HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, and Google Cloud today announced the expansion of their strategic partnership to bring HCL Software’s Digital Experience (DX) and Unica Marketing cloud-native platforms to Google Cloud. The announcement follows the success of the initial Google and HCL Software Commerce partnership announced in June 2020.

The Google Cloud offering provides customers a cost effective and highly scalable, secure and elastic cloud deployment option with global coverage that can support deployment of HCL’s DX, Unica and Commerce cloud-native platforms. DX’s cloud-native capabilities allow customers to deploy world-class, business-critical solutions significantly faster than before. Organizations with the most complex customer marketing data depend on HCL’s integrated cloud-native Unica marketing platform to support their precision marketing at scale. The HCL Commerce cloud-native platform delivers innovative and engaging customer experiences that go beyond the transaction.

“The collaboration between HCL Software and Google Cloud will deliver significant value for customers who want to deploy DX, Unica and Commerce from Google Cloud,” said Darren Oberst, Corporate Vice President and Head of HCL Software. “With the support of our global implementation business partners, we can quickly deliver comprehensive experiences to any audience, putting our clients in the best position to deploy and scale with Google’s Cloud and HCL’s cloud-native solutions.”

HCL DX is used by a wide range of organizations, including financial services firms, healthcare providers and government agencies, to provide a secure and personalized business-critical digital experience that is built cloud-native at scale across their multiple channels both internally and externally. Users of HCL DX on Google Cloud can take advantage of the all-new Digital Asset Manager (DAM) and developer toolkits to drastically improve productivity. When integrated with Google’s Data Cloud and proven artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, DX solutions provide actionable insights to help organizations deliver more relevant customer experiences.

HCL Unica is used by many of the world’s most recognized financial services firms, healthcare providers, retail, telecom, and government agencies to provide secure and personalized business-critical multi-channel experiences. Point-and-click integrations from Unica Link and over 780 APIs simplify even the most challenging integrations, driving business results quickly when run on Google Cloud. The Unica product roadmap includes integration to many of Google’s market-leading tools.

“Businesses across industries, from healthcare to banking to retail, work with HCL DX and Unica to create stronger online experiences for their customers, employees, and partners,” said Avanish Sahai, Vice President, ISV and Application Partners at Google Cloud. “By bringing DX and Unica to Google Cloud, HCL Software can enrich these solutions with capabilities in AI, ML and analytics, and extend DX and Unica globally on our network. We’re excited to further expand our strategic partnership with HCL and look forward to supporting DX and Unica customers.”

This latest announcement from HCL and Google Cloud expands on a deep partnership between the two companies to help organizations digitally transform. There are now three HCL customer experience products employing Google Cloud as a preferred cloud platform. HCL Commerce has seen solid success through this collaboration since its partnership with Google Cloud was announced in June 2020. Since then, several HCL Commerce customers from around the world have migrated to Google Cloud. With the addition of DX and Unica, HCL Software’s financial services, healthcare and government customers and agencies have the option to move to Google Cloud. In 2019, HCL and Google Cloud announced the launch of HCL’s Google Cloud Business Unit to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption worldwide. To support customers, HCL has established three dedicated Google Cloud Native Labs in New York, London and the New Delhi area. These labs provide business-focused design workshops to engage customers and develop IP and MVPs on Google Cloud across industries effectively and efficiently.

“The HCL Google Cloud Ecosystem enables product collaboration across HCL Software and Google Cloud,” said Sanjay Singh, SVP & Global Head, HCL Google Ecosystem, HCL Technologies. “With the launch of HCL Digital Experience and Unica on Google Cloud, we continue to build on our portfolio of joint offerings to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation and drive a superior customer experience,”

VMware released results of a global survey examining the digital employee experience — how much it matters, how well organizations are delivering it, and what can be done to improve it. The survey polled employees, HR professionals, and IT decision makers across multiple industries and regions. Its headline finding: enabling a positive digital employee experience — characterized by device choice, seamless app access, and remote work capability — correlates strongly with an organization’s competitive position, revenue growth, and employee sentiment.

“Too often, the conversation about digital transformation focuses on the technology and leaves out a key ingredient to a winning strategy – attracting and retaining the best talent. To compete for the best talent, companies are prioritizing employee experience; which encompasses technology, workstyle and culture. Leaders committed to improving employee experience are adopting the digital workspace, a concept VMware pioneered three years ago. A digital workspace platform fuels modern digital experiences, which our survey revealed as being critically important to current and prospective employees as well as improving other key business outcomes.”

— Shankar Iyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, VMware

Digital Employee Experience Favors Business Growth

Employees’ ability to access the applications and information they need — from any device or location — directly affects their capacity to plan, collaborate, and execute. The VMware survey found that providing a seamless digital experience positively impacts business outcomes including revenue growth, employee morale, and talent acquisition.

Organizations that rank as competitive leaders are significantly more likely to have employees who report a good digital experience at work, compared to those at companies identified as industry “followers.”

A particularly striking data point: 80% of employees at companies experiencing more than 15% revenue growth report they can easily find and install the right app for any new task or process at work. By contrast, only 42% of employees at underperforming or flat-growth companies say the same. This gap suggests that frictionless access to tools is not merely a convenience — it is a measurable business differentiator.

Digital Experience Retains and Attracts Top Talent

Beyond revenue metrics, the survey found that digital employee experience has a significant impact on workforce sentiment and an organization’s ability to recruit.

Respondents whose organizations give them the ability to work from anywhere were considerably more likely to express pride in their employer. Compared to those without location flexibility, they were also more likely to report that their organization:

• Has a progressive culture (71% vs. 28%)
• Is recognized as a top place to work (70% vs. 29%)
• Provides good work-life balance (69% vs. 30%)

On the recruitment side, digital tooling is increasingly a factor candidates weigh before accepting an offer. 73% of survey respondents agreed that the flexibility of tools — including technology choices, apps, and devices — would influence their decision to apply for or accept a position at a company. For organizations competing for skilled technical talent, this finding carries direct hiring strategy implications.

The Gap Between What IT Thinks It Delivers and What Employees Experience

One of the more revealing findings involves the perception gap between IT departments and the employees they serve. The numbers highlight a substantial disconnect:

• 95% of IT decision makers claim they provide employees with the digital tools needed for their jobs.
• Yet 42% of employees (nearly half) say they do not have the digital tools they need.

A similar gap exists around employee voice in technology decisions:

• 83% of IT decision makers say employees have a say in which digital technologies they use.
• But 64% of employees feel they have no voice in those decisions.

Despite these divergent perceptions of delivery quality, both groups agree that improving digital employee experience should be a top organizational priority. 87% of IT respondents and 78% of employee respondents share this view — a rare area of consensus that points to an actionable mandate for leadership.

Digital Employee Experience Is a Cross-Functional Responsibility

The VMware study surfaced an additional organizational challenge: confusion over who ultimately owns the digital employee experience. Depending on whom you ask, a different executive is identified as the accountable party:

• IT decision makers most often pointed to the Chief Information Officer (CIO).
• HR decision makers most often identified the Chief HR Officer (CHRO).
• Employees most often cited the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

This fragmented ownership model can lead to siloed initiatives and inconsistent experiences. Notably, 89% of all respondents — regardless of role — believe that HR and IT could collaborate more effectively to improve the digital experience for employees. The data suggests that ownership ambiguity, not lack of intent, is the primary barrier to progress.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and IT Leaders

For DevOps, platform engineering, and IT operations teams, the VMware survey results translate into several practical considerations:

• Measure employee-facing tool experience, not just uptime. System availability metrics do not capture whether employees can actually find and use the tools they need. Consider internal satisfaction surveys or tooling friction audits.
• Close the perception gap with feedback loops. The 95% vs. 42% split on tool satisfaction points to a lack of structured feedback mechanisms between IT and end users. Regular surveys, shadowing sessions, or embedded support models can surface hidden friction.
• Make device and app flexibility a first-class engineering concern. Supporting BYOD, cross-platform app delivery, and remote access is no longer a nice-to-have — it correlates with recruiting outcomes and revenue performance according to this survey.
• Establish cross-functional ownership. Digital workspace initiatives that sit entirely within IT or entirely within HR tend to miss important dimensions. A joint IT-HR product team with clear executive sponsorship is more likely to succeed.
• Frame digital experience improvements as business investments. The link between seamless tooling and revenue growth provides a compelling narrative for budget requests and leadership buy-in.

The full VMware Digital Employee Experience survey report and methodology were originally covered by e3zine.com. VMware’s Workspace ONE platform is positioned as the vendor’s primary product for delivering the digital workspace capabilities described in the survey.

The traditional industries are going through digital transformation and job roles have evolved to the extent that as many as 62% professionals feel ‘daunted’ by the rapid pace of changing skills, a LinkedIn report says.

The traditional industries are going through digital transformation and job roles have evolved to the extent that as many as 62% professionals feel ‘daunted’ by the rapid pace of changing skills, a LinkedIn report says. The skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly and demand for talent with rising skills is three-times that of the rest of the talent base, according to LinkedIn’s ‘Future of Skills 2019’ report, released on Thursday. The research was commissioned by LinkedIn and conducted by ACA Research between March 13 and April 15, 2019.

To determine the top rising skills, LinkedIn analysed skills data listed by members on its platform in the last five years and identified those skills that have experienced exponential growth. The report finds some interesting facts like top skills, Thoughts of Indian professionals on growing dependency on technology and changing job segments. Here are some highlights of the report:

1. The LinkedIn study surveyed 4,136 employees and 844 learning and development (L&D) professionals across countries like Australia, India, Japan, and Singapore, noted that 82 per cent Indian professionals feel that the skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly and 62 per cent feel daunted by the pace of change.

IBM Watson in Retail: Conversational Commerce

IBM Watson is one of the most widely recognised AI platforms in enterprise use. Capable of ingesting large volumes of unstructured data and answering questions posed in natural language, Watson has been applied across healthcare, finance, and retail.

US department store Macy’s partnered with Watson through the intelligent engagement platform Satisfi to create a mobile tool called Macy’s On Call. Shoppers can type questions — such as where to find a particular category of clothing — and receive immediate, location-specific answers without waiting for a human staff member.

Apparel brand Under Armour took a different angle, using Watson to generate personalised insights for users of its fitness apps. By analysing activity data collected through those apps, the system aimed to surface customised training recommendations for individual users.

Both examples illustrate the same underlying pattern: AI handling high-volume, repetitive interactions at a scale and speed that human staff cannot match.

Open-Source AI: Amazon DSSTNE, Google TensorFlow, and Microsoft CNTK

Amazon attributes a significant share of its revenue to its recommendation engine. Rather than keeping the underlying technology proprietary, the company released a deep learning framework called DSSTNE (Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine) as an open-source project. The stated rationale: product recommendation is a harder problem than image recognition because labelled training data is comparatively scarce. By open-sourcing the framework, Amazon hoped the wider developer community would contribute improvements that the company could then adopt.

This move sat alongside similar open-source contributions from Google (TensorFlow) and Microsoft (Cognitive Toolkit / CNTK). Together, these releases lowered the barrier for marketers and developers to experiment with machine learning without building models from scratch.

AI-Generated Copy: Natural Language Generation in Practice

Natural language generation (NLG) platforms take structured data — spreadsheet figures, database fields, product attributes — and turn them into readable prose automatically. Quill, developed by Narrative Science, is one of the better-known examples. Publications including Forbes have used Quill to produce earnings reports, and Credit Suisse has applied it to investment research coverage.

On a smaller scale, US car dealership group Dominion Dealer Solutions used Quill to generate vehicle descriptions for its listings pages. According to figures cited at the time, this led to a 50% increase in page views for used-vehicle listings and approximately US$1 million in additional annual revenue. A comparable tool, Wordsmith from Automated Insights, offered similar NLG capabilities for marketers in other verticals.

The practical implication for content teams is significant: NLG handles high-volume, data-heavy writing tasks (product descriptions, financial summaries, sports reports) efficiently, freeing human writers to focus on strategy, narrative, and creative work.

AI Web Design: Automated Site Generation

The Grid released an AI website builder called Molly that aimed to generate custom website layouts based on the content and images a user provides, without requiring manual design decisions. The proposition was that small businesses or agencies could produce unique, content-driven sites automatically.

A concrete use case put forward at the time: a boutique travel agency could automatically generate a personalised landing page for a customer interested in a specific destination — pulling in relevant activity suggestions, restaurant proximity data, and seasonal information — rather than pointing every customer to a generic brochure page.

This kind of dynamic, data-driven personalisation represents a logical extension of what recommendation engines already do for product listings, applied to the broader customer experience.

AI in Programmatic Media Buying

Programmatic advertising automates the buying and serving of digital ads through real-time auctions, connecting advertisers to publisher inventory at scale. AI takes this a step further by optimising bid decisions dynamically.

Wise Data Media developed a real-time bid management system called Wise Air, which applies AI to analyse consumer data and adjust bids before inventory is purchased. The system attempts to match the right audience, at the right moment, through the right channel — decisions that are too complex and fast-moving for manual management.

For marketing teams managing large digital budgets, AI-driven bid management reduces wasted spend and can improve campaign performance without proportionally increasing headcount.

What This Means for Marketing Teams

The thread connecting all of these applications is scale and personalisation. AI does not replace marketing strategy; it executes that strategy at a volume and granularity that manual processes cannot achieve. Key takeaways for marketing and DevOps teams integrating AI tools:

• Conversational interfaces (chatbots, on-site assistants) reduce support load and improve response time without sacrificing personalisation.
• NLG tools are mature enough for high-volume, structured content tasks. They are not a replacement for strategic or long-form editorial work.
• Open-source ML frameworks (TensorFlow, DSSTNE, CNTK) give in-house teams a viable starting point for building recommendation or personalisation features without licensing costs.
• Programmatic AI is most valuable when campaign data volumes are large enough to train the model meaningfully. Smaller campaigns may see limited gains.
• AI-generated web experiences are an emerging space; evaluate tools critically against your actual design and accessibility requirements.

The organisations seeing the clearest returns from AI in marketing are those treating it as an operational layer — automating execution — rather than a replacement for human judgement on audience, brand, and strategy.

Original reporting sourced from memeburn.com (2017).