers all over the globe are generating thousands of gigabytes of DNA sequences. Over 10,000 human genomes were completely sequenced by the end of 2011, but it is estimated that over a million could be sequenced by 2015. In addition to genome sequencing, understanding of the whole genome expression data also reveals information on the normal and diseased states of the human body. Although large amounts of genomic data, coupled with other clinical and biological texts, are easily available for downloading, there is currently a lack of a conceptual framework to integrate all the data. This is where cloud computing can help.

A biomedical cloud with large amounts of publicly available data on biology, medicine, technology and healthcare, could be accessed by individuals on personal devices and by companies through large data centers, through a secure platform. The cloud could also enable the use of software programs, such as CrossBow, which is capable of analyzing the entire human genome in a single day.

Global pharmaceutical company Merck has used cloud computing since 2003 – one of the earliest uses of cloud computing platforms by a life sciences company. Intensive drug research generated massive amounts of data related to genotype and gene expression, and Merck built one of the largest computer networks in the pharmaceutical industry to deal with this. With the eventual advent of next-generation sequencing, Merck examined the option of the cloud service which had been just launched by Amazon.

An expert line up of panelists discuss core themes including analytics, information governance, data archiving, and compliance, whilst showcasing real world uses cases of how cloud is helping to crunch and streamline big data.

Moderator: 
Bud Porter Roth at Porter-Roth Associates

Panellists: 
Kevin Brown – CEO at Coraid
Arijit Sengupta – Founder and CEO at BeyondCore
Bruno Kurtic – Co-Founder at SumoLogic
Greg Arnette, CTO & Founder of Sonian
Mark Skilton – Director, Strategy Office, Global Infrastructure Services – CapGemini

This keynote, complete with real-world examples, gives an overview of Fabasoft’s sophisticated offering for organizations that want to benefit from significantly enhanced agility and speed.

About Keynote Speaker:
Andreas Dangl is a Managing Director and Head of Software Development at Fabasoft, a leading European vendor of software products for the consistent and efficient handling of electronic documents and business records. He is the Fabasoft specialist for Enterprise IT and digital business processes. His area of interest lies in increasing the quality and effectiveness of organizations, as well as enhancing their motivation using agile methodologies. Andreas Dangl is a certified Scrum Product Owner and has been implementing agile projects with the Scrum project management method for many years. Furthermore, Andreas successfully introduced Enterprise Scrum to Fabasoft.

Panel Moderator: 
Tim Mather – Advisory Director at KPMG

Panelists: 
Brian Korn – Director Strategy and Development at Cisco
Itai Mendelsohn, Director, Cloud Enablenment Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent
Rich Casselberry, Director of IT infrastructure at Enterasys Networks

Private PaaS is NOT an Oxymoron

Some public-cloud enthusiasts look to spread FUD about private cloud, suggesting it doesn’t deliver value like a public cloud alternative. Some have even gone so far as to call private cloud an oxmoron! In this presentation, ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland refutes that petty argument, and discusses how the private cloud model not only delivers the cloud’s promised flexibility, convenience, and efficiency, but also ensures the control, security, and peace of mind the real-world enterprise demands.

Bart Copeland, President & CEO of ActiveState 
As President & CEO of ActiveState Software, Bart Copeland brings more than twenty years of management, finance, and technology business experience to his role. With a passion for technologies that help people lead more productive and enjoyable lives, Bart is currently focused on ActiveState’s private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, Stackato. With his vision for PaaS as an enabler to accelerate cloud adoption and value in enterprises, Bart is actively involved in the strategy, roadmap, business development and evangelism of Stackato. Bart is also an active angel investor and serves as a director on a number of other tech companies. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia

As President & CEO of ActiveState Software, Bart Copeland brings more than twenty years of management, finance, and technology business experience to his role. With a passion for technologies that help people lead more productive and enjoyable lives, Bart is currently focused on ActiveState’s private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, Stackato. With his vision for PaaS as an enabler to accelerate cloud adoption and value in enterprises, Bart is actively involved in the strategy, roadmap, business development and evangelism of Stackato. Bart is also an active angel investor and serves as a director on a number of other tech companies. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.

Mike McCarthy is Vice President of Cloud Computing for IBM Global Technology Services.

In his current position, Mike has responsibility for the portfolio of cloud services and for development of IBM’s strategic cloud delivery platform. He joined IBM in 1986 as a software engineer for IBM network management software. He has held a variety of positions with IBM, including: Manager of Channels for IBM Networking Software in Asia Pacific, market strategist for IBM Retail Store Solutions, Director of Market Management for IBM TotalStorage Open Software, and Director of Strategy for IBM Tivoli Software. He also worked for Medic Computer Systems, a healthcare software company, where he was responsible for marketing strategy and analyst relations. Mike has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in business administration from Duke University.

The cloud is revolutionizing the way people work together, allowing businesses to create new value by accelerating collaboration and innovation. We’ll explore how products designed for teams and built for the web truly enable people to work better together.

This session discusses how the consumer web and user behavior is changing the way enterprises view and use emerging technology such as Cloud. Cloud enabled, social, mobile and connected devices and applications are among core areas being addressed in this session.

Michael Lock
Vice President, Americas, Google Enterprise

Michael oversees the Americas Sales and Operations organization for Google’s Enterprise division. Since joining Google in 2005, Michael has helped rapidly expand Google’s footprint within the global Enterprise marketplace. Currently, he is responsible for teams driving customer acquisition of Google’s Enterprise offerings in the product areas of Search, Maps, Earth, Apps and Postini.

A 25-year veteran of the enterprise information technology industry, Michael began his career at IBM where he held roles in the general systems and enterprise systems divisions. He moved to Silicon Valley as a sales and marketing executive for Oracle in the 90′s and subsequently, took positions in several Silicon Valley start-ups. Michael played a pivotal role in the success and eventual acquisition of Virage, a pioneer of multimedia search and content management software.

Michael holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.