I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Eric Dirst. He is President of DeKonsultere LLC, providing CIO/COO/Board level services to small/mid-size companies & portfolios of VC/Private Equity firms, Chief Technology Advisor at Align Capital Partners, CTO at Cloud5 Communications, and CIO at Renew Corp.
He previously had executive positions at Adtalem and DeVry, which are leading for-profit trade and tech educational institutions and was CIO at Sirva (Allied Van Lines) President of DeKonsultere, LLC.
Given his long background in higher education, we talked about heroics as universities, colleges rushed to migrate from campus to distance learning and massive scaling demands on tech providers like Blackboard. We discuss likely business model changes as education moves more on-line and about changes in labor needs post-COVID and how the education sector needs to evolve to support more trade and blue collar skills. We also discussed the elaborate testing, contact tracing and other protocols as campuses re-open.
We also talked about pivots and acrobatics in the startups he advises.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Darren Roos who is CEO of IFS, which is a leading European vendor of ERP, field service and asset management software. He has had other successful stints at SAP and Software AG. He joined me from his home in London, UK
He talks about heroics in his customer base. He pays them tribute with the term "challenger mindset" and calls them "beacons of light in the darkness". In the US, he cites Munters (they manufacture and service air treatment solutions and saw an acute need to have field technicians conduct complex service calls) and Raven Industries (which jumped in to make PPE). COBA (in the UK switched its operations within weeks to manufacture medical tubing). Induflex in Denmark did similar. Some of IFS' customers were involved with the UK NHS rapid construction of Nightingale hospitals to handle the surge of COVID-19 patients.
I particularly liked his comments in the leadership section about "over communicating" during a crisis and how partners like TCS are stepping up to do remote projects in a travel-challenged environment.
Overall, very optimistic session and nice to get a positive point of view about the UK and Scandinavia, and a very different vertical perspective focused on complex, asset intensive businesses.
Brian Sommer and I go back nearly 30 years. We ran parallel Software Intelligence units at Andersen (now Accenture) and PwC (that unit is now part of IBM) and competed. The competition was tough at a professional level, but respectful at a personal level. He was one of the first people I called for counsel when I got a job offer from Gartner. At Gartner, I had to analyze Andersen so I got to torture Brian :)
We then co-founded a marketplace, IQ4hire. Our ambition was to digitize the entire SI/outsourcing sales and procurement process. It was ahead of its time in a world (our plans included proposal engines and video consultant resumes) where relationship selling ruled, but the rigor we codified two decades ago has allowed both of us to bring rigor to many a project since.
Many readers see us at vendor events. Many clients see us together on advisory projects. We look at problems from very different perspectives - something most clients appreciate. We also try to do so with humor. In (very) different ways, we are both story tellers as I wrote here.
So, not surprisingly we talk quite often on a wide range of topics (and crack plenty of jokes and tell stories). During the COVID-19 pandemic, our conversations have moved to Zoom. We thought it would be fun to share some of our recent conversations about enterprise technology.
Here is the first episode in a series of hot topics - titled the Burning Platform. Notice on the cover how cool the man is, even in the face of the raging fire. That is a good metaphor for how we approach enterprise problems. We will share these on a regular basis, minus much of the snark, family talk and politics that creeps into our conversations.
It is a roughly 10 minute format. The first episode is about how on-premises and cloud applications have fared during the pandemic, and why customers still cannot easily jettison old, ugly on-premises baggage. We also make some recommendations.
Look forward to your feedback, and the opportunity to help you through complex enterprise issues. And do so with much needed humor in these crazy times!
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Kevin Parikh, CEO and Chairman of Avasant, a digital research, benchmarking and advisory firm.
We cover wide ground around heroics he has seen in his IT focused client base. We also spend time on his book, Digital Singularity, which he describes as human experience meeting technological omnipresence as it gets embedded all around us in sensors and smaller devices. His view of Singularity is very different from that of Dr. Ray Kurzweil which is much more about man-machine convergence. Kevin emphasizes the subtitle of his book over and over - the case for tech in service of humanity.
I particularly liked his optimism around using maturing technologies to re-imagine the world as we recover from the crisis. He says like we sat on video and collaboration till the recent crisis, we have been underutilizing IoT, AI and advanced data processing. I liked the examples he cites - how he recommended rebuilding Dominica and the Caribbean broadly with wireless tech given the repeated damage from hurricanes, the moonshot race and similar opportunities around world to think differently around today's challenges. More of his vision are in this corporate video.
He rightly is proud of the private sector as it continues to be outcome and data focused in a world of disinformation and political maneuvering. He ends with his own examples of leadership - internships for his employee's young, and in turn encouraging his employees to spend time on charitable activities.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
The last few months have been tough on senior citizens, and by extension their friends and families. Many nursing homes and long term care facilities have been "fortified" and visits, even by family members, have been greatly restricted. Those who stayed at home have severely curtailed shopping, social and recreational trips. At home, they have been bombarded by a constant stream of negative news.
So it was nice to invite Mark Galloway, Chief Commercial Officer at GrandPad to talk about heroics he has seen in the community which works with senior citizens. GrandPad is a simple and secure tablet computer that digitally connects a senior to their family and friends. The average user is 82 years old and technology which most readers of this blog use on a daily basis is a big challenge for these seniors. The senior can easily view family photos and videos, play games, see weather for each family member, listen to music, check emails, make phone calls, place a video chat, and much more. As you can see from a few comments I extracted from the Slack Customer Channel that Mark shared with me, the user needs are fairly basic, but the joy to them and the peace of mind to their family and friends immense.
It's an uplifting conversation - please share the word with friends, family, neighbors with seniors who would benefit from being connected. It has been an extremely lonely and anxious time for many of them. We can all do better for them.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Josh Bersin, one of the best analysts on HR trends and a major influencer in his role as Dean at the Josh Bersin Academy.
The expression goes "what does not kill you makes you stronger". I kept thinking about that as Josh talks about what HR execs and staff have had to endure during the last 6 months - employee physical and mental health issues, transition of workforces to WFH, massive scaling up/down, stress of economic uncertainty, highly charged diversity and inclusion discussions, distance learning, automation plans as companies reconfigure supply chains, physical site re-opening protocols, leadership and resilience in a deep crisis.
We also talk about the changing HCM vendor landscape. Vendors like Salesforce with Work.com, ServiceNow and Facebook are increasingly part of the HR conversation in addition to many niche vendors, and leaders like Workday, SAP and Oracle.
We have long talked about HR becoming truly strategic. That time may have arrived. It is a really uplifting conversation.
Let me say at the outset, my hype antenna goes up whenever a vendor talks about machine learning. It comes from years of frustration with machines which have supposedly been trained to transcribe voices. Even the hyperscalers only deliver 85 to 90% accuracy when it comes to transcribing my book and blog interviews. I used to think it was the noise in my audio recordings. After all, if doctors can dictate their complex lingo and get pretty good automated transcription what is so complex about my workloads? Well, machines can learn their individual voices and accents - doctor handwriting is a bigger challenge, I think:).
In my case 95% of the voice is not mine - it is that of my interviewees. In tech, many of them have strong German, Indian, Chinese, S. African and other accents. And also in tech we use all kinds of big words and acronyms (thanks, Gartner!).
Machines can be trained well if you can limit the taxonomy they are expected to learn and then you expose them to LOTS of relevant data. It's the latter part where most vendors fail to measure up. They may have a number of large on-premise customers. Vendor machines cannot easily access that data - they are either not allowed to access the customer data center or even if the data is extracted, customers rarely give them permission to benchmark against other customers. If they are in the cloud, they do have easier access to the data, but few have sought or received permission to anonymize the data and use it for ML.
Which is why I was intrigued to hear about Sidetrade and its database of accounts receivable and cash collection data accumulated over 20 years - representing over 300 million invoices valued at over trillion dollars. I invited David Turner, the CMO to talk about their value proposition and have extracted 20 minutes from his presentation below. He discusses his Augmented Cash application and two of his large customers - Manpower and XPO Logistics.
The pandemic has been good for business. Q2 was the strongest in their history. Cash flow is king with the global economy in turmoil and their insight delivered via their bot, Aimie clearly helps collectors.
You would think ERP and CRM vendors would be all over this with their order processing and eCommerce capabilities? Sidetrade depends on them to process customer orders, do the billing and record the cash collections. (Sidetrade has a roadmap to itself offer some of the transaction processing) But go back to my comments above. Those vendors likely don't have enough real-life customer collection data available to train their machines.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and Founder of Constellation Research, an advisory firm which studies disruptive business and exponential technology trends. In Part I we covered acrobatics he has seen in tech during the last few months.
Ray graduated from Johns Hopkins with a degree in public health, so here we spent some time discussing public health and life sciences performance during the crisis.
We also spend some time discussing how he has stayed positive during the crisis, and how he sees the economy shaping up.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and Founder of Constellation Research, an advisory firm which studies disruptive business and exponential technology trends. In Part I below we cover acrobatics he has seen in tech during the last few months. In addition, Ray graduated from Johns Hopkins with a degree in public health, so in Part II we will spend some time discussing health issues in this pandemic.
We discuss how cloud applications fared in the last few months, the changed state of Digital Transformations (Ray and I have been talking about those projects for several years) and why so many enterprise vendors are showing interest in a consumer play called TikTok.
And if you think he is high energy in this section, you will find him provocative when we discuss healthcare and life sciences and the state of the economy in Part II which I will run Monday.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Michael Pinckney, founder and operator of a gourmet, hand-made cookie store based in Kirkland, WA. He was my colleague at Gartner, and had a long technology career which included stints at Microsoft, IBM and startups. The "Cookie Monster" second act started in 2009 and like a good entrepreneur he has morphed his product mix and channel strategy over the years.
COVID-19 has required unbelievable heroics on his part. He was squarely in the epicenter of the first outbreak in the US. He had to decide whether to shut down his business. Lockdowns made selling at the Farmer's Market unattractive. He had to switch to on-line selling. For various reasons he describes in the video, business has taken off and meeting the backlog of orders has required more heroics with distancing and talent constraints.
He has persisted and done a lot of good while baking his amazing confections - he gives a tour of his plant in the video. The good comes in the form of his generous contributions to COVID related charities and after the George Floyd incident, towards racial justice related charities.
Head over to his online store and order some of his 16 flavors including Ginger Molasses, Snickerdoodle and gluten-free and vegan varieties. I plan to order the "Brown Butter Brown Sugar Bourbon Spice". He uses an entire bottle of Award winning Woodinville Whiskey Co. bourbon in each batch!
Our guilt about the sinful cookies will be lessened by the knowledge we are helping him in his causes and saluting his heroics.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New Normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Tom Ryan, President and Founder of tkr Consulting Associates. Tom and I were colleagues at Gartner in the late 90s. He was one of the founding analysts of the Integrated Logistics Strategies service. Before that, he had been in warehouse operations at Procter and Gamble and at a warehouse management systems company. After that he was part of a third party logistics (3PL) firm and has since advised a number of companies on software and 3PL selections.
Tom has a wonderful ability to simplify complex logistics (anyone who can work in Tolkien's Balrog and Moria when talking about reverse logistics is surely gifted). I am glad we discussed how supply chains have been under stress during the pandemic across several industries and how it has taken a lot of creativity especially from small businesses to handle a "once in a hundred years, lifetime" scenario.
We talk about supply chains around PPE, ventilators and other healthcare supplies, dairy, meat, last mile delivery of groceries, restaurant meals, even used cars. We discuss the physical challenges of global supply chains when consumers expect delivery in days, the complexity of reverse logistics and capabilities of 3PLs.
We spend the most time on technology, particularly automation - in warehouses, with conveyors and autonomous mobile robots, drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles.
Love his calm perspective on the performance of supply chains during the pandemic - "Same stuff we have been playing with ...but worse... the intensity, severity, frequency (spiked) ...but I can do this, this hurts, but this too shall pass"
Five years ago, as part of my research for the book on automation, Silicon Collar, I coined the term "Alt-Job". I saw millions of workers and small businesses in franchises like those of McDonald's or the UPS Store, selling products using the Amazon Fulfillment platform, developing applications for the iOS store. Of course, companies have long used staffing firms, but unlike for employees where they have moved to a single book of record, they have multiple systems for contract labor. Often, those are managed by procurement, not HCM so there is even less enterprise-wide visibility. Many of those systems also date back to the 1990s.
Companies have even less visibility to talent in suppliers, digital agencies, law and accounting firms etc. As I have written, we have moved to a "Clover-Leaf talent economy" but our systems provide little visibility to most of those leaves. BTW clovers can have many more than 4 leaves. Guinness World Records says one was found with 56 leaves and that range may be even larger for talent sources.
So, I was pleased to spend some time with Dan Beck and Annrai O'Toole, ex-Workday execs at the Rising event last October. They have started Utmost to bring more visibility to this growing, extended workforce. I advised them to not just focus on the staff augmentation component, but to also factor franchise, platform and other more recent and growing talent bases.
Of course, the world of work has turned upside down during the pandemic with so many people working from home, travel restrictions etc.
Given all this, it was nice to get a presentation from the growing executive team on their progress so far. I have extracted 15 minutes in the video below of a much longer session we had. I left out customer case studies - they are not public yet - and a few other sections.
It is a great start, and they are very global in reach for a startup. Their timing is fortuitous given they can now factor massive changes in the workplace in the last few months. They are also benefiting as an early player on the Workday Extend platform. As I wrote last week, the platform has grown even more in importance for Workday in the last quarter.
I look forward to seeing how what Dan calls their "global work graph" keeps evolving.
Workday had a solid quarter - listen to the earnings call here. Actually given the state of the economy, you could call it a blowout quarter. On the heels of Salesforce's earnings report this week that I commented on yesterday, I looked for similarities and differences with other vendor performance during the pandemic.
Workday clearly benefited from a dramatically increased focus on employees during the pandemic. As Aneel Bhusri, the CEO had indicated in this interview I did with him in May and said on the earnings call "I've never had so many CEO conversations on the HCM product line. And I think the issue of employee health, mental health, physical health, how are they doing working remotely, how are they working on new projects. This new world of skills and a different world around talent become a number one priority for the CEOs." I was particularly glad to hear Aneel say : "We are not an ERP vendor...We are quick to implement HR and finance systems, really oriented toward employees and running the business in a very agile environment." I have told Workday for a couple of years now they have opportunistically been using the ERP term when they don't have much in the way of industry-specific operational capabilities
Workday has benefited from its growing portfolio of smaller applications like Workday Adaptive Planning, Prism Analytics and Spend Management and around workplace reopening protocol applications in partnership with Salesforce and IBM. Bite size applications with quick payback, and ability to be implemented remotely are selling in this market. Even SAP is finding its Amplify set of bite-size applications, not big honking S/4 projects are doing well.
Workday's Extend platform is gathering steam. Pete Schlampp -- Executive Vice President, Product Development said "I think we have about 100 different applications live today. One of them that just went live this quarter was a company that had built a self-assessment capability inside of Extend so employees could self-assess as they were getting ready to return to work and determine whether they were ready. So Extend is about any type of use case just extending the surface area of Workday." Workday has been careful to focus its platform at customers, not to open it up to a broad ecosystem of vendors like Salesforce has. It may need to consider doing so now. As we have seen during the pandemic, vertical "edge" applications have taken off - telemedicine, last mile logistics, PPP loan processing, digital mortgages and many more (see more in my comments on edge apps in this video here ). If Workday had some of those on its platform, its quarter would have been stratospheric. Workday could itself be using its platform to deliver industry applications. IFS is reporting field service traction in its asset intensive customers, ServiceNow is starting to see similar in financial services and healthcare.
Most cloud applications are benefiting from an overall annoyance with on-premise systems. Besides their age and expense, on-prem applications took companies way too much effort compared to cloud applications as they moved employees to WFH. SaaS applications have a massive opportunity ahead of them - in industry and geography reach. Us analysts recently had a fun time around the "funeral" of on-premise applications, but I resurrected "Mr. OP" for now. As I said, unless SaaS applications expand their functional reach and automate migrations, customers will lift and shift on-prem applications to hyperscalers and move to cheaper third party maintenance and support.
To, the last point, it is nice to see Chano Fernandez promoted to Co-CEO. It should free up Aneel to focus on product and strategy. It will be good to see him expand the Workday footprint.
Jim Cramer at CNBC pointed out the irony that ExxonMobil, a major carbon contributor as an oil and gas company is being replaced by Salesforce in the Dow Jones Industrials Index. Salesforce is a major supporter of the WEF's 1T.org initiative to plant a trillion trees by 2030 to offset the effects of climate change.
The official communication said it was related more to Apple's recent stock split and the need to add more tech to the index. However, to me it is another example of CEO Marc Benioff willing to take positions where most other corporate executives fear to tread - on diversity, homelessness in San Francisco and so many other causes - and increasingly being recognized for it. I have been impressed how many other executives mention Marc as an inspiration in the "acrobatics during the crisis" Zoom series I have been running. They have been doing so, unsolicited.
Of course, it is not just his leadership around "purpose". Salesforce has deftly pivoted its product mix during the pandemic. I could see it in the interview I did with Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, EVP, Industries in May. She was talking about Salesforce's work helping various verticals including public health officials and with partner nCino helping community banks process thousands of PPP loans
The Work.com launch has been brilliant. One executive after another has told me site re-open protocols are turning out to be much more complex than lockdown processes - which themselves were not easy as thousands were being moved to WFH. Schools, college campuses, sports teams, amusement parks are facing even more urgent and complex reopening scenarios.
As part of my recent interview with Tony Prophet, the Chief Equality Officer I wrote "Salesforce is a company which elevates equality as a core value and has been widely recognized as a company which is leading conversations on moving to a broader stakeholder, not just shareholder, focus. Given how well it has done for shareholders, the stakeholder goals are even more ambitious and Tony is clearly a key player in that effort and as he advises "aim high".
I know of customers who think Salesforce tries to be "woke" and support too many social causes. Well, after their product and financial performance (they just reported a blowout quarter) during the pandemic, I say - if they can walk the tightrope, let's just watch in awe.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Charles Phillips. He has had an amazing career in the Marines, on Wall Street, then as President of Oracle, as Chairman of Infor (which was sold to Koch Industries earlier this year), now as an investor, philanthropist and as board member of several public and private sector institutions.
He has been spending a lot of time thinking about next-gen business processes. He sees a breakdown of jobs into tasks and a lot more automation at that component level. He sees the process re-think as both an opportunity and a threat to today's enterprise vendors. We also discuss the likely impact on the job market. He discusses a Business Council project he in involved with which is looking at next-generation jobs in construction, advanced manufacturing, healthcare and tech. They are looking at "mid-skill" jobs that don't need 4 year college degrees. We have 'over-credentialed" too many jobs requiring such degrees in the recent past.
I have always been impressed with how Charles, as a person of color, has navigated his way around so many organizations. He humbly credits his upbringing in a military family and moving around every couple of years. That taught him to get along with people of every stripe. I particularly liked his views and advice to younger folks and civic leaders starting around 8:25. He is optimistic the conversation around diversity in business and society this time "has legs".
We also discuss Wall Street, its highs when Main Street is hurting, the coming market for vertical applications, the Fed's performance in the last few months, revving up the New York City economy post-pandemic and making it safer and more attractive to visitors. (BTW, he talks about the Fed's acrobatics - you can hear more of their policies in this unprecedented live webcast today at 9 am from Kansas City)
He is also very involved in party politics, but we stayed away from that. I liked the positive end when he talks about his son returning from a deployment in Okinawa. Having been "outside the bubble" for 4 years, he comments positively and optimistically about the state of the country. Charles says "someone that age saying that, I hope they are all saying that"
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Rich Karlgaard, former Publisher, now Editor-at-Large and Futurist at Forbes Media. He writes a regular column for Forbes Asia. He is also a bestselling author including that of a book he released last year, Late Bloomers. Even though he writes plenty about tech and innovation, I have always found his views on public policy very incisive, so we had a broad conversation about political leaders, enterprise software and the state of media.
We spent the most amount of time on his views on enterprise software and he is generous to Bill McDermott, Satya Nadella, Diane Greene, Tom Siebel, Hasso Plattner and many other industry leaders.
We discuss the Federalism trend in the US - 50 states approaching COVID-19 and managing economies in their unique ways. He is balanced and talks about governors in both red and blue states but is particularly generous to Doug Burgum in N. Dakota. Internationally, he spends a lot of time on what he admires about Singapore and how it is likely to benefit from the current issues in Hong Kong.
We spend time on his book and discuss ageism in Silicon Valley. He thinks enterprise software, as different from consumer tech, should continue to leverage "grey hair". I enjoyed his description of how he considers himself a late bloomer, and also how the great pitcher, Sandy Koufax benefited from advice he received mid way through his career.
We spend time on the state of media and whether we will see a "correction". He describes his own reading preferences and how he focuses on properties that keep him optimistic including TechCrunch and Seeking Alpha.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Evangelos Simoudis. His firm, Synapse Partners, which he co-founded in 2016, invests in early stage startups developing enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and advises global corporations on AI and big data strategies, next-generation mobility, and startup-driven innovation. Prior to founding Synapse Partners, he was a managing director at Trident Capital and Apax Partners. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science (machine learning) from Brandeis University, and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech.
He recently released his second book titled Transportation Transformation. While the book looked at how autonomous vehicles and mobility services will reshape economies, he has since also looked at how the pandemic has affected the sector.
We talk about how some segments of the sector have been vibrant - trucking to meet the increase in eCommerce demand, lot more interest in electric vehicles (EV), bikes and recreational vehicles (RV)s; others are not doing so well - mass transit given WFH trends, airlines, cruise lines, rental cars, ride sharing down given travel restrictions and consumer fears.
We discuss why there has been a spike in interest in EVs during the pandemic - he credits regulatory push, evolution of battery/digital tech, age of traditional auto industry architecture as drivers. In contrast, there is a much more realistic perspective on viability of autonomous vehicles (AV). He describes likely use cases for early adoption of AVs.
He also presents a very realistic pov on the state of AI - from his advisory work with large companies and from his investment portfolio.
Finally, it is also good to hear his global pov on how economies, especially in Asia, are bouncing back from the crisis. He brings a data scientist perspective to macroeconomics citing commuting and other patterns.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Sue Fellows, Chief Customer Officer at Workfront. She is a passionate customer advocate and the whole conversation is a celebration of customers. She describes several customer acrobatics in healthcare and life sciences but one of my favorites is her description of John Paul Mitchell Systems. They re-purposed their 40 year anniversary celebration budget to create a fund for hair care salons - so many mom and pop businesses which have been badly hurt by lockdowns. Given the uneven impact of the pandemic, it is nice to hear her describe how Workfront has worked with both ends of the spectrum - customers which are rocketing like one which helped process stimulus checks the government mailed out to hundreds of millions of homes and also those which are struggling.
The pandemic has forced every business to adapt to new WFH and site re-opening protocols and those around new products and revenue sources. We discuss how Workfront has always helped customers with unfamiliar and unstructured processes. I wrote recently about their scenario planner as customers look to navigate wild swings in macroeconomic signals.
She has helped build a very strong customer community around Workfront - I have felt the positive vibe during a customer advisory meeting and at their LEAP conferences. She describes how that has been carried forward in our increasingly digital, distanced world.
We also discuss leadership during this crisis. I had interviewed her CEO, Alex Shootman at the start of this series in April - he had talked about resilience in a crisis. Sue adds her own perspectives on leadership.
While I was editing the video, I noticed she is smiling or laughing in just about every frame. It is a very positive, uplifting conversation.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Tony Prophet, Chief Equality and Recruiting Officer at Salesforce. Tony has had a remarkable career. I profiled him in one of my books optimizing HP's supply chain. He had also described China's meteoric surge in the early 2000s. I then profiled him in another book at Microsoft helping digitize the education sector. Now he is in an even more influential role at Salesforce, especially with the recent focus on BLM and other diversity issues.
Salesforce is a company which elevates equality as a core value and has been widely recognized as a company which is leading conversations on moving to a broader stakeholder, not just shareholder, focus. Given how well it has done for shareholders, the stakeholder goals are even more ambitious and Tony is clearly a key player in that effort and as he advises "aim high".
On Equality.com, Saleforce says "We aspire to have 50% of our U.S. workforce made up of Underrepresented Groups (Women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Multiracial, LGBTQ+, People with Disabilities, and Veterans) by 2023 and to continue building a workplace that reflects society around the globe." They are already at 43.9%. So, I was struck by his humility. He says a couple of times, Salesforce does not have all the answers and they still have a ways to go. But he names names of several colleagues and others who are leading the way when it comes to diversity awareness.
He has some great leadership advice - "in a crisis, the tendency for leaders is to be communicate less. Need to do just the opposite". He also advises more openness - not to be afraid to talk about race issues for fear of saying the wrong thing. He cites a colleague who quoted a version of "closed mouth gathers no feet"
Most of the videos in this series have focused on heroics around the health, operational and financial impacts of the pandemic, so I was glad to get a chance to talk to Tony about the diversity angle. It took a while for us to schedule the talk given so many other executives, panels and forums are also seeking his counsel in what he calls a "moment of reset".
Definitely worth the wait...very inspirational conversation.
As Brian Sommer and Ray Wang reported on Friday in this video I was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral for on-premise software. In that role, I was allowed to the grave site where no media followed - most were too busy tweeting about the demise. So I was one of the few who witnessed a miracle. We heard a groan and it was old OP. We helped him out, and I stayed the weekend with radio silence to see how he fared. I visited him in the hospital this morning where he is in stable condition.
Here is a condensed version of our conversation (and sanitized for the foul language he used in describing us analysts):
OP - Vinnie, you have not been too nice to me the last few years, but I get my revenge. You get to tell the world that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
VM - OP, first of all its good to see you so lucid. Hope you don't mind calling you OP. Impressive that you remember your Hemingway.
OP - And I hope you don't mind me calling you illiterate. It was Mark Twain from London in 1897
VM - 1897? so Brian was right - you are as old as the hills.
OP - is that Sommer you talk about? Tell the SOB, I saw his snarky eulogy. And tell him and Ray, I will be around long to torment them.
VM - Now hold on OP, it's not just Brian and Ray. You are not too popular with customers. And you have gotten uglier by the day, and have all kinds of patches and band aids....
OP - this conversation is finished...
VM - the pandemic and work from home trend truly exposed your weaknesses. Most CIOs describe the extra VPN provisioning and other effort it took to keep you going. Cloud applications on the other hand were a dream.
OP - OK, smartypants, then why have they kept me around? Because cloud solutions cannot deliver all the complex industry and geography specific functionality. I delivered essential services just like healthcare and Amazon Prime workers did. And this is the gratitude you show me?
VM - well, cloud vendors are working on those industry solutions...
OP - good luck waiting for that. They have been promising them for a decade. Besides, even if they do, will customers have the massive migration budgets during the recession? Till cloud vendors automate the migration, they will continue to depend on their expensive SI partners
VM - not exactly, with travel restrictions, SIs are moving to remote delivery models...
OP - If you believe that one, then I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.
VM - OP, you really don't believe things have to change?
OP - With friends like Larry and Hasso, I am used to a certain lifestyle. Why should I change?
VM - because customers are talking to Google and Amazon and Microsoft about lifting and shifting you out of their data centers and moving it to their hyperscale ones.
OP - you mean I wont live in a suite any more?
VM - actually it gets better. They are also talking to firms like Rimini and Spinnaker to service you...
OP - Mercy... no more caviar - they will only serve me hot dogs? Can you do anything about it?
VM - I will see if Larry can move you into his infrastructure cloud, but even there you will be working pretty hard. You know Zoom ran 7 petabytes of video a day through his data centers a couple of months ago
OP - that sounds like way, way too much work...
VM - well I have a better idea. Why don't you announce your retirement?
OP - Hasso did exactly that and said I would be gone by 2025, but customers don't seem to believe him ...heheh
VM - no, you need to step up, teach cloud vendors all your unique industry and geography knowledge and I will see if we can get you a decent pension and a small place on the beach.
OP - Too hot...how about on a lake?
VM - OP, quit worrying. You have had a traumatic few days. Just work on a smooth transition, and we may even get you a customized bobble head
OP - man the one you have looks ugly but I guess after decades I do look that way. Can you arrange a red hat for him?
VM - Red hat?
OP - No not that one, one which says OP
VM - you mean Opie? We will have to check with Ron Howard.
OP - who, what? Look, I am feeling rough. Just get me the best deal you can, Mr. Deal Architect and I will gracefully, gradually fade away in a few years.
VM - OK, but no trickery. Teach cloud vendors all your industry and geography knowledge and how to automate the migration. By the way, you really gave us a scare, but I am glad you are bouncing back and are as feisty as ever.
OP - and Vinnie, nothing will please me more than to see you grovel and be nice to me. Stay healthy, yourself.
I have long been a fan of long-term scenario planning and this Harvard Business Review article describes in a fair amount of detail the big thinking around such planning at Shell and other large companies and at government agencies.
I found this nugget particularly useful:
"But Shell-style scenario planning has never really been about predicting the future. Its value lies in how scenarios are embedded in—and provide vital links between—organizational processes such as strategy making, innovation, risk management, public affairs, and leadership development. It has helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present. As unthreatening stories, scenarios enable Shell executives to open their minds to previously inconceivable or imperceptible developments."
Rightly or wrongly, the term is increasingly also being used for more tactical, near-term planning with scenarios reflecting chaotic macroeconomic signals. In the 50+ C level exec interviews in the series I have been running I have been asking them if they see a sharp V, a gradual U, a choppy W, or a dead L when it comes to economic recovery. Several had said they expect the Nike swoosh, others just honestly say they cannot even venture a guess. If I were to re-interview them a few weeks later, many would likely use a different letter.
In the interviews with operational executives I hear similar about physical site re-open plans. The planning horizons keep getting shorter and inputs from regulatory agencies, HR managers and facility managers keep changing. If you look at businesses which have partially reopened - like sports teams and theme parks - you see similar weekly even daily decisions on which activities to keep open, shut down, accelerate or decelerate.
Companies have been furiously planning and re-planning with their budgeting and forecasting tools. I recently had a chance to hear a very different presentation from Workfront. It was about features like Align and Scenario Planner they have recently launched. I have extracted below about 8 minutes of a much longer Zoom conversation with Scott Monroe, Director, Product Marketing and Michael Swan, Product Manager.
Workfront's Scenario Planner provides a nice bird's eye view on how projects, tasks, activities can be moved around as part of those frequent re-planning exercises and to factor rapidly shifting constraints so common these days.
I think every executive, no matter what their industry, would benefit from a similar conversation with them. It would give them a chance as the HBR article says to not just focus on dollars and cents but links between various organizational processes.
SAP Nation 3.0, which was published last year, took me 6 months longer than I had planned. When I looked at the first draft, it was dominated by S/4HANA. I told Stacey Fish, who was helping me navigate SAP I needed more coverage of other parts of SAP. In the end, the book has plenty of case studies and executive profiles around AIN, C/4HANA, IBP, ML, Qualtrics, SuccessFactors and other SAP products. Which created another problem - my editing team told me all the acronyms were confusing. You think? So we added a section upfront titled 'Do you speak SAPese?" which includes a taxonomy of TLAs, an index to the case studies by country and industry, and a listing of a wide range of customer strategies like ring-fencing and third party maintenance we describe in the book
The challenge has been to get SAP itself and its partners to speak "SAPese" in this broader vernacular. In my opinion, there has been too much focus on terms like "Intelligent Enterprise" and selling the big S/4HANA upgrade.
I have seen a glimmer of hope in the last few weeks as SAP has shed light across 6 analyst briefings on other segments of its portfolio.
The most emphatic was in a presentation that Greg Tomb and team delivered Tuesday on what they call their Amplify initiative - watch the replay here. Greg said the pandemic has led customers to ask SAP to ask for "bite size projects" and "immediate value" around "problems they face today." Focus on areas like "learning" given WFH, digital commerce, smart sourcing etc. He used words like "implementations in days and weeks". "flexible licensing", "Big SIs selling $50 to 100K projects" I have not heard often in my three decades covering SAP. Importantly, it has encouraged SAP to show off many of the products that do not get as much exposure.
Of course, most of what Greg described is horizontal, cross-industry functionality. In interviews I have done with Peter Maier here and Bob Stutz here you also get a feel for industry specific functionality from SAP.
If anything, in the last 4 months, I have seen an explosion of interest in what I call vertical "edge" applications - PPP loan processing, mobile banking and digital mortgage processing in fintech, telemedicine in healthcare, distance learning in education, ecommerce fulfillment and last mile delivery in retail, drive thru and home delivery for food service, shop floor and warehouse automation as customers re-examine supply chains and many more. Many more opportunities for SAP to explore.
I have heard similar from SAP's competitors about their new, often, bite-sized offerings. Workday using its planning and HCM capabilities and leveraging IBM Watson has developed a solution to help companies safely reopen sites. Salesforce's Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh described to me their vertical "edge" applications, often with partners on the Force.com platform, in this conversation.
As with everything in this phase, the question to ask is "how far will the bungee snap back?" When the economy starts to recover, will these vendors and partners go back to big "elephant hunting" and large, on-site projects? Importantly, will customers allow them to?
Rootstock gave me a demo this week of their Low-Code, Business-Driven Cloud ERP software release. I have extracted below 3 minutes from an hour-long Zoom session.
This press release describes five areas where "citizen developers" can increase their productivity using Salesforce Lightning and its Einstein AI platform that Rootstock is built on.
You know what? I found it a treat. The last few months we have focused on heroics as CIOs moved thousands to WFH. In my Zoom series, I have heard of many vertical "edge" applications in healthcare, retail, mortgage processing, higher ed, banking which have allowed customers to survive and often thrive during the COVID19 crisis. We have seen how projects have moved overnight to zero-travel, remote implementation and support. All that is pretty earth shattering.
In contrast, we have seen also been part of tone-deaf vendor events where they still pretend they can sell 2-3 year projects which require plenty of on-site presence and they mostly talk about products which were in the bag in January and now look dated.
So, it was good to have Tom Brennan, Rilene Simpson and Tammy Delatorre focus on something down to earth, but which makes ordinary users, and certainly power users much less dependent on IT and SIs.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Brad Feld, who has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars. He released last week a book he has co-authored titled The Startup Community Way. He has been a big cheerleader (along with Steve Case of AOL fame) of startups in smaller communities around the world, debunking the notion that innovation only happens in Silicon Valley.
For each of the interviews in this series, I have sent a script ahead to my guests. Brad put mine aside and spoke with amazing fluency on a wide set of topics. He is noticeably humble - does not dwell much on his portfolio or make any projections for the economic recovery. Instead, we spent plenty of time on complex systems thinking he explores in his new book and looks at the recent crisis from that lens. The big revelation from the last few months is 'geography' of where innovation happens has suddenly become less important in our virtual world, but the ecosystem concepts we have learned can now be applied to what he calls "domains."
In many ways, the conversation was a discourse on how much our healthcare system has learned about COVID 19 in the last few weeks. He discusses one of his portfolio companies, Whoop and its respiratory rate metric and how it is helping with COVID diagnostics. As interesting is his description of how doctors have learned not to overuse ventilators.
The conversation with Brad and my last session with Lou Von Thaer, CEO of Battelle reflect the tectonic changes we are seeing in healthcare and life sciences. Or more accurately how little we know and how quickly we are learning. I have said it a couple of times - we are starting to apply Moore's Law to our understanding of the human body and mind.
I have personally been frustrated how the media has hysterically presented the June/July spike in positives across the Sunbelt as similar to that in the Northeast in March. It has not paid much tribute to the exponential learning we are witnessing in healthcare like that around use of ventilators. How it has learned to rapidly scale ICU capacity. How it has made medical workers mobile across states. How therapies like Remdesivir and convalescent plasma are having a significant impact on acute cases. Brad describes media behavior within the context of multiple 'complex systems' he has been tracking - those around health issues, the economic crisis and mental issues from the lockdown.
We ran long in our session. There are two further issues I would like to explore with him in a future session. One is around mental issues - he has a keen interest there - from the crisis. We are running a global experiment with WFH. Kids are staying at home for extended periods away from friends, without much physical exercise. In FL, we are seeing strains coming from fortifying our nursing homes for months without family visitation. Lockdowns are not free - as societies we need to also wake up to the realities and costs of domestic abuse, suicides and other consequences of prolonged isolation.
The other is as companies re-jig their global supply chains, how smaller communities should position themselves to take advantage of the shifts.
Of course, given the experience with this session, I have no doubt, we would likely also throw that script away and cover several other fascinating topics.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Lou Von Thaer, who is President and CEO of Battelle which is a major force in science and technology discovery. Over 90 years, they have helped in a wide range of strategic national R&D projects and innovation - including around nuclear research, space technology, biotech and cyber defense. Today the company is focused on three major market sectors: National Security, Healthcare and Large Research Infrastructure.
Lou has had an impressive career starting at Bell Labs, then General Dynamics and a number of other defense technology companies. He has been CEO at Battelle for 3 years and as you can see he is comfortable talking across a wide range of STEM disciplines.
You can feel the intensity as he describes starting around 6:15 how quickly their vaporized hydrogen peroxide-based Critical Care Decontamination System scaled when N95 masks were in critically short supply in March. In 4 months, they have already disinfected and extended lives of over 2 million masks. (he mistakenly said 2 thousand in the interview).
In addition, they have been working on new forms of CV19 tests, more affordable ventilators, and even a sensor to detect CV19 in the air. He also describes work around vaccines, environmental models, "forever" chemicals and brain-machine interfaces to help paraplegics. They have also had a role in a number of consumer products like CD-ROMs, candy coatings and golf balls. He says he feels like he is back at Bell Labs in its heyday when they were patenting a new product a day.
I especially liked the section where we talk about his leadership style. He says "CEOs never get to choose between two good options - those decisions are made lower in the organization - you are always being asked to choose between the bad choices." He says he benefits from "standing on the shoulders of 10 previous CEOs " and talks about "prioritizing safety of your employees and society".
In many ways it is a feel-good conversation: Normally vaccines take 6 years or longer to develop and get approved. He was initially skeptical, but now says he is optimistic about CV19 vaccines by end of year. Over and over he talks about how well public/private/academic partnerships have worked during the crisis, including 11 pm calls with the Governor of Ohio and FDA leadership. "Fail faster" comes up early and often. He says as a country "we are not great planners, but we do stand together and react when there is a major threat.". He is proud of how businesses have reacted in the last few months "People did not sit around feeling sorry for themselves." Indeed.
It is a must-watch session. You will feel uplifted by this man fluent in so many STEM disciplines.
I interviewed Geoff Scott and Dave Wascom of ASUG (America's SAP User's Group) last week, and we talked about SAP customer heroics during the pandemic, S/4HANA adoption plans, remote implementations and other topics. The replay is here.
This week, I listened to a joint ASUG/DSAG (DSAG represents customers in Germany, Austria & Switzerland) session which focused more on S/4HANA trends.
They did a nice job highlighting where there were significant differences in expectations in the customer bases. One clear one is DSAG users covet integration a lot more - their S/4 implementations are broader in scope. In other slides, their expectations of SAP provided integration were also higher. Register here to watch a replay
One striking slide to me showed how much focus there is on Financial modules. That's the most mature functionality in S/4HANA, but to me a reminder of what happened with R/3 implementations. Many SAP shops ran out of budget and never got beyond FI and CO in spite of promises of wall to wall coverage. It suited SAP's partners, many of them with accounting backgrounds. As we enter an investment-challenged environment - customers need to think long whether just a "refresh" of that functionality is the best path ahead.
In contrast, I was pleased to see Peter Maier show the 3 minute video below in a verticals-focused session for analysts. It shows agile customer responses during the COVID-19 crisis using a variety of SAP products. Peter had discussed several of these customers in an interview I did with him - watch it here.
Much as SAP and its partners want to keep the "big elephant hunting" around horizontal functionality, it is these smaller, higher value, industry-specific projects which will likely be more in demand for the near future.
In December, I wrote decade-end perspectives on enterprise software and services. You can read them again here and here.
So, how has the pandemic changed the landscape? In many ways, it has exposed the weaknesses of many software and services vendors. In other ways, it has opened up brand new opportunities. Here are ten observations from many executive interviews - nearly 50 of which are public in this series on "acrobatics during the crisis" I have been running here
1) Moore's Law is being applied to humans with stunning results
In all the doom and gloom around the virus, it is easy to miss the amazing acrobatics we have witnessed both in healthcare and life sciences. Telemedicine, pop up hospitals, medical professionals parachuting in wherever needed. Healthcare professionals have learned so much from the Italy and NY experience - how not to overuse ventilators, how to flex ICU capacity. Therapies like Remsdesivir, Dexamethasone and Convalescent Plasma have kicked in. All kinds of vaccines are being developed, clinical trials being accelerated like never before. It's too early to declare victory but if the current spike in positives that many US states are experiencing had happened in March, we would have seen far worse crowding in hospitals and many more fatalities.
It has opened the eyes of executives in every industry to opportunities in healthcare - a fifth of US GDP is spent on that sector. Auto companies helping with ventilators, distilleries making hand sanitizers, everyone looking to make or disinfect PPEs, technology companies helping with contact tracing, statisticians looking to improve pandemic modeling and on and on
However, just because you serviced that sector in January does not guarantee you continued success. The expectations of exponential improvements in functionality and speed of delivery have been raised and there are competitors approaching from everywhere. Just look at COVID testing. The US has done over 50 million tests in just 4 months and yet the process feels so slow and cumbersome. There is immense pressure to move to 10-15 minute test results available at point of care. That's coming - and soon, given the speed at which our expectations are running.
2) Cloud apps supported WFH well....but....
In interview after interview, CIOs have talked about the heroics it took them to provision employees as they moved to WFH. Most also compliment how well SaaS applications scaled and supported WFH in comparison to on-premise applications, especially in self-run data centers. But dig a bit deeper and they also share all the complex protocols they are having to factor as they reopen plants, warehouses, stores, delivery vehicles, airplanes and other sites where physical presence is critical and WFH cannot help. Ask them what those on-prem systems supported and many will tell you about critical operational areas that SaaS applications have not tackled yet. Even if they could support those areas, justifying a move to SaaS in today's economic conditions is tough. If anything, moving legacy applications to IaaS looks more appealing. Others tell you about problems with WFH in several countries with poor last-mile connectivity, and with employees with kids at home (increasingly complicated by complex decisions around whether school districts can re-open physical classrooms after summer). Long and short, be careful selling WFH support as your most beneficial "feature".
3) Video was not the only killer app
The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting is a cult gathering for many investors. It was a virtual event this year. More emphatically, Warren Buffett talked about his long time partner, Charlie Munger who was not at the meeting "Charlie at 96 is in fine shape. His mind is as good as ever. His voice is as strong as ever, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea to have him make the trip to Omaha for this meeting. Charlie is really taking to this new life. He’s added Zoom to his repertoire. So he has meetings every day with various people, and he’s just skipped right by me technologically." 96 year old Charlie and many other senior citizens whose last technology upgrade was a Kindle reader have adopted Zoom. All of us have our Zoom bombing stories. I could add to those my experiences with MS Teams, Google Meet, Skype, ON24, Streamyard and other platforms. I have been cataloging the art form of virtual backgrounds - see here. So, yes, video has definitely been a killer app in the last few months.
But, even more so have been revenue facilitating, industry-specific technologies. Telemedicine in healthcare, PPP loan and mortgage processing and mobile banking in fintech, drive-thru support for the food industry, last mile logistics for grocery stores and restaurants, contactless checkin at airlines and hotels, distance learning in education - the list is long of applications which were life savers for certain industries. Your grandparents probably know all about Zoom but likely have no clue about nCino or Teladoc or Shopify though these vendors have allowed many customers to survive and even thrive in the last few months.
4) Get ready to hear more about these two acronyms
L+S - "lift and shift" legacy applications to cloud infrastructure at hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft and Google. Do it to reduce your data center costs. Do it to improve security and scalability. Yes purists will argue you don't get multi-tenancy advantages of SaaS. Yes, but SaaS may not offer the industry functionality. Additionally, SaaS vendors continue to depend too heavily on partners for labor intensive migrations. Interestingly, I had called Oracle's IaaS opportunity bigger than that of Amazon's back in 2016. That called for L+S of their PeopleSoft, JDE, EBS customers. Since then. Oracle's 3 big IaaS competitors have grown their cloud footprint significantly.
3PM - Third Party Maintenance never went out of fashion. In a recession, companies will look at it even more. With travel restrictions, the remote support model of 3PM vendors may allow them to even expand their footprint to broader Level 2 and 3 support.
5) The world is definitely not flat
In a world of travel restrictions and two-week quarantines, globalization is increasingly a dirty word. The reality is COVID-19 was not consistent in its geographic impact. The global recovery is already shaping up as uneven. It will mean new opportunities for regional players, expanded software functionality to markets that are recovering quicker, a redistribution of global delivery centers and reshaping of global supply chains. Now is the time for buyers and vendors to also be rethinking their global IT supply chains and offerings.
6) Remote services are only the start
I wrote a paper at Gartner in 1998 where I pointed out just the travel expenses (not their much higher fees) of systems integrators were often greater than the cost of the software they were implementing. I also pointed out the productivity impact of 4 day SI on-site weeks and health issues from continuous, long-term travel. Buyers and vendors would agree on ways to cut that back on travel, but it was grudging. Even offshore vendors which had honed the discipline of remote support were proposing much more on-site support. Suddenly, there is no more grudging. Remote diagnostics, remote delivery, remote support are hot. But it should not stop there. Outsourcers should be thinking about shared services - data conversion, testing, training "factories" from where specialists should be helping multiple customers, not just one project at a time. And as that knowledge gets codified to then move to automate many of the tasks.
7) Executive Changes at Vendors
Many people have been puzzled by sudden executive changes at a couple of large vendors. I am expecting many more. Aging workers and execs across industries are looking at early retirement or at least slowdown scenarios. The last 3-4 months have been traumatic. I have heard of unbelievable efforts and wonder if the pace is sustainable. Many of these execs look at their pipelines and workloads and think the next couple of years will not be much fun. Or they have finally had time with family and want a bit more of that. Given uncertain markets, layoffs combined with new employees from M&A opportunities, I am expecting to see many new executive faces
8) Digital Twins - with an emphasis on Twins
In my conversations I have repeatedly heard about digital acceleration during the crisis. In this interview with Tamas Hevezi I discussed examples from a wide range of industries - healthcare, retail, banking, higher ed and many countries like Japan and Germany.
However, I am worried we will starve the physical/analog experience for customers and employees. Ideally, we end up with parity between the digital and physical worlds. Let's treat the twins equally well.
9) Full-spectrum automation
In my book, Silicon Collar, published in 2016, I had profiled automation trends across a wide range of work settings - at accounting firms, on the basketball court, in banks, on the battlefront, in digital agencies, in the oil patch, in R&D labs, on shop floors, in wineries, in the warehouse and many more. During this crisis, I have heard of many more use cases for drones, kiosks, shop floor and warehouse robots and autonomous vehicles.
Most of the software and services world has largely defined automation as machine learning and RPA. HR groups have watched automation from a distance - the lead has often been taken by operational executives. Lots of changes are needed as a new wave of automation arrives.
10) Certainty is even more elusive than toilet paper
Partly because it is hurricane season and I live in Florida and partly because pandemic modeling has been so chaotic globally, I have increasingly been thinking about my case study on the National Hurricane Center and my update from a visit there in 2018 The NHC has long understood the track of a hurricane (what they call cyclones) swings wildly and they talk in terms of "cones of uncertainty". In their lingo it is "The cone represents the probable track of the center of a tropical cyclone, and is formed by enclosing the area swept out by a set of circles (not shown) along the forecast track (at 12, 24, 36 hours, etc). The size of each circle is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle." The NHC has tons of historical data, but they refresh it for each hurricane with data from satellites, Hurricane Hunter flights, sensors on buoys, dropsondes and many other sources. I am seeing CFOs shorten planning horizons dramatically, I am seeing them move to continuous planning and frequent re-planning. Certainty is an elusive commodity these days. I hear vendors talk ML but they are still largely working from historical, internal data. They need to step up and help customers think in econometric terms with a lot of external, constantly refreshed data.
To the last point about uncertainty - the last few months have been humbling. So much noise yet so many new signals to process. I am sure I will be writing about even more trends in coming weeks.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Geoff Scott, CEO and David Wascom, SVP Executive Programs of the Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG). They have over 130,000 members across thousands of SAP customers.
They describe acrobatics they have seen at SAP customers in the last quarter. It 's nice to hear Geoff summarize what they have seen as "unending optimism in the middle of tectonic changes ". They describe pivots and other scenarios at several manufacturing companies, window and blinds makers and life sciences companies.
We discuss the state of S/4HANA implementations - those already started are going ahead with creative remote support. Those planned for later this year are getting pushed back. We also discuss the opportunity to "lift and shift" ECC to a hyperscaler cloud, remote delivery and support from SIs and SAP's role in helping with vertical revenue-facilitating "edge" applications.
We also discuss trends in events world in the Zoom virtual world they find ourselves in, the state of video technology, the change in audience demographics.
I loved the positive tone of both Geoff and Dave. They bring out the stress SAP customer executives are going through with what Dave describes as an "overwhelming sense of optimism, while grounded in reality"
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Max Mueller, CEO and Christian Nilson, COO of Daimani, a unique marketplace for VIP experiences in sports, rock concerts and other events. They have a worldwide audience, much of it corporate, and deliver packages which bundle tickets, travel and hospitality for premium events. While it is a niche offering, their reach is remarkably global.
We discuss the impact the cancellation and postponement of so many events and travel restrictions has had on their business. They have worked extremely professionally to help clients get refunds or exchanges and sound very positive given the major shock to the events business. As they point out the demand side is still eager, the supply side needs to work through its re-opening and hygiene protocols. Short term, they think local events will be more popular till the world again becomes comfortable with international travel. They also think outdoors events with safe distancing in the stands and suites will bounce back quicker.
They also discuss the SAP cloud software role and its global capabilities in supporting their marketplace.
Most of us enjoy sports, rock concerts, other live performances. Humans are social beings and such events bring us together. So, their role packaging premium packages for easy availability is a vital, may be even at a stretch an essential service. I am going to cheer for their robust recovery.
I was one of Gartner's first WFH analysts in 1995. They were not sure the WFH model would work in analyst world so they had me spend most of the first 6 months at HQ in Stamford, CT. My employment contract also required me to relocate to a new office they were opening in Atlanta. Fortunately, my cohort of remote analysts turned out to be extremely productive (Gartner tracked all kinds of metrics on client queries handled, new presentation slides created, research pages written etc) and much to my wife's relief they allowed us to stay put in Tampa. Or at least that's what I like to believe. It could be they needed the relocation budget for something else :)
The technology was primitive. I got a hand-me-down Apple Powerbook (Gartner was an Apple shop back then). I did get a brand new HP All-in One. We got to provision two phone lines - one for a 14.4 baud line connection to servers at corporate. High-speed! The other for client queries. Connectivity on the road required finding public phones with elusive RJ-11 jacks and it cost a princely sum when you were overseas. We somehow stayed productive - I think I was in the top 10 in metrics for all analysts for most of the tenure there.
I have stayed reasonably productive since with my books, blogs and advisory work. However, the last 3 months have been humbling as I have cataloged acrobatics during this crisis. We are seeing the emergence of WFH superworkers:
Rob Enslin, President of Google Cloud Sales describes a day in his work life especially at quarter-end. He had customer calls to Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Brazil, Florida, New York and California. Organizing all that a few months ago would have required 2-3 week trip.
In his interview, Rob talks about remote consulting Google is doing even on complex ML projects. He talks about how the service sector will be a lot more productive going forward. I have been imploring SIs to cut travel since I was at Gartner (I had arrived there from PwC). The pandemic has forced them to finally act. In my vision, the next step will be to move to shared services across projects and to a lot more automation. Even more productivity.
Tamas Hefezi of Automation Anywhere has been on a 15 year journey to turn all his analog interactions digital. It is mind-blowing how organized he is and the set of technologies he leverages. Read about his routines here.
Vittorio Viarengo describes a morale-boosting project he was asked to coordinate at VMware. He mixed and synthesized audio and video files from 30 virtual employees around the world to produce a rendition of "This Little Light of Mine". Watch the 5 minute final product, then read here the effort and skill it took to mix music and synch videos from amateurs recorded on consumer grade tech. Bear in mind he has a full time job there - he VP of Cloud Marketing. This was a side project he tackled.
My interviewees share many more examples of remote productivity in this series - click here for more
Before we use these superworkers as benchmarks, let's acknowledge that WFH does not work for everyone. People who also have to school kids, compete with neighbors for badwidth, those who thrive on social interaction struggle with WFH. Telcos do need to upgrade their last mile fiber (my FiOS cable was mangled or cut in March and the tech told me our neighborhood fiber was 15 years old), companies need to fortify the security at their remote machines, buy employees better webcams, mics, lighting etc. All this will need a lot more CIO/CFO/CHRO coordination.
We are learning so much from this phase, and whether full time or part time, WFH will be part of every white-collar work regimen. For now, this WFH pioneer is proud of - and extremely humbled by - acrobats like Rob, Tamas and Vittorio.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Rob Enslin, President, Cloud Sales at Google.
I have known Rob over the years from his long stint at SAP. He is not one to brag but if you parse some of the statements he makes in the video below, you get a sense for the tectonic changes coming to most economies and how technology will play what he calls a "massive role". The formidable range of offerings Google and Alphabet already offers to consumer world will increasingly be leveraged by the enterprise. With Thomas Kurian and Rob that should accelerate.
He touches a wide range of industries across the conversation - auto makers, banks, food and beverage, hospital, universities, call centers, public sector agencies, travel companies. He covers scenarios such as running a virtual annual general meeting, banks moving from branch to digital banking, machine inspection of shop floors and automation of thermal checks at airports.
He describes how many customers start with "lift and shift" of legacy apps to Google infrastructure for the cloud economics, scalability and security. Then they start to leverage Google's machine learning, collaboration, vast data sets (like health related ones from Google Health and Calico), mapping and other digital assets.
I was struck by his personal productivity during the shelter at home. He describes a day of customer calls to Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Brazil, Florida, New York and California. Organizing all that a few months ago would have required 2-3 week trip. He says Google has always been a video-savvy workplace (which has also made their WFH a lot easier), but he says it is striking how the rest of the world has moved that way.
He is rightly proud that the cloud has managed to support so much traffic without too many hiccups - all the massive uptick in ecommerce, video, banking and trading volumes, telemedicine and other digital activity from home. As he asks - could we have done that a decade ago?
He also touches on delivery models and how even complex machine learning projects are being supported remotely. He expects much more productivity going forward in delivery of services.
When I asked him about leadership, he complimented Google leadership like the CEO Sundar Pichai for decisiveness - about quickly moving to work from home, ending large group meetings, being conservative about moving back into physical workplaces. He also cites his personal experiences during the dot.com recession in the early 2000s, and that in the 2008 financial meltdown as helping him lead during this crisis. He says he shares with his employees how he personally relaxes. He also participates in many virtual happy hours, virtual Peloton group rides with staff.
He was immensely popular at SAP - read this post I did on his earlier career and his leadership style. No surprise he has continued that at Google.
I found it an extremely uplifting conversation. I think you will too.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Ton Dobbe, Chief Inspiration Officer at Value Inspiration which analyzes and advises startups. I asked him to discuss heroics he has seen in what he calls his 'Tribe".
He discusses pivots and new products and services at many of the companies he follows around the world. He specifically mentions
Dr. Cindy Gordon, CEO SalesChoice
Paul Zak - CEO Immersion
Patrik Berglund - CEO Xeneta
Timothy Willis - COO Aerobotics
Dagmar Schuller - CEO auDEERING
Recessions can be brutal for startups, but the pandemic has opened up so many new opportunities, that it is not surprising that he reports the entrepreneurs he deals with are fairly upbeat.
Ton is a glass half-full optimist like me, so it is a really invigorating conversation.
Last August, I had floated the idea of writing Oracle Nation. This blog post laid out the reasons why I was thinking about it. I added in a comment the changing industry landscape I hoped to explore
"The next wave of apps are going to be in vertical operational areas and many geographies beyond the bigger Western countries. The competition will change as more customers are moving back to custom developed and even building industry solutions for sale. Also there will be more regional players and others on Google, AWS and Azure platforms. Got to factor all that in my decision."
Oracle and I discussed various options. They offered access to 6 events around the world as a way for me to meet customers and Oracle executives to interview. That was very generous and would have given me a very nice exposure to Oracle's global reach. However, none of the events was vertically focused. And, honestly, I find conferences a tough place to get decent face time with executives. Much better to catch them in their comfort zones in their offices. Not that it would have mattered. Given the COVID-19 crisis, most of those events have been cancelled.
I also managed to get a dialogue going on verticals. Mike Sicilia, EVP of Oracle's global business units, gave me a nice overview of key verticals such as hospitality, retail and utilities. We were supposed to arrange for drill downs into many of the sectors but again COVID-19 has disrupted scheduling.
I had hoped to re-engage and make Oracle part of the "acrobatics during the crisis" Zoom series I have been running. However, the Oracle executive I approached declined. I understand. While the vast majority of executives I invited have participated, some have not - they don't want to come across bragging during the crisis or for other reasons.
In background, to get a 360 degree perspective I had also talked to Oracle partners, competitors, user groups. Long and short - my books tend to be case study heavy and I don't think I can get a broad enough range of customers for the book.
I will be honest - in my polling I got several comments that I should instead write about SaaS leaders like Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow or the hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft and Google (Oracle IaaS is showing more recent momentum but did not come up much in my earlier conversations). The acrobatics and digital transformations during the crisis (watch the interview I did here) are also really timely fodder for a possible book. BTW these conversations are showing a lot of interest in vertical edge applications (like telemedicine, drive-thru support, PPP loan processing etc) less ERP or other transactional system refreshes in the short-term. Less tech focused, I have also thought about writing a book on US policy matters - our middle class, immigration, global trade etc. I find there are plenty of what I call "toxic myths" about those topics.
Seriously, I am learning so much from my Zoom interviews and can share them on a much more timely basis that I plan to continue doing those. I have several more great executives lined up.
Oracle is continually fascinating. There will be a time and place when we will be able to engage meaningfully. Just not this year.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Brian Sommer, President of TechVentive which analyzes and advises on the ERP, HCM and Financial software markets. Here he discuss heroics as HCM executives deal with a slew of new demands.
He describes expectations of HR related to layoffs, getting people ready for work from home, site re-opening protocols, reacting to regulatory changes as government emergency programs like the Payroll Protection Plan (PPP) loans in the US. All this is in addition to their regular day jobs which is being done remotely. In addition, HR is squarely in the middle of corporate response to diversity issues and protests. He describes the risks as corporations re-open sites and re-hire employees. We also discuss impact on employer brands coming out of the crisis.
We discuss how cloud applications performed in support of work from home formats, and how HR can find justification to move to the cloud as enterprises try to optimize IT budgets and prioritize revenue-facilitating vertical applications. We also discuss moving legacy application to cloud infrastructure, and using third party maintenance to support those applications, and outsourcing opportunities.
As usual, Brian is entertaining and uses terms like "finding true love elsewhere". But most of it is serious stuff - a lot of empathy for the crushing load that HCM groups find themselves buried under.
Tamas Hevizi interviewed me about what I have learned about digital transformation in the business acrobatics interview series I have been running in the last few weeks. Below is a discussion about digital acceleration during the crisis in the US and countries like Germany and Japan. We discuss a wide range of industries - healthcare, retail, banking, higher ed and many others. We also discuss the need to reach parity between digital and physical/analog experiences for customers and employees.
He had initially set it up as a Zoom session, then asked to change it to Skype. I groaned - in the last few weeks I have used ON24, Google Meet, MS Teams and a few other platforms. I did not want to install yet another product. As you can see the quality of his production is superb. No, don't just credit Skype. He has re-invented the home TV studio. A post on that is coming up on New Florence.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up.
This time it is Amit Shah, who is CIO of Excelitas Technologies, a spinoff from PerkinElmer. As he describes it, they are "light people" with products which "create light, sense light and bend light".
Since they make components for avionics, imaging, temperature sensing and many other applications considered essential, the majority of their global locations remained open. Amit describes the hygiene and other protocols for their plants and other physical sites that most companies which shut down are having to factor now as they re-open. Several of their product classes like thermometry have seen significant demand during the crisis.
They are an SAP ECC shop, moving to S/4HANA for financial applications which will run in the SAP NS2 cloud (since they do government aerospace and other contracts, they cannot operate in the public cloud). He describes how they handled their work-from-home situation. He also describes their use of Microsoft Remote Assist and HoloLens for field service applications.
When asked about likely changes in global manufacturing, he describes how they were already insourcing more and that their approach of controlling more of the supply chain has been validated during the crisis
I particularly enjoyed his description of their Advanced Manufacturing journey where they have applied Industry 4.0 concepts - robotics, digitization of shop floor, analysis of yield and scrap and work cell structures.
I also like his comments on pushing the pedal on R&D spend (a philosophy his CEO endorses) as that allows you to emerge even stronger when the economy improves.
He likes to paraphrase Churchill "a crisis is terrible thing to waste". His team clearly did not waste much during this crisis.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Seth Ravin, Chairman and CEO of Rimini Street which provides third party support for enterprise software.
Seth is very widely traveled and when asked about acrobatics, he makes a striking observation on how Japanese business is going through a fairly dramatic digital transformation.
He sees customers seeking a fairly significant "cost realignment with their new revenue realities". He sees a focus on revenue-centric applications, and a de-emphasis of ERP "refreshes". He sees accelerating "lift and shift" moves of applications to cloud infrastructure as different from moving to SaaS. He also believes Rimini's virtual support model is timely in a world with travel restrictions. Broadly, he expects a gradual recovery spread over 2 to 3 years.
I liked his comments towards the end where he says he is respectful of those who build software. "We would not have anything to support if these great companies did not innovate." As he says "We are all trying to help the same customers. It's time for all of us to pitch in."
Sure would be nice if Oracle, SAP and other large enterprise vendors adopted a similar attitude and respected the customer need for choice in this tough economy.
While they talk more about their other innovations, not third party support, also check out my interviews with SAP, Unit4, Salesforce, Infor, Workday, VMWare and other executives in this series. I have invited Oracle, Microsoft and other vendor execs and hope they join this growing gallery.
Even though I call myself a glass half-full optimist, like everyone, I have mood swings during this wild phase. I had a roller coaster of a day yesterday, but did two calls in the evening and went to sleep very encouraged.
The first call was with Jason Blessing, CEO of Model N. He rattled off example after example of his life sciences and high tech customers who are running like crazy to come up with vaccines, therapeutics and other products to help fight COVID-19. As I was listening to him - watch the video here, I was thinking about the intensity at which these executives are working. Like all of us, they have elderly parents, children running around while working from home, and they are working on unprecedented projects and products. I worry about burnout - is their pace sustainable?
I got a calming answer in the second call which ended about 9 pm my time. It was a call with Cassandra Long at the Taronga Conservation Society in Australia. It was a call SAP facilitated and I hope to post an interview with her in the near future. What was striking was COVID-19 was actually the second "shock" they had to adjust to after the one of brush fires that tormented the country late last year. Burnout? She was high-energy on the Zoom call.
The morning had started with HP Enterprises CEO Antonio Neri describing acrobatics at his customers including the Nightingale pop-up hospitals which were set up in a mere 9 days at the UK NHS.
The afternoon continued with Bret Taylor, President/COO at Salesforce describing acrobatics during an analyst session. He talked about a banking customer as they handled the crush of emergency PPP loans and public health agencies as they tried early forms of contact tracing of infections.
These examples always inspire me.
I was a bit discouraged before my evening calls. Media and social media were highlighting the rise in infections in several US states which are opening up. Of course the numbers are discouraging, but they were not pointing out the June COVID-19 positives are very different from the March positives. They are much younger and likely much healthier and our hospitals have learned to change assortments of rooms and handle better surges in critical cases. I hate to be uncharitable, but I am reminded of Madame Defarge, the knitting lady who spends her day at the guillotine in The Tale of Two Cities.
Give me time instead with hard working people any time. They, in turn, are working their butts off to bring the large unemployed pool back to work again.
Which is why I was encouraged again this morning by Workfront's LEAP event with its theme of "Work Boldly". CEO Alex Shootman (see my interview with him about resilience during a crisis here ) and his team presented other examples of customer acrobatics. Particularly striking was the John Paul Mitchell "stimulus package" for beauty salons. This sector has been especially hurt by distancing requirements and they are offering a bundle of their products for free to stylists. We cannot forget those who work in brick and mortar settings.
That is why I am looking forward to a Cognizant webinar next week which will feature Harvard Public Health professor Joseph Allen talking about "Healthy Buildings" - register here. As I wrote recently, we cannot just talk Digital Transformation. The really smart companies are thinking Omni Transformation, including re-imagining their brick and mortar.
For eons humans have found dignity through our work. Many of our family names continue to honor our occupational legacy. In all our doom and gloom, I am finding many heroes that are showing us proudly the joys of work and work ethic.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up.
This time it is Jason Blessing, President and CEO of Model N which helps life science and high tech companies with revenue management software.
He describes heroics at many of his customers - 24 out of 25 of his largest customers like Stryker and Gilead have worked on some life-saving COVID-19 related products or services. He also talks about others like Seqirus which is ramping up flu vaccine production for the Fall.
I liked his empathy and comments about commitment to his team during the crisis. And his comments about "focusing on the horizon". He has kind words for Marc Benioff and one of his mentors, Mike Gregoire. And for his customer executives - he has taken advantage of their increased accessibility during this WFH phase.
We also talk a bit about his passion for drone photography. He credits his Zoom background of the West span of the Bay Bridge, to his Mavic 2 Pro launched from Yerba Buena Island.
Extra! extra! The dead has arisen!!!
As Brian Sommer and Ray Wang reported on Friday in this video I was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral for on-premise software. In that role, I was allowed to the grave site where no media followed - most were too busy tweeting about the demise. So I was one of the few who witnessed a miracle. We heard a groan and it was old OP. We helped him out, and I stayed the weekend with radio silence to see how he fared. I visited him in the hospital this morning where he is in stable condition.
Here is a condensed version of our conversation (and sanitized for the foul language he used in describing us analysts):
OP - Vinnie, you have not been too nice to me the last few years, but I get my revenge. You get to tell the world that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
VM - OP, first of all its good to see you so lucid. Hope you don't mind calling you OP. Impressive that you remember your Hemingway.
OP - And I hope you don't mind me calling you illiterate. It was Mark Twain from London in 1897
VM - 1897? so Brian was right - you are as old as the hills.
OP - is that Sommer you talk about? Tell the SOB, I saw his snarky eulogy. And tell him and Ray, I will be around long to torment them.
VM - Now hold on OP, it's not just Brian and Ray. You are not too popular with customers. And you have gotten uglier by the day, and have all kinds of patches and band aids....
OP - this conversation is finished...
VM - the pandemic and work from home trend truly exposed your weaknesses. Most CIOs describe the extra VPN provisioning and other effort it took to keep you going. Cloud applications on the other hand were a dream.
OP - OK, smartypants, then why have they kept me around? Because cloud solutions cannot deliver all the complex industry and geography specific functionality. I delivered essential services just like healthcare and Amazon Prime workers did. And this is the gratitude you show me?
VM - well, cloud vendors are working on those industry solutions...
OP - good luck waiting for that. They have been promising them for a decade. Besides, even if they do, will customers have the massive migration budgets during the recession? Till cloud vendors automate the migration, they will continue to depend on their expensive SI partners
VM - not exactly, with travel restrictions, SIs are moving to remote delivery models...
OP - If you believe that one, then I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.
VM - OP, you really don't believe things have to change?
OP - With friends like Larry and Hasso, I am used to a certain lifestyle. Why should I change?
VM - because customers are talking to Google and Amazon and Microsoft about lifting and shifting you out of their data centers and moving it to their hyperscale ones.
OP - you mean I wont live in a suite any more?
VM - actually it gets better. They are also talking to firms like Rimini and Spinnaker to service you...
OP - Mercy... no more caviar - they will only serve me hot dogs? Can you do anything about it?
VM - I will see if Larry can move you into his infrastructure cloud, but even there you will be working pretty hard. You know Zoom ran 7 petabytes of video a day through his data centers a couple of months ago
OP - that sounds like way, way too much work...
VM - well I have a better idea. Why don't you announce your retirement?
OP - Hasso did exactly that and said I would be gone by 2025, but customers don't seem to believe him ...heheh
VM - no, you need to step up, teach cloud vendors all your unique industry and geography knowledge and I will see if we can get you a decent pension and a small place on the beach.
OP - Too hot...how about on a lake?
OP - man the one you have looks ugly but I guess after decades I do look that way. Can you arrange a red hat for him?
VM - Red hat?
OP - No not that one, one which says OP
VM - you mean Opie? We will have to check with Ron Howard.
OP - who, what? Look, I am feeling rough. Just get me the best deal you can, Mr. Deal Architect and I will gracefully, gradually fade away in a few years.
VM - OK, but no trickery. Teach cloud vendors all your industry and geography knowledge and how to automate the migration. By the way, you really gave us a scare, but I am glad you are bouncing back and are as feisty as ever.
OP - and Vinnie, nothing will please me more than to see you grovel and be nice to me. Stay healthy, yourself.
August 17, 2020 in Cloud Computing, SaaS, Industry Commentary, New Normal COVID-19 | Permalink | Comments (0)