deal architect

Zoho's strikingly different global path

I have heard Zoho talk about doing business in UAE and Nigeria. That is so different from other cloud vendors which tend to mostly focus on N. America and Europe. Over the last decade, their US revenues have steadily declined to now about 40%. Not because the US, is not growing, because other regions have grown up quicker.

So, I caught up with Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho on how they have grown globally, and how they have done it in their own unique way

Extracts from our conversation

How is your global footprint evolving?

We started in India and U.S. at the same time.  In U.S, we started in New Jersey and moved to California, now we are making another transition to Austin, TX. Early on, when we launched our initial set of products, we noticed good interest from few markets like US and from some unexpected countries like Japan.  Back then, interest came from printer manufacturers in Japan.  So in the late '90s, we said, "We need to have an office there given the interest from the printer manufacturers." We set up an office in Japan in the late '90s and we have had it since then. Over the last two or three years, the global expansion accelerated.  On top of India, US and Japan, we have had our presence in China for about seven or eight years now. We have around 100 employees in China. Few years back we started our Singapore operations.  Our Mexico office has been growing silently for about a year now, but it became official last month. Our Australia office went live earlier this year. UAE is another country where we have had offices for a few years now, but recently accelerated our efforts there. In Europe, we did not have significant presence in the past. But once we got going couple of years back we quickly ramped up operations in Netherlands and now expanding to other countries like France (where we have employees) and Germany (where we will be adding employees).  There are a few additional countries in which we have people present, but didn't evolve yet into offices yet. We expect these to expand moving forward. In the near future, this trend of adding local presence will likely continue. 

When we pick a country, we typically do not set up an office downtown in a big city.  For example, we didn't open our office in Tokyo, Japan.  We did it in Yokohama, a calm and beautiful city.  Similarly, in Mexico, we chose Queretaro, not Mexico City.  It's about two and a half to three-hour drive from Mexico City. The same thing in the Netherlands.  We set it up in Utrecht, not Amsterdam.  Same in China. Of course, in US, our expansion is in Austin, not downtown San Francisco (where large number of tech companies are based). One of the key reasons for picking these cities is quality of life for our employees. Our employees get to have a good life, good cost of living, good education, healthcare facilities, less traffic/commute and less pollution. All of these contribute to quality of life and happiness at work.

How do you prioritize your geographic growth?

It varies.  It could be because 1) the markets pulling us - like noticing a spike in customers from a country or increase in signups, consistently high number of logins/activity, partners pulling us in certain markets etc or 2) We are being proactive in certain markets seeing a long term potential.

In Mexico, for example, we started attending events. We noticed significant interest. During our first Zoholics we had 200 attendees.  Since then, every year, it has been doubling. Zoholics typically is a way we enter some of these markets to understand the customers, their usage, their requirements, expectations, requirements and feedback from partners, interest level in the market etc.

Just in the past year or so, we hosted Zoholics in 25 countries (that's about one event every 2 weeks). We have offices in 9 of those 25 countries. This also means we are addressing the user/customer needs in other countries. If we notice some strong signals from the market, we end up opening an office and expanding our presence from there. Before we make that call, a question we ask ourselves is, are we going to continue to invest in these markets for decades to come. If the answer is yes, we move forward. Even before we go and set up an office, we put in some ground work. Like making sure that the entire website is translated or we have local partners in place etc.

Apart from the usual signals, we also look at long-term potential of a country. Looking at demographic information for example. Nigeria for example where the median age is around 19. Fertility rate is around 5.5. This means, in the next couple of decades, this is going to be an important country with long-term potential.

If we observe the demographic information, there is a correlation between demographics of a country and GDP growth. Typically when the GDP of a country accelerates when the median age is between 25 and 40. During that period, there is generally business formation and this helps economic activity and offers opportunity for various businesses including technology vendors.

Now, if you list down all the countries that have a median age around 25 or 30 and a decent population, a few hundred million or higher, then you can create a short list of countries that are going to do well 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now.  Then, based on that, we can make some educated guesses on where to expand/invest.

What we sell also matters/varies in some of these countries.  In the U.S., we are known as a CRM company for the most part because that has been a popular product.  In UAE, we are known as an accounting company instead. Kind of similar in India. In Brazil, we are known as the email company.  In pockets, depending on what the interest is, we try to pitch those products and expand from there.  Given that we have close to 50 products, it helps.

Our customers tend to be local companies or international companies with local offices. Several global companies with local presence in multiple countries tend to standardize on our apps.  There's a travel company called Agoda.  They belong to the Bookings.com group. In the Asia region, Agoda uses Zoho. But at the global level, not yet. There are other international companies like Grab using our apps across countries and they are supported by regional offices. When we say we have local support in each of these regions, that helps a lot.

You also have a different philosophy on how you staff your regions. Can you elaborate?

The key to expansion in a country is the "anchor" executive for a region/country. We do this differently than other companies. We identify a person, typically someone who has been with us for a very long time, who knows and understands the company, its culture deeply and we relocate them to a region/country to be the anchor. Once we have an anchor, we then hire locally to build and expand around the anchor. 

If we take our European office in the Netherlands, Sridhar Iyengar, who leads that office, has been with the company for 23 years now. Similarly, Gibu Mathew, who heads our Singapore office, has been with the company for around 20 years. Same with the head of our offices in UAE. The main reason we do that is we do not want these individual country offices to be silos.  We want them as part of the company fabric. To do this, these offices should have the same culture. The best way we believe we can maintain the culture of the company is by having someone there lead that office who understands the culture of the company and then makes sure that he/she sets up the company in a similar approach.  That is the reason we would pick an anchor from within. Apart from setting the culture, if that office has a need, this regional head knows who to contact throughout the company because they know the company inside out and they know who to contact to get something done.  Because each of these regional heads have been working together for 20 years and there is no friction. It becomes more like calling a friend. You just pick up a call any time and talk to them. 

We basically go global but hire local.  Apart from the anchor, everyone else is locally hired.  It's the anchor that moves from our core team, but our preference for hiring has been to hire freshers, for the most part, and train them locally in each of our regions.  In Mexico, we hired 15 kids fresh out of college.  We trained them for four months.  In six months, we were able to run an entire Zoholics in Spanish.  We said no English speakers are allowed at the event," which meant I was not allowed to speak. 

We run a very flat organization globally. Any person, including new hires, can reach another employee globally using our own tools. Our tools like Cliq and Connect play a crucial role in flattening our organization. All our global communication happens through our own tools. We truly run Zoho on Zoho.

Locally, the regional head runs what we call "open houses" where every month they just spend an hour or two talking to all the employees within the region. Any employee can ask any question, even anonymously.  Some of it can also be online.

Our CEO, Sridhar Vembu runs open houses globally, on Connect.  We have built a feature called 'Town Hall' because of this. Anyone can ask any question on Connect.  This can come in from multiple regions.  It can be anonymous questions, and it can be any question. We don't have a lot of rules there.  Such free form communication flattens the organization. 

This far flung global footprint must also require a global data center strategy?

We have two in the U.S.  When we set up an office in Europe, we set up two data centers in Europe.  We have two in China, given their own restrictions and challenges, we needed to have the data behind their firewall.  India now has two data centers. Those are eight data centers in these four regions.  

Then there is the more coming that are in the works. We will soon be launching two new data centers in Australia. Should be live fairly soon to serve the Australia/New Zealand market. We will keep adding to this list depending on interest.

Given the geopolitical climate, I think every major region will likely mandate that data stay within their region or within their country and that's generally the direction of the industry. We've invested over $100 million in data centers, and it's an ongoing thing.

Why do so many technology vendors have problems expanding globally?

There are several technology companies in the technology industry who built good products, but with bad economics. A quick look at financial statements across tech companies reveal this. If they are not profitable in developed countries, they are unlikely to be profitable in developing countries. If the economics are bad for developed countries, then they are going to be worse in developing countries.

If we take a suite like Zoho One where we pack incredible value at $30/employee/month....in US, it sells like hot cakes and they love the price points. But in India for example, $30 is considered expensive. In fact, in India we sell it for Rs. 1000 instead, which comes down to around $15. Even at $15, companies still negotiate with us.

That's the reality of some of these markets. If we don't have our economics optimized to serve at those price points, there is no point focusing on that market.

I think that is the reason majority of tech companies don't enter other markets. Lot of companies don't have the right economics. Bloat is built into the system. Bloat from expensive downtown offices, bloat from over-priced acquisitions, technical bloat etc.   

During bubbles, like the current one, profits don't matter. As Sridhar Vembu puts it, economics don't matter, until they do.

We are trying to build good software with good economics. Our users around the world love that.

The IFS-Acumatica-EQT "powerhouse"?

Part of me is excited by the announcement that EQT, the private equity investor in IFS is also buying Acumatica. I have been saying for a while even after two decades of cloud applications, there are shockingly few operational applications for manufacturing and other industrial markets.

But the announcement also has me asking "so what?"

The good news is both units will continue to be autonomous. The history of enterprise software over the last couple of decades shows that integration of acquisitions/roll-ups can be very distracting and not really that beneficial to customers. Go look at the history of Microsoft Project Green, Oracle Fusion, rationalization SAP Cloud Properties and Infor CloudSuite if you want proof of that.

The bad news is both units will continue to be autonomous. IFS is increasingly focused on asset-intensive industries and is bringing field service into the modern age where assets generate plenty of data. However, it often falls into the trap of chasing too many broader ERP opportunities. Acumatica has a "cloud ERP" positioning but even less of a clear vertical/operational focus. Their customer bases are very different - IFS stronger in Europe, and with larger customers. Acumatica is US centric and SME focused. Their go-to-market is very different, with Acumatica heavily dependent on resellers.

So, I want to see what synergies EQT can bring across the two. As we have seen with Unit4 and FinancialForce, just having some common ownership does not easily translate to success in the field.

Personally, I hope EQT can sharpen the vertical focus at both. There are all kinds of opportunities for migrating customers to product design labs, shop floors and warehouses "of the future". With the caveat that the future is already here when you see the robotics and wearables at the BMW plant in Greenville, SC and at Amazon's distribution centers around the world.  ERP vendors need to catch up and not just pretend 2D bar code scanners are good enough to modernize operational areas.

So, look forward to EQT's detailed roadmap for creating what it promises will be a "global cloud ERP powerhouse "

Stant: RPA in a Manufacturing setting

When you think of automation on the shop floor you think robotics, IoT and AR/VR. On the other hand, when you talk to executives in white collar industries about automation, the conversation usually drifts to bots. Most SIs now have a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) practice area and most of their references tend to be in banking and other financial services verticals.

So, I was pleased to sit down with Dorothee Baas and have her describe their RPA journey at the recent Plex user conference. She leads Business Process Integration at a manufacturing company, Stant.

Stant, headquartered in Connersville, IN, is focused on thermal and vapor management products for automotive OEMs (many of the leading brands around the world), industrial OEMs (like Caterpillar) and auto aftermarket (channels like Walmart).

Extracts from our conversation:

Stant used to be the largest producer of precision piano tuning pins and somehow then ended up as an automotive supplier.  We just celebrated 120 years last year, so there was a big celebration and that felt good to be part of that history.

In North America, we have plants in Connersville,IN; Pine Bluff, AR and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. We also have plants in the Czech Republic, China and at a joint venture in Korea. Rochester Hills, MI which is where I'm based is an administrative office. 

Our RPA efforts so far have focused on two main areas : a) Accounts Payable invoice matching (Finance) , b) Accounts Receivable (Customer Service) sending invoices to customers. The AP bot is supposed to do all the upfront work and put invoices into buckets that need human attention (this has a price issue, that has a quantity issue etc.) and others which are ok to process. On the customer service side, we developed three small bots that simply email the accounts receivable invoices from the system out to the customer each night or print them at the local printer if the customer wants them in paper format. (The AP payback has been much higher and that is described below.)

We had a small AP employee group. They had to learn two ERP processes because in addition to Plex, we have QAD in one of our locations.  They were struggling to keep up with the invoice matching. Plex has an approval workflow, but it was not being followed, and they were holding on to invoices. We had a huge backlog of invoices which were not being processed for weeks.  So we started adding temporary workers because, what do you do when you need to catch up?  You throw more people at the problem. Well, we also ended with high turnover in that temporary workforce.

At this point, our CFO decided to outsource the process, but my boss, the CIO suggested we also look at RPA. I remember it well. He came into my office and said, "Hey, what if I had a magic button that just takes all these invoices that come in through email and magically matches them and no one has to look at those?"  I looked at him, and I threw him out of my office. True story.  I said, "Okay.  I like you, Andy, but I don't have time for you right now because I'm trying to solve a problem here with finance and you need to just leave. I can't listen to your rainbow, unicorn stuff." Well he persisted. Couple of days later, Thirdware (a partner of the RPA vendor, Automation Anywhere and whose video describing the Stant project is available here ) was in our building showing us what other customers have done, explaining RPA. I was not convinced in the beginning because I didn't understand it, honestly.  I saw it as screen scraping.  If everything is not perfect, then nothing will ever work.

They convinced me pretty quickly.  Then we had a three-day workshop where we scoped out what we wanted to do.  What are all the different main processes that we would need to program?  Then, within ten weeks from me throwing my boss out of my office, we went live with a select group of suppliers.  I think that we could have done it faster but, at the same time, remember; we had to also outsource.  I was trying to train humans in doing this somewhere else in the country.  There was just a lot of stuff going on, so I think we could have even done this faster than ten weeks. 

Using the Pareto 80/20 principle, we focused on about 50 suppliers that sent us the most invoices, volume wise. In the end, Stant ended up with 3 bots - Bot 1: AP invoice matching bot, Bot 2: AP invoice Retry Bot (if Bot 1 could not find invoices to match on the first try) and Bot 3: AP manual invoice entry bot. The bots know to focus only on these suppliers. It has a preparation stage where it looks at emails from these suppliers. It scans for the keyword invoice, grabs the PDF attachments and sends them to an OCR reader (a tool called Doc Parser) which turns them into Excel sheets. The bot validates the entries in the spreadsheets - did the OCR grab the wrong source so the price field has a word in it? A price needs to be a number, ideally with decimals. Do all my lines add up to the total?  It puts exceptions into buckets which need human review. The bot also renames the PDFs to our naming convention - location, supplier number, invoice number etc.

At this point, there are two piles of "These are the invoices I'm not going to even attempt to match, and here are the invoices that I will now attempt to match." Taking that pile, it's going to log into both of our ERP systems and try to find the matching receipt.  It first checks if maybe someone already matched this invoice. Sometimes a supplier will send the invoice to the AP mailbox but, also, to a very specific accounts payable clerk.  Maybe the clerk already did the matching and now the bot is also trying to repeat it.

Then it looks to make sure that it can find a unique record that matches that based on who the supplier is, the shipper number, combination, and it checks the currency. If it doesn't error out there, now it's going to actually go into the invoice in Plex or in XA, and it's going to do all the work.  The first thing it will do is overwrite fields.  This is actually data entering.  It will overwrite the invoice number because now we have an invoice number, or it'll overwrite the date.  Then there's a field down here.  It's called printed invoice total.  This is where the bot enters what the Supplier’s PDF totals, so the bot can see if there is a difference to the Plex calculated Total.

If it doesn't match, the bot will go down into the line item level and compare each part number, quantity, and price between what Plex thinks and what the Excel sheet transcribed data from the supplier says.  It will then know, "Ah!  I have an issue with price," or, "I have an issue with quantity," or, in some cases, it doesn't know. 

The humans still need to do the legwork of trying to figure out if there is something incorrect.  The bot would not know that, but it can do the prep work to tell you there is something incorrect. And I now have great tools to understand root cause of matching discrepancies by supplier.

The next graph shows the results across the 53 suppliers:

To adjust for timing differences or system unavailability, we programmed a second bot and that's our retry bot where bot one just hands over, if it can't find something, to bot two and says, "Hey, bot two, just try this again tomorrow.  You have all the information.  I already have everything transcribed.  You just need to keep logging in every day and try to find the receipt.  Just keep trying.”

The bot also sends email notifications every time it starts the process and every time it finishes the process.  It sends it out to whoever I put in the distribution list, which is mostly the accounts payable group because I want them to own this.  I want them to know your team member, the bot, just finished something and now you need to look at all these log files.

Two critical decisions

We decided early on the bot would be owned by the AP group, not IT. We wanted to make sure that they can help themselves after this is done and they can monitor the bot and have the bot be a part of their team.  We wanted them to see the bot as an equal member within the business function that they could work with.  That was the hard sell. 

What we're doing different is that we're not only doing the analysis with the bot, but we're also having the bot process it inside the system, which saves a lot of time.  That's the thing that I think we do in addition to maybe some other companies.  A lot of customers I've talked to that use RPA use it to pull reporting, but none of them that I spoke with, even the banks or the big guys, use it for actually overwriting or data input, which I found interesting and I think it's the whole security or SOX compliance that they're worried about (as a private company, Stant does not need to worry about SOX).  We use it for data entry and we use it to actually overwrite information.  Our bots have security roles just like our humans.  They have a user ID just like a human.  Everything they do is captured.  So, in the system, in my invoice, if they made a change, then in my change log it says the bot made this change on this date, just like it would log a human doing it.

Results and next steps

As the slide above shows, the invoice backlog went down to just 4 days, the initial savings are $ 50K a year, which should increase as more suppliers are covered and the bots do more tasks. The next graph shows potential other bot applications.

Credit: Stant for all images

In the land of the blind.......the one-eyed man is King

I only half-jokingly proposed that to my editor as the sub-title for SAP Nation 3.0. One of the reasons the book comes out, on balance, positive to SAP is because it is developing, acquiring, releasing a new generation of enterprise applications. Most other vendors are content to peddle their financial, HCM, CRM applications. They are enamored with infrastructure and platform markets. Let someone else develop applications. After 20 years of cloud applications, if you look at a grid by country, by industry, by business process, we barely cover 20%.

So, nothing against Tableau, but I would have invested in a variety of new industry applications. Instead, Salesforce keeps hoping its partners will develop them on its platform. And it has invested over $ 20 billion (including that in Mulesoft) in the last couple of years without growing its functional footprint.

But why just pick on Salesforce? Oracle and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Amazon. I would love to see them develop new industry applications. Microsoft continues to let its resellers verticalize its applications. The end result usually is small extensions not major operational functionality. Oracle made a number of industry investments like Retek and i-flex a decade ago but in recent times has mostly been talking about its horizontal applications.

The white space won't stay white for ever. I met a couple of Fintech execs in London last week. Plenty of similar execs in New York, Shanghai and Singapore. At the Workfront conference, conversations were about product design and creative agencies. Recent conversations with Cognizant have been about packaged applications in healthcare and insurance markets. Those with Plex have been about automation on the shop floor. Those with Zoho have been how they target markets like the UAE, Brazil and Nigeria. At Sapphire, Hasso Plattner told me several executives asked him about vertical operational functionality in the cloud.

Here's the irony. Most vendors covet Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Most customers on would also love them to develop the applications that run Amazon - its eCommerce, its fulfillment, its R&D, its logistics.

The time is ripe for a new generation of applications - and likely a new generation of vendors.

    

Workfront - Modern Work, Modern Markets

Many vendors talk about the "Future of Work". It's usually in the future tense. They forget that the future is already here. The BLS adds many brand new occupations in its listings every few years. We glibly talk about the "gig economy" when in many cases 70 to 80% of corporate talent is already on their platforms, in their franchises, their suppliers - "off payroll". We talk narrowly about automation when robotics, drones, wearables, RPA. ML and other technologies are reshaping just about every job.

So, I was excited that Workfront's theme for its LEAP user conference in London was "Mastering Modern Work". Modern, not future. CEO Alex Shootman in his keynote said "we have moved past (the great) Peter Drucker’s knowledge work to very different modern work". What he calls global tribalism - our growing connectivity with the explosion in social and mobile technologies - and the massive digital transformation efforts in every enterprise are driving that. He also predicted enterprises will soon start to designate a Chief Work Officer.  Already some customers have a Chief Automation Officer.

It is a recognition that work is not just done by those who get a regular paycheck. Importantly, it is being done in silos and at the junctions of traditionally automated business processes. It includes what my friend Sig Rinde, who recently passed away, used to call "barely repeatable processes". It's not uncommon to see companies "ring fence" core systems with tens of specialist solutions. No wonder, Workfront positions itself as a "glue" between many operational systems of record and is positioning itself as a system of record for "work"

I missed going to the Workfront event in Dallas last month due to a conflict. The one in London I attended actually allowed me to meet a more diverse set of customers. I have lamented that after 20 years of cloud apps, if you look at a grid of applications by country and industry processes, it's only about 20% filled. LEAP in London stood out for the diversity of customers across geographies and process areas.

An example was Glenn Joyce, Senior Production Manager at Boden, the British clothing retailer which sells ladies and children's clothes online, and continues with its traditional mail order/catalog model. An excellent salesman, he gave me a catalog for my wife when I told him she was a Laura Ashley fan. He then explained that in a form of mass customization they mail out multiple versions of the catalog, The catalog and the digital sites tailored across many markets around the world require an extensive Digital Asset Management of the imagery. Before they adopted Workfront there was little project management, little scheduling or analysis, and then much of it on spreadsheets. Now they can better measure economics and results of print catalogs, email campaigns and other digital efforts. Creative folks don't like to be burdened with administrative minutiae and his team has helped create over a hundred templates to initiate email and other campaigns. Next, he hopes growing resource visibility will allow him to estimate effort down to an hour level.

On stage, Alex and Steve ZoBell, the CTO presented a case study on a fictional Citadel Medical. It wove together several creative groups in product design and product engineering. In the past, an idea for a bionic knee may have been noted but stayed invisible in the Salesforce system. Each product area would begin design anew. Workfront has changed all that. In another customer they requested I mask, it allowed their merchandising group to better audit utilization of their intellectual property.    

Refinitiv, a 2018 jv between Thomson Reuters and Blackstone Group sells financial market data and infrastructure. It presented a complex, but more traditional IT-centric use case. Workfront has allowed them to gracefully retire tens of inherited custom built apps and will play a role in on-boarding 5,000 developers in the next two quarters. Look at the eye-popping numbers below.

It is an example of what Workfront calls "Land and Expand". Start small, show impressive payback and encourage a wide deployment through free what it calls "collaborator" licenses. Workfront also does a nice job celebrating the early adopter executives, who then help spread it across the enterprise.

Nina Long in Marketing Operations at TSB, the 200 year old bank, described how her social media and even risk management teams are showing interest in the product based on her initial success. There were cut out figures of a dozen such early adopters across the show floor and awards recognizing many more.  

I thought it was nice that Workfront invited JLL's Rose Hayes to dinner with a few analysts. JLL provides a variety of real estate services. Rose is a prototypical modern worker, working as she does remotely from Kauai. She certainly won the farthest to travel award to be at the event and showed no effects of jet lag at dinner. After all, she is used to 3 am conference calls. Similarly, Dave Randall had flown in from Michigan, representing Atlas Copco, the Swedish company. He joked he is surrounded by SAP systems around the world, and little Workfront still plays a pivotal role for him.

So what exactly is Workfront's sweet spot?  In a one on one, Alex told me he sees three prominent uses cases in his customer base:

• Increase speed of work/productivity especially in creative areas like product design and marketing.
• Squeezing cost out of more traditionally automated areas - as with Refinitiv
• Helping with compliance - Nina at TSB had described compliance across marketing campaigns as the big driver for her Workfront project

Is Workfront too unfocused with so many industries and geographies across its 3,000 customers? I also mentioned to Alex their definition of "work" may be too narrow - it's missing out examples from the shop floor, from the hospital emergency room, from the warehouse etc. He politely pushed back. His analysis shows there are 400 million knowledge workers in companies with 1,000 or more employees. Nearly 180 million of them have access to some modern applications. That is a massive market for Workfront to target. Blue collar and operational areas can wait. See, they are not that unfocused. Still, analysts will try to pigeon hole them as a project management or CRM tool.

I am glad I went to the London event. I heard of a much wider range of process areas and geographies than I would have at the Dallas event. The diverse, hand crafted flavors at the ice cream stand in the "Experience Zone" at the event was a good metaphor. In a world of too many vendors selling "cloud solutions" which are mostly spray painted but actually vanilla general ledgers and SFA solutions. Not really representative of modern work. This was refreshingly different.

Confession - I did try the Baileys flavor :)

 

  

Plex: From shop floor to top floor

I was surrounded by high-tech. I flew into the Delta McNamara terminal in Detroit with its ExpressTram which uses air cushion levitation like a hovercraft. The terminal is connected by a passenger tunnel which celebrates LED art. I stayed at the Renaissance Center where GM shows off its latest auto technology. PowerPlex, the Plex user conference, was at the Cobo Center which also hosts the annual North American International Auto Show, which attracts a million visitors all using its wi-fi and watching exhibits which leverage AR/VR and AI. Barrie Vince, Plex's "Q" showed up on stage as a roving display, as if to wave goodbye to Sheldon at the end of the Big Bang Theory show. Plex customers like Seven Marine had brought props like their luxury boat engine rated at 627 horses. Partner booths were displaying scanners and sensors.

But what stood out for me this week was something analog and likely boring to many - a board with printed sheets of metrics. It was at the plant of a Plex customer, College Park Industries, a maker of prosthetics. Every technology vendor these days has "Digital Boardrooms" and dazzling analytics in their demos. But how many demo you those at their customer's facilities? And even more specifically at their shop floors or warehouses or emergency rooms being used by blue collar employees? And show operational metrics related to quality and logistics?

I have been lamenting that even after two decades of cloud applications, if you look at a grid by industry and country you can mostly find application coverage in financial, HCM and CRM processes and there mostly for N. America and English speaking world. Product design? Scrap management? Kiva robots in the warehouse? Not our problem, these vendors seem to think even as they claim "enterprise-wide" coverage.

Which is why I look forward to visits with Plex. Over the years they have taken us to tours of shop floors of customers like Fisher Dynamics, Trojan Battery and Sanders Chocolate each with unique manufacturing, packaging and other engineering challenges. They invite us to spend time with their Customer Advisory Board which represents an even wider range of industries and operational details. Jargon such as auto-release, LPN barcodes, pull efficiency and traceability is common.

While Plex tends to rely on its customers to take it overseas, it is common to hear about its global reach at its events. An exec from Stant talked to me this week about their plants in Czech Republic, China and S. Korea. On stage was Toyotetsu which supplies parts to a number of Japanese automakers.

While most events have inspirational speakers, Plex tends to bring in keynoters like Mike Rowe who talk about solving the perennial shortage of blue collar workers. At this conference, Dean Kamen, inspirational in his own way with his string of inventions including Segways and insulin pumps, talked about how he has helped transform Manchester, NH, a textile town couple of centuries ago into a modern day high-tech magnet. He talked about FIRST and getting young kids interested in robotics. Not just talk - action about closing the advanced manufacturing skills gap. 

 

Beyond the manufacturing focus, Jerry Foster, CTO presented on a machine learning project which, frankly, systems integrators should have long been working on. Most of them have industry templates with pre-defined configurations of systems parameters. The Plex project has analyzed such templates across its customer base and identified potentially newer ones that could benefit several of its implementations. Going forward, hopefully, such parameter configuration activity can be significantly automated and reduce dependence on consultants.

Of course it is not just manufacturing sectors which are looking for modern operational systems. Markets don't wait for ever and I have been researching startups, SIs, corporate buyers who are targeting various verticals.

Plex has new executives led by CEO Bill Berutti, with significant manufacturing experience at PTC. He did a nice job hosting this year's PowerPlex. While he is disciplined in executing to Plex's current path, I am hopeful he will allow me to periodically distract him. There are just too many operational application white spaces across industries and geographies to ignore.

Teflon SAP?

In the ASUG Executive Exchange on Monday morning at Sapphire I joked that it was fitting that we had yet another rumor floating - would Bradley Cooper show up with Lady Gaga at her concert later in the week? I cannot remember a Sapphire with so much rumor and speculation in the build up to the event. I was impressed how SAP executives handled much of it during the event. In one on ones, however, several of them were hurt and even angry about the coverage. Even more striking was how little customer execs had heard about or cared about the chatter.

Some of the topics about which there has been some wild speculation

Qualtrics

Yes, it was an expensive acquisition - a "high-beta" one. I am not a big fan of M&A in software. But in my new book, I point out several trillion dollar markets SAP, Oracle, IBM and others missed out on in the last couple of decades - digital advertising, smart products, cloud infrastructure etc. So I cannot fault Bill McDermott for betting a pile of chips on his view that the "experience economy" is going to be a massive one. Not only will it differentiate SAP's CX offering it is already opening up product design, employee engagement and other new opportunities for SAP. It also allows SAP to benchmark and reshape its own product ideation and customer relations. And it has brought a new breed of impressive, high energy execs into the SAP ranks.

HANA

There was some really irresponsible "HANA is dead" speculation. I told several journalists and analysts weeks ago I was baffled by the talk. So it was nice to hear Hasso Plattner after lowering expectations that his was an "old-style", "low-cost" keynote then proceed to announce “SAP HANA is too good a database just to lock it inside SAP enterprise applications,” Watch this keynote where along with Gerrit Kazmaier, he set ambitious new goals for HANA and for the broader portfolio of SAP's analytical offerings. 

Layoffs

There has also plenty of talk about layoffs including some of my colleagues asking for more "openness" from SAP on the topic. I was in Salt Lake City with several of the execs as they were being announced and I could see the hushed conversations. I chose not to pry given the legal and HR considerations that surround such moves. Besides, as I write in my book, SAP has to evolve to a much more cloud, open-source, machine learning savvy culture. So do its systems integrator partners. So do its customers. Continuing with legacy customizations is a growing security and compliance risk. Much worse, it is a recruiting liability when trying to attract younger technical talent. The transitions at SAP are just a start. The ripple effects will be felt throughout SAP Nation. The sooner we start planning for them the better, and we should not just hammer SAP for kicking them off.

Management changes

Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications had told me "we have individuals in some cases who collectively have worked for SAP for 100 years, and who decided that it was time to try something else in their career. Does this not happen in every company?" Hasso Plattner was even more emphatic when he told a few of us that several customer executives have marveled at the smooth transition. He told us SAP is much "younger" now and he has never been more proud of the company. Watch this keynote and see the energy of execs like Christian Klein, Ryan Smith, Jen Morgan and others

Elliott investment

Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG had to explain to an audience of customers who exactly Elliott is. That calm struck me as radically different from the panic I have heard from of my media colleagues. Yes, Elliott is a feared force as an activist investor but I am familiar with at least a few executives who have worked collaboratively with them. I liked Bill McDermott's comments during a Q&A “I’m very confident in our top- and bottom-line development,” McDermott said, and that he and the Elliott reps were “psyched” by SAP’s prospects. As I write in my book, there is a huge opportunity in "tilting the bell curve" - transitioning ECC and customizations, BW, S/1 to the new portfolio of S/4, C/4, SAC, SCP, Qualtrics, SuccessFactors, Ariba and many other products SAP now has to offer.

My book

Finally, I am bracing for potshots about my book. I had a chance to give my book to both Hasso Plattner and Bill McDermott. I warned them both it had many sections which would make them cringe. They were both gracious in their thanks - can I dare say they are mature enough not to expect a puff piece from me? But if hear some of my colleagues who have clearly not read the book, you would conclude it is an unqualified endorsement of SAP. I had a chance to sign several copies for SAP customer executives this week. Trust me they are not looking for fawning support of SAP when they talk to me.

No, Bradley Cooper did not show at the concert. But Lady Gaga was amazing on her own. I did not know much about her music prior to the concert but you have to admire her amazing pipes, incredible energy and her body of work. More importantly you have to acknowledge the sheer admiration she got from the audience. SAP is not everyone's cup of tea, but you have to similarly admire its wide body of work and the fact that it is the backbone for over 400K customers.     

I heard an executive say this week media attention on any topic lasts about 5 days. You wait that long and any PR crisis will blow over. That is not a compliment to our analyst/media side of the fence. We have to take the much longer customer view points when they invest in technology.

From my side, this week made me resolve to be even more careful in my reporting and to continue to validate my viewpoints with even more customer conversations.  

"I have never been so proud to be part of this company"

Said Hasso Plattner as we were wrapping up our annual Sapphire meeting with him. He told us he thought Bill McDermott's keynote this morning was the best he has delivered (I had walked up to Bill a few hours earlier and told him roughly the same thing, for different reasons as I describe below). He raved about Jen Morgan and her attention to detail. He is just as pleased with the other members of the new management team. He said customers have complimented him about the smooth executive transition over the last few weeks. He was energized and as we will see in his keynote tomorrow dispel rumors that have been swirling around HANA the last few weeks.

I liked Bill's keynote because it highlighted global companies like Apple, Under Armor, Shell, Tapestry and SAP itself tackling complex issues in product design, manufacturing, field service, joint venture accounting, retail and digital transformation. It is such a contrast to the competition which pretends that its financial and CRM cloud functionality is all that an enterprise needs.

The keynote and a sneak preview walk through we got of the show floor even as the roadies were still moving booth material in their fork lifts gave me the solid feeling that SAP is back as the dominant application vendor. There are 5 massive "neighborhoods" centered around People engagement, Network and spend management, Customer experience, Supply chain and the Digital core and a section on 25 verticals.

ASUG had invited me to present on themes from SAP Nation 3.0 to its Executive Exchange on Monday. It explained to them why on balance the book comes out positive about SAP. If I had waited till this Sapphire to finish, I have a feeling the book would have come out even more positive.

The Orange County Convention Center advertises 2.1 million square feet of exhibition space. Given the scope and ambition of SAP's application coverage, in the not too distant future, I think it will be able to use all that space.

Competitors watch out - you have one heck of an energized application vendor.  

The Oracle Enigma

Rimini Street recently conducted a survey of Oracle customers. Oracle and Rimini have long been in litigation, so I would read the results with a nuanced viewpoint, but it does not paint the picture of a very happy Oracle Nation.

As an analyst, I am particularly interested in products and competitive positioning.  One of the more intriguing sub-plots in my writing SAP Nation 3.0 was looking at why its competitors did not go for the jugular. 5 years ago, when I wrote the first volume, SAP's image suffered from the massive failures and writeoffs, it appeared distracted by HANA, its next-gen ERP, S/4 was immature. Customers were ring-fencing SAP, moving to third party maintenance and two-tier ERP. In many ways, SAP was on the ropes. 

As I say in the book

"Partly because SAP’s competitors did not target it aggressively enough, and partly because its own cloud acquisitions and developed products afforded it a shield, the company has come through the threat of the last five years relatively unscathed. In fact, when you look at the mob of strong competitors that it had to fend off, it has done remarkably well. In those five years, SAP’s customer count has actually increased by 50%. Wall Street has not been as generous to SAP as it has to cloud vendors, but the existential threat that SAP faced has passed."

The competition is not just Oracle, but as the largest application competitor to SAP, I wondered why they did not have more momentum in the last five years. It's partly because the Oracle functional scope in the cloud does has not appear to have grown significantly. I wrote recently

"In October 2018, Oracle co-CEO Hurd predicted that 80% of business applications would be in the cloud by 2025....Today, even after two decades of cloud computing, industry and geographic coverage is spotty — by my estimate, less than 20%. For Hurd’s prediction to prove accurate, it will take massive new investments in upgrading industry functionality."

Will Hurd's own products grow rapidly and get a lion share of his projected 80%? In January 2006, Oracle had confidently declared they were "Halfway to Fusion". 13 years later, Oracle still mostly talks finance, HCM and CRM. NetSuite, even after 20 years, has limited global coverage as Phil Wainewright points out here or industry coverage as I point out here."   

Beyond applications, I was excited about its autonomous database, but wondered why they had to bundle it with their IaaS. When it was introduced, I wrote this. I have also been puzzled why the Oracle IaaS had not focused on its and other on-premise customer bases. I wrote this 3 years ago.

I write this from SAP's Sapphire show. I spent yesterday at the ASUG (user  group) Executive Exchange. There was vigorous conversation on a wide range of topics, many like Indirect Access which makes SAP cringe. My schedule for the week shows small group settings with key executives. I attended a couple of sessions at the Partner summit. We got a sneak preview of the show floor even as the roadies were still setting up.  Jon Reed has polled several "Mentors" and influential developers in the SAP community. There is a definite openness to all this. The week prior Workday allowed us access to most of their product executives at their analyst summit. Next week Plex is taking us to (another) customer plant, and has several executive sessions for analysts as part of their user conference. More openness.

I have asked for Oracle for a similar, much more open analyst summit and have been told it's not likely to happen any time soon. May be it's just me with all these questions. But I suspect my analyst colleagues have other questions about the vibrancy of its database, its platforms and other products. We all want Oracle to be a strong competitor, but with so many questions, it would be nice to have much more open conversations.  In the meantime, I will have to rely on Oracle partners like OppSource to describe innovations as Mark Galloway does here.

Frankly, they can easily ignore us analysts. It's customers they need to focus on - the Rimini survey is a symptom of what they need to turn around. 

The Paradox of Selling Progress: a guest post by Mark Galloway

Mark Galloway and I go back to our respective Lawson and Gartner days. I caught up with him recently - he is Co-Founder & CEO of OppSource, developers of next-gen sales engagement tools. He told me of an interesting use case of his tools as he describes below.

After watching multiple waves of “transformative” technologies come and go in the enterprise over the past 30 years, none in my opinion have been as transformative as what we are seeing with the “Amazon effect”.  No, I am not talking about AWS or the cloud.  Rather, I am talking about the online consumer shopping experience that many of us interchangeably call “Amazon” regardless of whether we are actually shopping at Amazon or some other online retailer.  You ask, so what does Amazon have to do with transformation in the enterprise?  Let me tell you, a lot.  As consumers, we have taken our desired consumer experience for self-service and moment-of-interest engagement into every corner of the workplace.  The net result, we have created a new normal for a radically different B2B buying journey.  We don’t want to talk with salespeople until we absolutely have to, and in many cases, we don’t ever “have to”. 

On the other side of the commerce equation, sellers are having to quickly and radically change their sales coverage models to adapt to us modern buyers.  The days of press-fleshing sales calls are waning. The cost/per sales engagement for this traditional sales approach used with today’s modern buyer is no longer economically feasible.  As a result, companies everywhere in every industry are now grappling with how to transform their sales coverage models to grow more profitably. 

Many organizations have favored hiring young, smart, and high-energy “inside sellers” who come with almost no business, industry or product acumen.  Why hire on this profile?  Because they can force high velocity and high-volume outreach and engagement efforts on these young go-getters at a fraction of what they were paying their expensive, highly compensated field-based predecessors.  Yes, these new reps are sharp and yes, they are quick learners, but without any contextual understanding or experience, smart learning can only take them so far.  The paradox of progress for the modern buyer is that while they don’t want to talk with salespeople until they absolutely have to, when they do, they want to speak with someone who brings value and relevance to their unique buying situation.  The current hiring model for insides sales teams that many companies are using is out of alignment with the modern buyer’s sales experience expectations.

This is where artificial intelligence and machine learning can lend these young sales guns a hand.  Imagine as a young rep, being prompted with questions to ask, similar customer stories to tell, and appropriate product/solutions to position all while you are engaged real time with one of these modern buyers.  This is all being made possible by leveraging machine learning and AI to listen to conversations.  Using modern AI and machine learning models, sales reps can be provided these real-time prompts that will augment the missing business, industry, and product acumen that next generation sales reps will need. Working together, salesperson and machine will be able to satisfy the buyer’s expectations for a modern sales experience, one that comes as the highly personalized and relevant engagement they desire.

As an example, Lifetouch, the nation’s largest K-12 school photography studio used to rely on field sales people to drive around and call on schools in their local territory.  This model worked well in days gone by. However, the modern security measures employed by most schools today discourages unsolicited sales calls and in many cases are not even allowed.  Coupled with these security changes, today’s modern school administrator have enormous time constraints just keeping up with running their schools.  They simply don’t have time to meet spontaneously with sales people of any variety. These market changes required Lifetouch to rethink their sales coverage model. 

They chose to hire recent college grads as inside sellers who work collaboratively with strategically located field sales specialists.  Their job is to line up scheduled and qualified appointments with school principals and other picture day decision makers at schools.  But getting engaged with enough of these contacts to keep a field team of sales people busy with qualified meetings required a much higher volume and velocity of market outreach than what these inside sellers could do with just a phone and their CRM.  They needed a specialized system that provides touchplan automation, AI and machine learning to capture conversation data, and automatically setup callbacks, and appointments.  Working with our company and our OppSource Sales Engagement Platform, they saw the average revenue per rep driven by their inside sellers grow 4X over 24 months.  An incredible ROI by anyone’s standards.

This type of progress driven by AI and machine learning is coming quickly.  A recent McKinsey Institute study found that by 2020, as much as 80% of transactional sales related functions will be possible with Ai and machine learning. 

If your sales organization isn’t experimenting with AI and Machine learning to augment your evolving sales force, you may soon experience the paradox of progress.

You can reach Mark at mark DOT galloway AT oppsource DOT com

 

Sapphire 2019: A curtain raiser with Nick Tzitzon

As I prepare to drive to Orlando for the annual SAP conference I had a chance to talk to Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications about what we can expect on the main stage.

If you think about the big picture, Vinnie, in terms of where the economy is and where our customers are, we approach SAPPHIRE with a really clear view of the challenges that we need to address and the opportunities we need to seize.

If I had to give you the top three headlines, number one is continuing to deliver on promise of the intelligent enterprise, which as you recall is something we launched last year. This was the pinnacle moment, if you will, in terms of what we always knew that the SAP HANA era would lead to for SAP. Our customers know it’s a big data world. They know that they need end-to-end connectivity in their business. They’re hungry for the exciting machine learning use cases and the new wave of industry best practices. You’ll see a lot more of this in Orlando.

Look for Bill McDermott to make the argument that we want our customers to focus on something of a cultural transformation. The idea here is “you need all people inside companies focused on people and opportunities outside of companies.” Demand chain integrates to supply chain in any truly digital business model.

This leads me to the second headline, which I think will surprise a lot of attendees in terms of the energy it creates in the SAP community. In looking openly at the same challenges facing our customers, we recognized there’s a big gap we needed to solve for. No company in our industry at scale, not SAP, not our competitors, could bring in real-time experience data to complement operational data. This goes directly to the culture change McDermott wants to hit. Nobody questions the operational heft of SAP. The question is – how can we help customers direct those systems to what their key stakeholders, customers and employees, actually feel. Experience Everything , Everyone is a Customer, Customer is Everywhere.

It's widely known that we went out to find a partner here. We found not only the market leader, but the pioneer of the experience management category with Qualtrics. SAPPHIRE will now be the largest event ever focused on experience management and helping businesses operate with greater agility in terms of knowing what's going on in their business, knowing why things are happening, being able to connect the two and personalize outcomes to a far greater degree. So while I think people have read the headlines about the Qualtrics deal, I don’t think there’s a full appreciation of the paradigm-shift that experience management on the Qualtrics XM platform will enable.

Number three, I think the consistent feedback you see, not just from reading about SAPPHIRE, but from reading about all vendor events in this industry, the customers do a better job talking about the solutions than the vendors do. Perhaps this a career-limiting admission for someone in the marketing and communications function, but I’m willing to take the risk. This year we made a concentrated effort to bring as many customers to Orlando as we can to let them tell the stories, to let them explain the experience they're having with SAP, why they chose SAP, why they're excited about the idea of experience management as the latest frontier for the intelligent enterprise.  You're going to see hundreds of customer-led sessions, and the dominant ‘red thread’ is that customer testimonials will be steering the conversation. 

Those would be, at a high level, the three things I think about.

In terms of product announcements, we're going to do a lot around SAP HANA. I can’t tell you how aggravating it is to read speculation in the media about our product strategy. Josh Greenbaum wrote a nice piece about this earlier this week. HANA remains—as Bill calls it--the intellectual foundation of SAP. You're going to see Hasso do what he does best as we blaze a new trail in the data management space with some announcements about SAP HANA, which is very exciting. 

You're also going to see some additional progress being made on the idea of combining experience management and intelligent enterprise capabilities. You have heard us talk about this as “X Data plus O Data.” You'll see some early releases, giving developers the tools to build on our platform and accentuate the capabilities of X plus O. There'll be exciting announcements on this front as well.

You have another breakout on C/4HANA?  Is Qualtrics going to be more in that? Is that its own sub-event within the big tent? 

Qualtrics is going to be everywhere, first of all. CX LIVE is the customer experience event focused on SAP C/4HANA and the five integrated clouds that run in that suite. Frankly, the interest has been so high since it was announced last year, we had to do a dedicated CX track at SAPPHIRE because we ran out of space. That’s why Alex Atzberger and his team are hosting CX LIVE as a separate but connected track in Orlando. I’m sure Alex will happily tell you that it's a bigger crowd than they anticipated, which is good news. I should also say that any registered SAPPHIRE attendee can also participate in CX Live. Bill will appear with Alex at CX LIVE.  Ryan Smith from Qualtrics will appear there. It’s going to be a fun event. 

What about all the drama over the last few weeks?  Will Bill touch on it? Are you going to let the media openly ask their questions?

Yeah, I think the media, influencers, analysts, can and should ask any questions they want.  Personally, I don't see the drama. People have been following us for years and have very high expectations for us. Bill tells us all the time – take the high interest in SAP as a compliment that people believe we’re a significant company with a lot riding on us. Having said that, I worry that much of what’s out there right now has largely been the result of speculation and not necessarily the result of facts. In the case of the executive departures, we have individuals in some cases who collectively have worked for SAP for 100 years, and who decided that it was time to try something else in their career. Does this not happen in every company?

And the other piece of those changes, we have a particularly strong bench of talent at the leadership level and at the engineering level. Names like Adaire Fox-Martin, Christian Klein, Jennifer Morgan, Juergen Mueller, Thomas Saueressig, Gerrit Kazmaier, Abdul Razack. I think these leaders and the quality work done by our engineers will be on display at SAPPHIRE. Maybe the only thing that will quiet the conspiracy theories is seeing a totally thriving SAP in action in Orlando. So I guess I’m happy it starts next week.

Vinnie, I'm normally, as you know, somebody who is pretty sensitive to what's going on across the company, and I feel like the company is going in with a full ahead steam with a pretty clear sense of what it has to accomplish.  I just don't see a lot of this so-called drama.

While I understand there is some sensational stuff in the media, we put more credibility in the facts.

If there’s any learning I have from all this, it’s that we need to do a better job over-communicating about everything. We know what our customers expect, we know what our shareholders expect, we feel motivated and excited about the future. That’s the story I personally need to do a better job getting out into the influence channels.

Any other big announcements?  Any other directional stuff?

You’ll see a re-invigoration on the industries focus from us. There's a lot of really good content we're going to have at Sapphire on the industry side, a lot of good road mapping and best practices. 

You're going to see a lot on the ecosystem. I think our partners are fired up for SAPPHIRE.  You're going to see some more detail in terms of how our partnerships with cloud infrastructure providers have matured. These are topics that we know the SAP customer base is interested in, so they will be well featured at the event. 

I also think you're going to see an increasingly good balance between the technology topics and the business topics. This is something that all vendors struggle with. We, like many, have an audience that comes from multiple perspectives, but what we really like about the intelligent enterprise, particularly now in the context of the experience economy with experience management from Qualtrics, this is a conversation that bridges the gap between business and technology.  It completely unites the value chain on what needs to be done to keep companies successful or, in cases where they're struggling, gets them back on the right track. SAP is talking end-to-end now in multiple respects and we're excited for SAPPHIRE, if for no other reason, because it's our best opportunity of the year to show people just how complete and broad our portfolio is and how complete our strategy is in terms of giving them the tools that they need to be successful.

Plus, we're going to be distributing copies of exciting, new, future best-selling books. In case you have any recommendations in that regard.

Well I know at least one person - the publisher of SAP Nation 3.0 - will enjoy that drama :)

Thanks for the sneak preview.

Digital Transformations: Too little, too late?

I find Frank Scavo a great sounding board.  He has a way of simplifying things and pushing back when things are buzzword-y. I have quoted him in several books. He has introduced me to case studies I have profiled in my books and blogs.

I liked his recent post on Digital Transformations, especially the graph on left.

But it reminded me of 2 things.

In The New Polymath, I had invoked Doblin's (a design strategy firm) 10 types of innovations. You could take Scavo's graph and nuance it some more.

However, the key point I want to make is I started to write that book in 2009. It was inspired by innovative people, products and places I had been cataloging on the New Florence blog since 2004.

In 2012, in The New Technology Elite I had bunches of examples of companies making smart products - taking analog products of the past and embedding sensors, software, satellite and mobile support. They had started designing those products years before.

In 2014, I helped Karl-Heinz Streibich wrote The Digital Enterprise. It cataloged a number of companies rethinking their supply chains, their business models. They had been doing it for years.

In 2016, in Silicon Collar I cataloged companies in over 50 work settings changing their business processes with all kinds of automation - robotics, drones, wearables, 3D printing etc etc. They had been doing so for years,

In my latest book, SAP Nation 3.0, I point out the countless missed opportunities at some of our favorite vendors. Markets don't wait. Startups, corporations as in healthtech and healthcare, SIs have been developing solutions they should have 

What's my point?

If you are only now starting to think about digital transformation, you likely are years behind many of your competitors and your peers.

Here is something even more sobering. The solutions you are likely looking at also missed out on working with those pioneering customers. Their SI partners will try to convince you the solutions embody "best practices". No, they don't - the best practices belong to those pioneers.

Which is why I was pleased to see Brian Sommer write his new book Digital with Impact. In my review, I wrote:

"Brian Sommer and I go back a long way and we have consulted with clients on several projects he describes in the book. We are both worried that today's "digital' project is becoming the "re-engineering" project of the 90s. It starts off with the right goals, then many companies just implement off the shelf solutions justifying them or being told by their consultants they embody "best practices in a box". End result in 90s was massively expensive ERP and CRM projects and failures. Companies risk making the same mistake again with similarly poor results. This is where I like Brian's 4 step framework - spend plenty of time looking for digital opportunities (not just move your back office to the cloud) and build your own jigsaw of solutions given the plethora of cloud apps, automation technology, developer platforms and other tools available today. I also like his emphasis about thinking about in terms of a circle. Rinse, repeat - don't view it as a project which is one and done. Finally, he has a slew of exercises you can use to encourage lots of back and forth with colleagues.."

Frank is right when he concludes "each digital journey is different, because every company is different." In addition, as I said at the end of my review of Brian's book

"Its important you scream and debate. Opportunities like this come only every couple of decades - you want to do far better than most companies did with the "re-engineering" wave in the 90s."

You are likely late. But in addition, please do not do too little with your digital transformation project.

SAP Nation 3.0 Excerpts: Chapter 8 - Bystander Customers

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.

In chapter 8, I covered the final category in the four customer types in the book - Risk-takers, Modernizers, Diversifiers and Bystanders.

"So, it is not surprising that only a small fraction of SAP’s 400,000+ customers have migrated from ECC, Business One,BusinessObjects and other products to its more modern S/4, SuccessFactors, ByD, HANA and SCP.

In fairness, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft, IFS, Unit4 and other vendors have the same issue with their legacy customer bases. You also have to ask why after 20 years Salesforce, NetSuite and other SaaS vendors have still not converted millions of customers from the on-premise world."

I interviewed several analysts about these Bystanders

Holger Mueller of Constellation

"Now they’re in a similar situation. I think SAP pulled a fast one, saying, ’Oh, don’t worry. We copied all the code. S/4 is not a new system. S/4 is just a new implementation where we simplify things and get rid of old things.’ To some extent, it was a technical argument as you got rid of these non relevant tables. The simplification ran the system better, and you got better business intelligence because there was no need for a data warehouse.

However, for SAP, just copying the code wasn’t that easy. Technically, you had to examine the code and truly simplify it to make it work. Besides, the public cloud is not offering the dramatic TCO advantages that R/3 did relative to R/2.

Importantly, I don’t see the functional equivalency. When SAP was started, Hasso has said, he went to ICI, the launch customer, and met a person in the finance department. ‘He showed me how he worked, and I rebuilt that in software. It took us a few months, and then we had that.’

Today, you cannot go to a finance department and ask, ‘How do you use machine learning? What do you do with data science? How do you use the cloud? What are your FP&A best practices?’ These practices are still being distilled. We’re in the era of experimentation."

"To be fair to many of the European CIOs, the vendors also have not done a good job bringing data centers across the ocean. Germany is the largest European economy. Where else should your data center be? There have been so many ones opened in the UK, which makes sense for banking and financial services vendors, but Paris and Frankfurt are much bigger than London. That’s not even an argument."

Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras

"Anecdotally, the biggest thing that stops them is the perception that they need all their previous customizations. I would argue they probably don’t, partly because new solutions today do more than they did back when they implemented. Plus, they have more ability to con- figure without invasive custom code changes. Partly, it’s because they just didn’t need those customizations. They did it because that’s the way they always did it, and they weren’t willing to bite the bullet and do something even better or different.

I was at a Unit4 conference last year, and I was in a session meant to collect information from customers to help them move to cloud. It was almost like a focus group with product management. The big resistance to moving to cloud is customization, because for so many years Unit4 had the BLINC message — an acronym for “Businesses Living IN Change.” With their SDKs, they actually encouraged code changes, but code changes that would move with upgrades. Now, in a multitenant SaaS solution, even those kinds of code changes are discouraged. But those customers are all sitting on those kinds of code changes, which is making them very resistant to moving into the cloud. I have asked Steve Miranda at Oracle a similar question. Basically, what he said was, ‘I strongly encourage customers not to inventory their customizations and to move forward.’

But I really think it is inertia. People have bad tastes in their mouths from having gone through the blood, sweat and tears of an ERP implementation years ago. I don’t think it needs to be like that today, but that’s the perception."

Frank Scavo of Strativa

"Vendors like Infor and Oracle have tried to move legacy customers to the cloud with initiatives called UpgradeX and SOAR, respectively. The reason you don’t have very many SOAR and Upgrade X customers to talk to is because there are not that many of them. Existing customers do not make that cloud conversion routinely."

"Some of these companies are running on operating systems that aren’t even supported anymore, so they’re running patched versions. They’re not getting vendor support, and they are running in emulation mode. A “last legs” kind of thing — and still, they will try not to make a conversion.

What are the kinds of events that finally force a company to go to a new ERP? There are several:

• We did an acquisition and we’re now on two ERP systems and this is just not tenable for the long term. We’ve got to standardize on one.
• We expanded our business into Asia and this ERP system is not double-byte or doesn’t support localizations.
• We went into a new line of business that has subscription billing. The [current] system doesn’t do this."

Workday: The Power of Focus

I kept thinking of Southwest Airlines while I was at the Workday Innovation Summit in CA this week. I had read this tribute to the legendary founder, Herb Kelleher on the flight over and it reminded me how revered he was - like Dave Duffield of Workday is in HCM circles.

Then, a walk down memory lane took me back a few decades. At business school, as part of the Corporate Strategy class, we had been assigned in groups of 3 to analyze a local company. We interviewed executives and then presented to top management about growth opportunities. I had drawn Southwest Airlines, then just a regional airline with under 5% of today's fleet and revenues.

I remember I got an A for the course, but I am pretty sure I flunked the presentation to the airline executives. They were brutal. One of our recommendations was that they set up a separate sub to service smaller cities and acquire commuter planes for those routes. Nope - we will not diversify from Boeing 737s, was the response. We also recommended they diversify to airports in Chicago and couple of other major cities. The response was along the lines of "No, too many union and weather issues".

They have stubbornly continued with the first principle. Since then, Southwest has become the largest and most experienced customer for successive generations of the 737 - gaining significant maintenance and training efficiencies from a homogeneous fleet. They have been more flexible about the second recommendation. Indeed, I felt vindicated when they started flying out of Chicago Midway in 1985 and have since blanketed most of the country. Southwest has become my preferred domestic airline especially since they offer me nonstop flights from my home airport to over 30 cities.

I saw the discipline again when in 2006 after a bad experience with Ryanair in Europe I sent Southwest executives a letter requesting them to expand internationally. Nope came the response - there is huge amount of growth left right here in the U.S. They have since started to fly to the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, but the bulk of the revenues is still U.S.- centric.

What's been fascinating to watch is how Southwest's discipline has attracted relentless competitive attacks. There was the infamous Wright Amendment which hobbled Southwest for three decades from flying nonstop on longer routes from its home state.

In response to the success of Southwest and others like Jetblue, United tried a sub called  Ted, Delta tried Song and most airlines have since moved to offering "basic economy", highly restricted fares. In doing so, these major U.S. airlines have neglected vast chunks of global markets to the advantage of premium competitors like Emirates and Singapore Air.

Workday has shown similar discipline. Its "Power of One" strategy is like that of Southwest's commitment to the 737. No on-premise distractions. A slow diversification in the form of AWS support. Functionally, Workday has stayed focused on finance, planning and HCM.

And along with Salesforce it has similarly drawn inordinate attention from bigger competitors like SAP, Oracle and Infor. They have been chasing after accounting, HCM and CRM markets with their own acquisitions and organic products when they would have had much more traction in verticals or world geographies. As I write in my new book, we are seeing new competitors in the form of startups and even major (buyer) corporations developing products for "white spaces" in fintech and asset intensive industries that these vendors should have been focused on. Google, now with Kurian and Enslin, will likely emerge as another threat in some verticals and regions.

Can you be too focused? With Southwest you are seeing the potential risk of being dependent on the 737. The issues with the new MAX generation of the 737 are causing short term scheduling issues, but longer term if customer perceptions about safety persist they could hurt Southwest significantly. Its slow international expansion has allowed regional, cut- rate players like AirAsia and Easyjet to grow nicely across Asia and Europe.

Workday could have similar challenges. IDC is talking about "cloud repatriation" - a bit of backlash against the economics of public clouds. Let's face it, after 20 years of cloud apps, over a million SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Unit4 and other on-premise customers have not migrated major chunks of their enterprise to the cloud.

During the summit this week I saw a somewhat superficial Workday focus on operational functionality and data. It talks about enterprise wide planning when it does not get invited to complex network planning, finite capacity or CPG assortment planning opportunities. I saw a narrow focus on automation when enterprises are trying out a wide array of telematics, wearables, robotics across the enterprise. Internationally, Workday has been slow to expand functionally or in local presence.  It has been lucky the competition has mostly tried to engage it in areas where it is strong, rather than "surround" it with operational and regional depth. That will not last for ever.  

The great news is like Southwest which has a distinctive, even quirky culture, Workday is building its own unique persona. It topped Fortune's Future 50 list this year while also cracking the Top 5 in the magazine's top places to work. It has been blazing a trail with a decade of analyst summits, when some competitors shrink away from them. CEO Aneel Bhusri promised even more openness and communication.

There is so much to like at Workday. I do want to see them continue to evolve and expand. Correction - their customers want to see them evolve and expand. And those million on-prem customers continue to wait for a compelling reason to migrate.

 

 

 

SAP Nation 3.0 excerpts: Chapter 7 Diversifier customers

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.

In this chapter, I covered the third category in the four customer types in the book - Risk-takers, Modernizers, Diversifiers and Bystanders. Diversifier customers. In the first volume of SAP Nation, we had described the early wave of Diversifiers. They were “ring-fencing” SAP with cloud solutions, trying out two-tier models, TPM and private-cloud infrastructure. This group continues to expand and experiment. The big difference we noticed this time around was in some cases they are diversifying back to SAP products.

Here are excerpts from 4 of the 12 case studies in the chapter

'In the hypercompetitive software vendor world, Unilever could be construed as giving up on SAP. Actually, like many CIOs, Moran is merely diversifying her portfolio. Moran told CIO UK, “Working with SAP, they helped us put together the internal business case to move forward with S4/HANA. We’ve found that having HANA on our databases has increased performance five to 10 times when we have HANA sidecars.”47 In that article, she also talked about her other strategic partners: Microsoft, AWS and increasingly Google. Unilever also has a Foundry that, since its launch in 2014, has facilitated 100 pilots between start-ups and Unilever brands — stimulating and facilitating experimentation across the global footprint. It’s all part of diversifying the portfolio, and SAP continues as a key component.'

Andre Blumberg at CLP Group in Asia Pacific.

'The more interesting project which is our focus now, is to look at global disruption, industry changes and technological innovation. When you look at the Apple iTunes store, the Google Play store, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. you see how the platform business model has disrupted many industries. We’ve been looking at what a platform business model could look like for our sector — so what is the “energy internet”? What is the Amazon equivalent for a utility company? We are working on that now and how we can bring ecosystem players together to provide added value for our customers. How can we establish that on a modern public cloud PaaS platform so that any third-party ecosystem player or start-up companies can join our platform and work with us? That way, we don’t limit ourselves when it comes to innovation. That’s a much more exciting discussion and we’re working primarily with proven public cloud companies, particularly Amazon Web Services. It will be interesting to see how the global public cloud providers play out in the Asia-Pacific region over the next two to three years.'

Bryan Bee at EBSCO

'We had a healthy skepticism when we started the process. It took us a while to get our head wrapped around the service provided, the risks, and interoperability issues. As we went through that journey, we became comfortable and we concluded going with Rimini was an acceptable risk. Once we did our initial due diligence, we engaged both our business stakeholders and our developers. We did multiple reference calls and each time it was like, man, this is too good to be true.'

Paul Wright at Accuride

'Functionally, there’s no doubt in my mind that with SAP, we’d be compliant anywhere we wanted to go in the world. In today’s world, that’s important. We had a choice when we were going to Russia. I had a choice. I could have said, ‘Let’s figure out how to do with this with Plex and Workday. Or, let’s do this inside SAP.’ I mean, at some point, unfortunately, the government regulations are going to drive what you can and cannot do as a business, and it was just too risky to do something else in Russia, even if we wanted to, so we stayed with SAP.'

The joys of book reviews

I saw an article aimed at authors and publishers on how to handle critical reviews. And I chuckled to myself  "I could have written that myself"

I took most heat for the first volume of SAP Nation - mostly from SAP fans and partners. It was actually a generous history of SAP as it grew from small German vendor to global powerhouse. What I drew attention to was its poor handling of partners and the massive costs and project failures in the ecosystem. Five years later, I can say with some pride that it had a significant impact. The strategies I highlighted in the book like ring fencing with cloud, two-tier ERP and third party maintenance have gone mainstream. Also, in writing volume 3.0 I saw customers have become cautious in their use of large SIs, they are minimizing change as they move to S/4 etc. That to me is gratifying. I was talking to the customer audience and many of them have benefited from the book.

I was criticized for not being alarmist enough with Silicon Collar. The book came out when prominent Oxford profs and Gartner analysts were screaming about catastrophic job losses from automation.  Mine was a tone of optimism - automation makes us safer, smarter, speedier workers. Machines typically impact repetitive tasks not complete jobs. Automation takes time to mature, it is not cheap. History has proved me right so far. Very few job losses from machines. We are pushing back dates for autonomous vehicles, for payback from machine learning. Two disappointments from the book- I had hoped SIs and outsourcers would automate their own operations - but they are mostly sticking to labor intensive models. The other was software vendors would reshape processes to reflect growing drones and telematics in logistics, sensors, 3D printing and wearables on the shop floor, robotics everywhere but it may take a wave of greenfield vendors to come along to do that.

I am starting to hear criticism I am "too nice" to SAP in the latest, volume 3.0 of SAP Nation. I am actually pretty tough on SAP in a number of chapters. What I do point out is how little its competition has evolved in the last 5 years. So many missed opportunities. Some of the criticism is coming from them for highlighting their performance. To me, again, that is background noise. The book gave me a chance to highlight 200+ pages of case studies talking about a slew of new SAP products. Hopefully, the customer audience benefits from that and sees that this is not "your Dad's SAP". And the competitors realize the clock is reset and they can show much more progress by the time I start to write volume 4.0 in the series.

I tend to be a tough critic myself. The New Polymath was one of my best reviewed books and it was gratifying to get a number of comments about people wanting to expand their own skillsets. What I had hoped in addition was it would spur Polymath organizations like the GE Global Research Center I described in the book "Conversations in the cafeteria, in the hallways, and at the 40 - room lodge attached to the center effortlessly drift from pathology to holography, from one “ aha ” to another. The Global Research ethos is “ Innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines. ” So, put chemists, mathematicians, engineers of all stripes, and biologists in close proximity and who knows where the conversations will lead."

The New Technology Elite was about smart products (analog products made digital with software, sensors and satellite support)  and covered design, IP issues, the application of Moore's Law, a need to plan multiple releases, product documentation and training and a number of other dimensions. I see so many smart products launched in the last decade which could have used that advice. You wonder, for example, how things would have worked out if Boeing had provided better documentation and training around the MCAS software and the Angle of Attack sensor on the 737 MAX.  

I write books to stay in touch with practitioners - my case study heavy style makes me reach out to over a hundred for each book. They provide me the reality checks and validations for the themes of each book. They also provide fodder for our advisory work. The ultimate compliments and criticism also comes from them, not from social media. Nothing is more pleasant than a note from a client which says "thank you from saving us from a $50 million mistake" or "you forced us to consider couple more scenarios we had not factored"

Having said all that, I happily sign my books, and enjoy presenting on themes from my books especially to audiences on campuses. See you at an event soon. 

The bad old days of consumer tech

Not a day passes without some harsh story about Facebook and data protection. How un-innovative Apple has become. Why Amazon should be broken up. Why Google should be regulated.

And I ask do these folks not remember the days when consumer only got technology dregs? It was not that long ago. Elite government agencies got the best in satellite, computing and other support. Then came corporations. Consumers, if they were lucky, came much later in the technology lifecycle.

Today, consumer tech leads enterprise tech in capability and design. Enterprise software repeatedly turns to consumer tech for innovation. Mobility, multi-tenancy, cloud infrastructure, machine learning - the leadership has not come from IBM or SAP. It has come from Apple and Google.

I think of this every time I hear Mark Hurd, co-CEO of Oracle, present in keynotes. He particularly likes to point out that consumer spend on technology has caught up to enterprise spend — annually about $1 trillion each — and is growing faster. Even more dramatically, over 80% of enterprise tech is spent on keeping the lights on, not innovation. In contrast, the consumer is getting almost pure innovation for her dollar.

Enterprise tech vendors — especially ERP/ CRM vendors, their systems integrators and other partners — were set to dominate the technology landscape in the late 90s. They had emerged very strongly from the Y2K crisis, and the launch of the EU’s common currency promised another bonanza. Instead, their share of the market steadily declined over the ensuing two decades. They missed out on the contract manufacturing of smart products, digital advertising, cloud infrastructure and several other trillion-dollar markets. Two decades ago, not many of us had heard of Foxconn which has delivered billions of iPhones, iPads and smart products. Few of us considered Amazon or Alibaba as tech vendors. Few of us would have speculated that Apple, near dead, or Google, not born yet, would have many times Oracle or SAP’s annual revenue.

To me, that has worked out better for consumers. Enterprise vendors have delivered nowhere near the price/ performance improvements or innovation that consumer tech has seen. It should be no wonder then that the tech the consumer gets at home on Sunday night or in her car is so much better than what she finds at work on Monday morning.

So, let's ask for a vote - how many consumers would give up the advertiser funded or subscription models and sign up for enterprise licenses and audits? So, we can criticize consumer tech for data privacy issues, but honestly, it is a tradeoff consumers have been willing to make. Us smart folks making snide comments or worse forcing GDPR type regulations are not doing them many favors.

Talking about regulators, let's look at their track record with tech. They have not fixed spam email and phishing, robocalls with IRS or Microsoft scams, misleading or fraudulent TV ads. Honestly, those cause way more damage to consumers. Regulators have given immunity to telcos after they violate our privacy rights - why do we think they will do better with consumer tech? GDPR to me is "feel good" legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley was post-Enron. Lot of noise and expense but little in results.

Be careful what you clamor for. You may bring about the bad new days of consumer tech. And that is not what tens of millions of consumers, including me, want. Respect our ability to make choices.

ERP: Moving Fast and Yet So Slow

A guest post from Ton Dobbe, Chief Inspiration Officer, Value Inspiration

"Every week I interview entrepreneurs and experts from around the world to share their big idea about new forms of value creation and the potential we can unlock when technology augments the unique strengths of people to deliver remarkable impact.

I got inspired by the release of the book SAP Nation 3.0, hence I invited its author, Vinnie Mirchandani to my podcast. We explored the changes in the ERP landscape over the last 5 years, in particular amongst the big 3 – SAP, Oracle and Workday. We also explored why after 20 years of ERP in the cloud today there’s still not enough traction.

The thing that triggered me most from my interview with Vinnie : "Cloud ERP has been around for 20 years now. But after 20 years, both the customers and the vendors are just not moving quick enough. Something's not right."

Vinnie’s conclusion is so true. If you compare the transformation in the ERP industry with other enterprise software categories, it’s transforming fast, but too slow. He outlined a range of reasons for that:

1)         Lack of functional coverage: ‘If you plot functional coverage by global world region, by industry, by business process only about 20% is filled. So after +20 years, the vendor community hasn’t delivered enough.’

2)         Not enough shift in value: ‘Data is one of the biggest selling points of cloud, you know, we are gathering a lot of data. That should allow us to do some really unique things that we couldn't do before. That’s simply not happening yet’

3)        The partner community is holding things up: ‘Partners are selling mostly private cloud or on-premise solutions. Partners want to continue to do what they always did: implementations, upgrades, application management.’

4)         Buyer fear. ‘The memory of the last implementation is still holding back a large number of buyers. Many of them just customized the heck out of their old ERP system and they're worried that they will lose the customizations if the functionality in the new product isn’t rich enough.’

So, it’s a chicken and egg dilemma that’s needs a breakthrough. And the breakthrough won’t come from continuing to move traditional solutions to the cloud to continue to do their traditional thing. From my perspective, there’s a large-scale opportunity in the market for any of the vendors – established or new – to shake things up but taking a fresh perspective on ERP.

We discussed a number of opportunities to unlock the status quo, here’s a summary:

1)         ‘Don't just modernize the technology, modernize the business processes.’

2)         Verticalize – what is wrong with offering claims processing or retail merchandising, or insurance billing, or utility asset management and so on. Those industries are screaming for cloud and in memory solutions for that.

3)         Get systems integrators to apply machine learning and automation to their own business. It's amazing how many systems integrators still sell bodies, when over the last 30 years they've done millions of ERP projects and millions of CRM projects. Why aren't we training machines to do configuration. Why aren't we doing automated data conversion.

In all three examples it’s data that’s the magic ingredient to unlock a large-scale and untapped opportunity to create a shift in value. As Vinnie quoted: ‘Up to now a lot of the machine learning that is showing up in the ERP space has come from the work vendors like Amazon and Google have done with image recognition, and voice recognition and so on. To me, the big, big, big payback will come when we can take enterprise data. Our own productivity, our process productivity needs to dramatically improve. It's not about it's not about replacing humans; it's making them into super workers. ‘

Listen to our interview about the evolution of the ERP space, and the large scale opportunity this leaves to creates shifts in value in a world that’s progressing, but not quite fast enough."

Groan - yet another TLA

Every good analyst is entitled to coin a couple of TLAs in their career. It is a badge of honor. So, I certainly understand why my friend Phil Fersht and his team at HfS have coined a new one IAP - Integrated Automation Platforms to evolve today's RPA or Robotic Process Automation.

"RPA provides a terrific band-aid to fix current solutions; it helps to extend the life of legacy. But does not provide long-term answers." they say

I groan because I am sore from TLAs. In my new book, SAP has so many new product names and TLAs that my editors recommended a glossary at the front of the book. Imagine what my poor transcriptionist had to go through to interpret all those TLAs in 20+ accents of the interviewees in the book.

But back to IAP. I hope Phil and team consider a couple of things

a) putting systems integrators on top of their graph sends the wrong signal. We should be highlighting automation - not more expensive labor and "change management". Besides, it would be nice to see SIs showcase automation in their own operations.

b) automation is about way more than white collar processes. In my book Silicon Collar, I had case studies of BP using drones and autonomous vehicles in remote, harsh parts of the globe. UPS with telematics guiding its trucks, factories with wearables and sensors, hospitals with tow bots, wineries with automated irrigation, waste management with robotic arms on garbage trucks, CGI at digital agencies, Exari (which Coupa announced today it is acquiring) which helps mine complex contract data, and many other examples including RPA.

So, hope Phil and team plan to start covering a broader range of automation, especially in operational areas.

Drama in enterprise computing

Ray Lane, a top-notch tech executive and investor over decades, said this about my new book

"Don't be fooled by the title—the book is not just about SAP. It's about drama in enterprise computing."

I then used "drama" in the title of my recent ZDNet guest column.

Drama? That's what you get in Augusta in April. Isn't enterprise tech boring and glacially slow?

You be the judge.

My book catalogs the product launch machine SAP has become and the fact that its customer base has grown 50% in the last five years. It was on the ropes, the competition could have delivered a knockout punch but it has bounced back impressively. 

Of course,  SAP is also generating a lot of interest and emotion with its recent layoffs and executive moves. From an investor point of view, CEO Bill McDermott has created excitement by promising to double its market cap in four years

Marc Benioff of Salesforce told Jim Cramer of CNBC a few weeks ago " I see $30 billion right around the corner. In fact, we initiated a 4-year guidance today, Jim, of $26 [billion] to $28 billion."

How can that not make your heart beat faster?

Last week, in his coming-out party since he joined Google several months ago, Thomas Kurian made quite an impression.

Also last week, at a SAP Analytics event, mostly under NDA, I expected to hear plenty about coopetition with Google, Oracle and IBM. Instead I kept hearing about Microsoft with its Power BI, Surface, Azure ML, Office 365 and other products.

Oracle and IBM were similarly snubbed by the DoD as it shortlisted vendors for its $ 10 billion JEDI cloud contract. One contract should not mean that much but the twists and protests in that one certainly count as drama.

When a case ends up at the Supreme Court of the US, it usually makes for some some oohs and aahs. When all 9 justices vote unanimously on something, it certainly perks you up. That's what recently happened to Oracle in its long running litigation with Rimini Street.

One of the nice things about the Amazon Kindle is a feature called "Popular Highlights". Amazon combines the highlights marked by all Kindle customers and identifies the passages with the most highlights. For my book, this statement by Mark Hurd has already qualified for that honor. "In October 2018, Oracle co-CEO Hurd predicted that 80% of business applications would be in the cloud by 2025."

That para goes on to say "Today, even after two decades of cloud computing, industry and geographic coverage is spotty — by my estimate, less than 20%. For Hurd’s prediction to prove accurate, it will take massive new investments in upgrading industry functionality." Will Hurd's own products grow rapidly and get a lion share of his projected 80%? In January 2006, Oracle had confidently declared they were "Halfway to Fusion". 13 years later, Oracle still mostly talks finance, HCM and CRM. NetSuite, even after 20 years, has limited global coverage as Phil Wainewright points out here or industry coverage as I point out here.   

In the meantime, in China, Kai-Fu Lee, who has been called the “Oracle of AI” has funded nearly 150 AI start-ups. At Davos earlier this year, the theme was Globalization 4.0 which shows that Industrie 4.0/IoT concepts are spreading worldwide. Holger Mueller of Constellation opines about platforms "Why Open Source has won and will keep … winning.”

Augusta generates drama for 4 days. Enterprise tech takes a bit longer. But it has its share of comebacks and black horses. I will have a front row seat as I start planning for SAP Nation 4.0.

Or may be it will be titled Oracle Nation 1.0 or Workday Nation 1.0. That right there is plenty of drama.

SuiteWorld Redux

Oracle sent me the video of the product session at SuiteWorld which could not be webcast live when I wrote the post Unfair to NetSuite?

Of the 7 webcast keynotes I watched at Oracle MBX/MCX and at SuiteWorld this was the most relevant to me as an analyst. Gary Wiessinger,  EVP Products did a nice job covering a wide range of product topics.

Here are some thoughts after watching this session

- Oracle has a nice early testbed for its OCI and autonomous database. 3 years from now NetSuite will look unique in a market where most other application vendors are being platformed on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and other clouds. Time will tell whether that flavor of "unique" is something to celebrate.

- Oracle is also helping NetSuite become more global. However, I found the global metrics NetSuite shared a bit confusing. At last year's SuiteWorld they said they had users in 199 countries, this year is was up to 212 countries. Their web site still says 110 countries. Much more important is how many countries they support with functionality, languages and local presence. They said they added 21 new countries with local functionality. Their web site says they support 20 languages. All good progress but would be nice to see how many two-tier implementations they have sold with Oracle apps at HQ. How deep is the local functionality - most countries have provinces,  unique nuances.

- Where Oracle does not appear to be helping NetSuite is in verticalization. I saw a slide from SuiteWorld which showed NetSuite supporting 7 verticals - Retail, Wholesale Distribution, Manufacturing, Software, Services, Agencies and Nonpofits. At the last SuiteWorld, Paul Farrell shared with me they were moving into micro-verticals. What Gary showed this year went the other way. They would qualify as two "macro-verticals" - Products and Services. At that level of abstraction, the functionality is largely horizontal. To me, commitment to verticals means showing 2-3 unique operational systems of record in an industry - claims processing in insurance, clinical systems in healthcare etc. -  not just a couple of features.

One thing I definitely appreciated - even though it was a bit corny, the beginning of the session had a nice tribute to founder Evan Goldberg, one of the original cloud pioneers who continues to be a nice, approachable executive.

SAP Nation 3.0 excerpts: Chapter 4 A Massive Pivot

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.

In this chapter, I summarized a wide range of conversations I had with SAP execs and watchers from trends in developer communities, to UX to CX to SAP openness. I saw so much change that I am not that surprised with recent layoffs and executive moves. 

"Cohen’s argument about retiring customizations makes a lot of sense, but bear in mind many of those modifications were written a decade ago or even further back. Will standard SAP software reflect 2009 practices or that of 2019? In the last decade, the shop floor has seen automation in the form of robotics, wearables, 3D printers, etc. As we will see later, global companies are moving plants across borders at startling rates and need agility they did not a decade ago. In fairness to SAP, Oracle and Infor have the same challenge. Also, many customers don’t want to make big moves in ECC and then make a second transition to S/4. They would prefer a single move.

Cohen talked about a multinational customer who asked, “We love your public cloud but you have to offer us 189 countries localization out of the box.” “I told him, ‘I have only 64 today.’”

Customers don’t want to regress from functionality in ECC and other current products. And they don’t want multiple projects and change initiatives. As fast as he and SAP are moving, many of his customers want him to move faster."

"Atzberger is fighting plenty of cynicism. Reaction from a couple of customers to the C/4 announcement: “five years too late” and “CEO McDermott arrived at SAP from Siebel 15 years ago … what took him so long?” Several analysts reacted to my post, “Salesforce is Vulnerable” by adding “Yes, but not by SAP.” One snarkily wondered if SAP’s branding team had vetted the fact that C4 is a plastic explosive.

SAP is going after the CX market differently this time. It has lots of differentiated features, especially through its acquisitions of CallidusCloud, Coresystems, Gigya and hybris. The sales function is being redefined with Callidus’s revenue recognition and sales commission functionality. Meanwhile, hybris Commerce, CPQ and NBA functionalities are much more relevant for newer outcome-based business models and a world where digital and physical are merging. The Coresystems acquisition offers customers an Uber-like plat- form to find available field service technicians in real time. So a customer like Siemens can use SAP functionality on a per-user basis for its own techs and pay for a marketplace for crowdsourced techs on an occurrence basis. Leonardo IoT capabilities allow for new service models as industrial assets get smarter and allow for more predictive versus scheduled maintenance. The Gigya acquisition, with its customer identity and access management capabilities, is more relevant for a world which is moving past email blasts and overused cook- ies. SAP CEO McDermott stood shoulder to shoulder with Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, to announce their Open Data Initiative. It was also a vivid display of “coopetition”: Adobe and Microsoft compete with SAP on many a CX opportunity."

" The world of designing the user experience is mind-blowingly complex — mobile trends on iOS and Android; social/ collaboration trends driven by Facebook Workplace, Slack and others; digital assistants like Alexa, Siri and SAP’s own CoPilot.

Listening to Cabahug, you see that expectations change dramatically as you move within an enterprise. Customer-facing marketers are far more UX-demanding than workers on the shop floor. As you move around the world, you have to reflect expectations of chat and emojis common in China."

” Grassl agrees:

“When I talk to my peers at developer relations in other companies, I get the same feedback. It’s a very tough market to get and keep developers interested in your products.”

He then countered with the following:

“Let’s start with who do we target. Does it make sense for us to go after a broad, less-professional developer? It doesn’t help us to get a developer who knows HTML and can create a small app for a web page. We drive programs to show them the [enterprise] career path — but it also requires work on their side, to learn and build up the skills.

At SAP, we accelerated our focus on developer relations about five years back. There are a lot more things available from SAP than in the past. Also, we use the term “developer” very broadly at SAP. It includes sys admins, technical people and business user-type developers. We have focused on three main activities."

" Matthias Steiner, Head of SCP Evangelism, explained the move to me:

“We are articulating that this is not your grandfather’s ABAP. It still uses a lot of the common technologies that have been floating around within the SAP ecosystem for a while, like HANA core data services. Of course, we recommend using UI5 and Fiori, so it’s just a stepping stone. It’s just making it a little bit easier for our one million ABAP developers as they up-skill.

We still believe that for all those hesitant customers, the best way to get started with cloud is this whole topic of user experience, because the elephant in the room is data, security and information privacy. If you leave the data where it is and just use the cloud as the catalyst to expose this data to the outside world, make it accessible to the end users, and typically this is what we do with Fiori-type applications, then you can familiarize with the technologies. For these things, pick something which is not mission-critical, so you have a little bit of time and no pressure to familiarize with cloud.”

"Klein is now using that experience to help market S/4 and SAP cloud properties to other global companies seeking similar transformations. He is on a quest to help them become what SAP calls “intelligent enterprises.”

“We are tackling the whole value chain at SAP. We are looking end to end, looking at marketing, sales, finance, service and support, cloud operations and the cloud infra- structure. That’s the first aspect of our transformation. Next, we are infusing machine learning, IoT, predictive analytics and these new technologies to bring the intelligence into play.

It’s about adapting business processes to the new digital age. It’s about fixing the data architecture. Last but not least, it’s about change management, and taking the people with you. In the end, everything that we do in the cloud impacts our 90,000 employees and our 400,000 customers.""

" Fanelli says she has the opportunity to move partners from a historic focus on reselling and implementations towards a broader role in helping customers become Intelligent Enterprises. Partner performance will be measured on customer lifetime value and their success.

SAP has a long history of building similar apps ecosystems around Fiori apps, HANA apps, mobile apps, etc. This time around, the customer access is much more digital. SCP leverages a lot more open source, and the barriers to partner participation appear lower.

At this point, it is a fledgling in terms of revenues for both the ISVs and for SAP (Fanelli says focus is adoption prior to monetization), but there is significant promise.

This time, she has new platforms to benchmark against. In the last decade, Apple has generated tens of billions of dollars in revenues for its partners and for itself from its iOS store. Amazon with its fulfillment engine has done the same. She can help SAP dream much bigger in this round."

" A few months earlier, I had seen him next to Jon Bon Jovi at another event. The hugely popular musician opened up about going through a very dark, personal phase. He was openly vulnerable. McDermott, in contrast, was positive as ever, quoting from Teddy Kennedy’s “the Dream shall never die” speech. There was no mention of his own personal tragedy.

It’s not just this accident; the man has also navigated being a cross-border CEO."

" I am only describing the tip of the spear — these executives are just a small handful of the 95,000 worldwide SAP employees. The pivot at SAP in the last five years has truly been massive. And the pivot will accelerate, as SAP announced in January

2019 a restructuring where it “will reassign some employees and offer early retirement to others, but still expects its overall head count to exceed 100,000 by the end of 2019.”

Tom Bogan – The Importance of Being Agile

Tom Bogan is CEO of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company whose business planning cloud automates previously manual planning tasks—for finance, sales, and workforce planning—and supplements those capabilities with enterprise-scale reporting and analytics. Tom joined Adaptive Insights when it was at $40 million in revenue. Under his leadership, in 2017 Adaptive Insights topped $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a watershed milestone that only 1% of cloud software companies ever reach. Then, in June of 2018, three days before the company was to go public, Bogan and his team struck a deal with Workday, a leader in cloud corporate performance management, to acquire Adaptive Insights for $1.55 billion.

Now a Workday company, Adaptive Insights continues to cook up ways to help businesses see planning as a competitive advantage. Most recently, Adaptive Insights commissioned Plan to Win: Achieving business agility in the age of urgency. The new book seemed like a good reason to sit down with Tom and get his thoughts on the origins of Plan to Win, the state of cloud software tools, and how businesses will plan years from now.

Let’s start with the book. What prompted it?

We’re always talking to customers. In doing so we learned that many felt there simply wasn’t much written about why modern planning was critical to the success of a business. They’d gone through the transformation themselves—from slow, manual, siloed static planning to automated, collaborative, and continuous active planning—so they knew what it had done for their business agility. They wanted something they could share with others, a book they could pass along to colleagues in their organization who may still be stuck doing static planning, or might be considering a change but not sure how to map their journey.

The book isn’t just a reflection of our world view on planning. That’s in there, but it’s also a researched exploration of how businesses have used planning over time, and how the digital age made those old planning processes obsolete. And it’s filled with lessons we’ve learned from our customers, including a few whose experiences are profiled in the book. It’s a helpful tool for both companies new to a cloud planning process and for our customers who continue to expand their vision for business planning in their organizations.

We’ve known for a while that static planning doesn’t work. But for many companies, budgeting remains a painful annual ritual. Why haven’t they been able to break out of it?

A big reason is the tools they’re using.  Most organizations still use spreadsheets. And unless you’re a very small company, spreadsheets quickly hinder your ability to plan across a wide population in your company.

Business and market conditions don’t change just once a year—they change constantly. So if you plan annually, you’re creating a plan that’s obsolete almost as soon as it’s done. So to operate with agility, you need to be able to update plans, budgets, and forecasts continuously, not just once a year.  Many of our customers update their plans quarterly and some do it monthly, or at least as often as conditions change.  

And as businesses grow, they realize that spreadsheet planning is cumbersome because they make it hard to coordinate all resources across the organization. Cloud-based planning enables a more agile process because everybody is using the same cloud system—not dozens of individual spreadsheets traded by email. They all work from the same data. There’s a single source of truth.

Putting planning into the cloud, having a flexible modeling platform, and deploying capabilities that allow you to engage in both financial and operational planning—this is what is helping break people out of static planning.

It seems like we've seen a mass proliferation of data analytics tools, data visualization tools, and so on.  Companies seem to have one of each. Does that help planning or does it actually make it more fragmented?

I think it helps.  When companies have a good understanding of their operations and the operating data, it inspires them to do richer planning. 

For example, when I started doing planning in companies, we'd look at a revenue forecast.  It would be more trend-based: What percentage are we going to increase this year? Today when we do our sales planning, we're looking at the number of reps we have and the number of leads we're generating.  What are those conversion rates from marketing leads to sales opportunities? How many sales opportunities can our reps execute against?  What are the expected win rates?  All that rich operating data is now part of the plan.

Now apply that to agility. If our actuals are either better or worse than the assumptions in the plan, we can change and update that plan. Those regular updates allow you to course-correct when needed. Visualization systems, the tendency to collect metrics and KPIs and the ability to see those through the various analytics tools—all this provides a strong foundation because the operating metrics become the drivers or the assumptions in the plan. We built the plan and the models on top of that analytical data. They fit together beautifully. So the proliferation of analytics tools, together with the planning model, is very synergistic.

Workday's focus is primarily finance and HR.  Does that constrain what you get from customers and does that kind of make it competitively disadvantaged for you because you don't have access to too much operational data?

That’s a great question. In the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud, we certainly integrate with Workday solutions, but we also integrate with all other systems as well: General ledger systems from Oracle, SAP, NetSuite, and others; CRM systems like Salesforce; marketing automation platforms like Marketo, HubSpot or Eloqua—we integrate with all of these systems so that data is feeding our assumptions.

We describe the Business Planning Cloud as “best in class, better in suite.” This means if you’re using Adaptive Insights on its own or with a non-Workday ERP system, you’re still getting the best, most highly-rated planning solution in the industry. But it gets even better if you choose to implement solutions from Workday. We have not only HR and financial data from Workday business systems, but we can add information from other GL systems, from sub-ledgers, and from operating analytical data. We can either bring that natively into Adaptive Insights through our interfaces or we can bring it in through Workday’s Prism Analytics.

SAP has something called Integrated Business Planning, and they go into all kinds of manufacturing and transportation and distribution planning. Does that put you at a disadvantage?

Not at all, because we place no limitations on the amount of information or the number of dimensions you can build into a model. And it’s important to remember that Adaptive Insights is a broad-based modeling platform. You can model any business scenario in Adaptive Insights, just as you could in a spreadsheet.

For operational planning, we pre-build some functionality. For example, in sales planning, we know that most organizations will want to plan around the number of reps they have, by market segments, and possibly by vertical industry. They'll want to do territory planning and to measure key aspects or dimensions. We provide the framework that allows them to do that. Our customers use that framework to build models and solutions that are specific to their business needs.

One customer, an airline, uses Adaptive Insights to run route profitability analysis for their routes all over the world so they know which are the most profitable. Another is P.F. Chang’s, who is featured in the book. They model the operations at a restaurant level.  Again, customers and users model any aspect of their business on the platform. 

You mentioned how cloud has evolved planning; made it much more collaborative, much more available to a broader audience, etc.  What is machine learning going to do to planning?

Great question.  It's going to change everything. We think that planning is one of the areas that will be more impacted by ML than almost any other space.  In the short term, we'll be able to leverage machine learning to do things like anomaly detection and to determine when information in a plan looks aberrant relative to what we'd expect based on analysis of history and trends.  We'll be able to flag exceptions.  The user will be able to decide whether they're appropriate exceptions or whether it's something that has to be looked at further.

Then we'll learn from that.  We'll be able to better anticipate and predict what the data should look like.  That's the short term. 

Going forward, I think we'll be able to leverage machine learning to create additional planned scenarios automatically. We’ll identify the most critical assumptions or drivers in the plan. We’ll take the heavy lifting out of scenario planning. 

We want to shift where people are spending their time, from creating the plan and crunching numbers to running analyses and really understanding what’s in the plan.   What are the critical assumptions? What kind of scenarios can I run? Then I believe we'll also be able to assess confidence.  A CFO can go to the board that this is a 75% probability plan or maybe it's a 25% probability plan. They can know where they stand before going in. 

Improvement will be gradual, and then it will accelerate once it hits critical mass. I’m sure years from now, we’ll do planning in a completely different way. But I’m hopeful that five years from now, we’ll do planning in a completely different way. 

Five to 10 years sounds realistic. But many people make it sound like it will happen tomorrow.

It depends on what we're talking about.  Anomaly detection will happen sooner but that’s only the tip of the iceberg for machine learning.  I think about the world in which we can automatically create plans and do a first pass.  That’s a little further out. 

Do you think planners are preparing for that?  I talk to some companies where they have literally hundreds of planners, category planners, assortment planners in the CPG industry and so on.  It just seems like there is a lot of labor in planning.  Are you helping planners look forward to the day where machines will be their assistants?

Yes. Whenever you talk about automation, everybody assumes we’re going to eliminate jobs. That’s not the goal. It’s to reduce the number of labor hours on preparing a plan so you have more time for strategic analysis. That’s part of the return companies and organizations will experience.

I think the point you're making applies just about everywhere.  Automation takes over the more mundane, routine tasks, and humans move up to a higher value in the workstream. What else did you learn from preparing this book?

Two things.  One is that there was strong affirmation of the need for active planning—planning that’s continuous, with monthly or at least quarterly updates to the plan, and with the best practice of rolling forecasts, where you’re not bound by this artificial annual time boundary. The book confirms that this is an important trend for companies. 

The other is the importance of machine learning.  The leading thinkers, and some are featured in the book, really believe there's a huge opportunity to leverage machine learning in the planning process, to make it more agile. We agree and believe that the tomorrow’s winners will be the most agile.

Rob Enslin, turnaround artist

SAP briefed me, under NDA, on Friday night about Rob Enslin leaving. At that time, I was also staring at a fairly hostile email from another vendor exec in response to a request they become more open in their analyst relations. The stark contrast made me appreciate even more how Rob and others at SAP have dramatically reshaped vendor -analyst conversations.

While Bill McDermott and others are the public face of SAP, Rob became that to many analysts. That was not his job, but in his doing so I came to appreciate his role as turnaround artist with his stints in Japan, post-recession US and elsewhere in world and then running the cloud properties the last few years. Having done several years of overseas assignments and traveled to over 70 countries myself, I admire even more what Rob did at SAP.

I have personally seen his role in making SAP more "open"

A) My latest book, SAP Nation 3.0 would not have been written without the countless conversations with executives and customers SAP introduced me to. The book is tough on SAP in several places. It took a lot of courage for them to have faith that I would present the good along with the bad. I think I succeeded - early feedback to the book is that of surprise how balanced my coverage is. It also shows a SAP going through a massive turnaround which is catching the competition flat footed. They will need to quickly expand their product and geography reach to keep up.

B) I saw Rob along with Nick Tzitzon play master of ceremonies to two of the most vibrant analyst summits I have ever been part of. Conducted under NDA I saw one SAP after exec come in with only a handful of slides and spend time getting input from analysts. Sure it was painful for some of them but Rob and Nick set the tone for openness.

C) I have conducted hundreds of interviews for my books and blogs. I cannot remember one with as much heart as the one Rob brought. I ran it in a two part post here and here and it will forever for me be a benchmark for other impactful interviews.

Next up - I look forward to seeing Jen Morgan continue the trajectory Rob started. And I will continue to exhort other vendors to try and emulate the openness I have seen at SAP.

In the next phase of what he described in the SAP statement as  his "new journey", I hope to cross paths with Rob again. I admired the reverence with which he described to me the mentors he has had along the way, and I am confident he will be the same himself. 

Making features/functions sexy again

I got excited this week when Workday sent analysts a hour-long video (sorry - don't have permission to share the video) which summarizes 500+ new features and 300+ new brainstorms in release 32.  That release was delivered on March 9. Workday used to do this on a regular basis - indeed I wrote last year "I miss Stan Swete’s updates every time Workday had a new release (they are up to release 31). He would crisply march through new features and also give a quick update on the state of the company." So, glad to see them start doing this again.

Excited about features and functions? I must lead a really boring life, eh?

No, if you look at what application vendors have talking about last few years - its been mostly about their technology - UX this, ML that. Often it's not even their technology - they are leveraging what Apple. Amazon, Google, Microsoft are pioneering and scaling. Business process and functionality have taken a back seat.

No wonder enterprise applications are evolving at snail's pace - in business process, in industry and geographic coverage. We desperately need a refocus and reinvestment in application functionality.

Here is what I told M.R. Rangaswami of Sand Hill in an interview about SAP Nation 3.0

"While enterprise vendors have superb technology visionaries like Larry Ellison and Satya Nadella, they have not groomed a similar breed of business process visionaries. If you want inspiration for the factory, warehouse, store or hospital of the future customers don’t turn to Oracle or Infor. That has to change. Application software has, in the end, to continually evolve business processes and enterprise data. Instead of inspiring customers to look to them, too many vendors are offering platforms and expecting someone else – their partners, their customers – to build applications. It’s the equivalent of your favorite restaurant saying our renowned chef is gone, however, we will open up our kitchen. Come use our appliances. No, customers continue to want tasty, healthy, affordable cooked meals."

Thanks, Workday -  I want to see starting with release 33 you talking about verticals beyond higher education and about more geographical coverage beyond the 34 countries you are supporting today:)

Bruce Cleveland - Part 2 - thoughts on current enterprise market

In Part 1, Bruce Cleveland talked about the framework in his new book, Traversing the Traction Gap. Here we talk about partnering and white spaces in the market.

Most enterprise vendors now offer their own platforms. Could they use your framework to develop a vibrant network of startups on their platforms?

At Siebel, we used partners to dominate – I know the word is overused— the industry.  We grew from initial product release to $2 billion in revenue in 4.5 years. In 1999, Deloitte named Siebel the “fastest growing company in the US” with a staggering CAGR of more than 750,000%.  We only accomplished this because we (by “we” I mean Tom Siebel) put significant resources (personnel and capital) into building a technical platform and a robust ecosystem to support it. 

Tom knew he had to “remove the constraints on the growth of the business.” We needed systems integrators who were trained and certified on Siebel implementations. We needed to our applications tuned to run optimally on various hardware systems. And, we needed numerous third-party applications that could interface and interoperate with our application suite.

Consequently, Tom charged me with building the Siebel Alliance Program. Tom had created our first systems integration partnership with Andersen (now Accenture).  He also had created our first hardware relationship with Compaq and our first software partnership with Microsoft.

I simply took Tom’s initial ideas and those partnerships and developed a scalable partner program from them.  We began the Siebel Alliance Program with Accenture, Compaq and Microsoft and over the course of three years we accumulated a total of 750 partners. These partners generated about a $B of additional annual license revenue for Siebel and helped us ensure that those licenses were implemented successfully. By partners, I don't mean they were reselling Siebel applications.  I mean we partnered with them to market, sell, and implement our joint solutions. We were compensated on our products/services and they were compensated on their products/services.

So, as you might imagine, I am a huge fan of partnerships. We won the Forbes award for the most innovative partnering program in the technology industry at the time and every technology company knew how powerful it was. It wasn’t a secret.  I find it interesting – with all the success we had with the Siebel Alliance Program - that none of the incumbent technology companies have replicated its form or function.

I believe the current technology platform leaders have a tremendous opportunity to develop a similar program. Sure, they all have partner programs, but those programs don’t really put a lot of skin in the game. By that, I mean, they don’t obligate the leaders to do much or to invest in their partners beyond providing basic access to some technology and lightweight market awareness. 

For our program, we actively recruited and hired hundreds of MBAs from the top universities as well as industry professionals and chartered them to create joint business plans with our partners, advocate for our partners with our product and sales organizations, and held the Siebel Alliance organization accountable for helping our partners achieve their revenue and market share objectives. We built specific marketing programs – brand and demand gen – that partners could sponsor to generate leads for themselves. We put skin in the game.  

The program was so successful that Harvard Business School wrote a business case study about it. So, I'm pretty proud of it.

Today, though, for the most part, the large technology platform companies offer what I call “paper partnerships”.  Those partnership don’t obligate either party to much of anything.  They're not “skin in the game” partnerships so they are anemic, at best. 

Most startup teams have little experience partnering with these large technology providers. And, even if they do, they have found that those companies offer little that their startup can benefit from. There's little provided by the large company that is likely to generate significant market awareness or revenue for the startup. For example, startups need to know who, from the partner’s organization, wakes up every morning worried about helping the startup to succeed; where are the demand gen programs they can co-invest in to generate awareness and interest in the startup’s products?  Which teams inside the large company are held accountable for achieving the market share and revenue objectives of the startups in their partner community? The answer? None. Those partner programs are essentially worthless – at least as far as the startup community is concerned. 

Salesforce built an App Store and prospective customers can certainly search for and find add-on applications and products for the Salesforce ecosystem there. However, that's a pretty lightweight endorsement for startups. Who is held accountable within the four walls of Salesforce to wake up every morning, ensuring that a particular partner has the leads it needs, generating a robust pipeline, and helping the startup to convert that pipeline into revenue?

I don’t mean to call out Salesforce. At least they developed an innovative approach and put a lot of energy behind it. And, they have done some advanced partnering with Vlocity. Vlocity was founded by some of my former Siebel colleagues.  What's Vlocity doing?  They're building vertical applications on top of the force.com platform. 

Salesforce saw a need to have much deeper vertical versions of their platform.  That's what we did at Siebel (create vertical solutions of Siebel) and David Schmaier led that initiative as the executive VP. David is the founder and CEO of Vlocity. David and his team are replicating what we did at Siebel for Salesforce and it's going very well. 

I'm an investor in Vlocity, and, to your point about partnering, it's an example of what can – and I think should - be done between technology platform providers and the startup ecosystem.  As this example shows, it's not just about partnering with systems integrators. 

If you want these partnerships to amount to anything there needs to be alignment and shared objectives. For example, if you want to garner the attention of the partner’s sales organization, there is nothing like making partner revenue a part of the sales rep’s quota.

The truth is that partner programs as conceived and implemented by the current technology platform leaders just don’t do much for startups – in terms of market share and revenue - and therefore it shouldn’t be surprising that those programs aren’t valued by startups.

Apple has done well in its ecosystem – with the App Store - but the consumer world doesn’t require face-to-face interactions. In the B2B world, people's work reputations are on the line when they make a buy decision. And, in almost all cases, there are multiple decision makers who must be convinced.  For B2B, startups need brand credibility from the platform provider. This happens when they implicitly endorse the startup by working closely with them. 

In the consumer world, a startup can “borrow” the brand of Apple because if their application is admitted into the Apple App Store, it tells consumers, "Look, we vetted this product. It adheres to our rules." 

Conversely, I don’t think that Salesforce’s App Store does a lot for startups. It’s essentially a digital catalog with some ratings/rankings. That’s not enough for most businesses to make a buy decision. If you speak with startups about the Salesforce App Store and ask them if it is a significant source of revenue for them, I think you will find that for most, it isn’t.

Startups lack credibility.  They lack access to prospective customers.  And, they lack sufficient marketing dollars.  This is where the enterprise vendors could really help startups.

I had hoped that the technology leaders would have adopted at least some of the best practices we had created with the Siebel Alliance Program. Tom Siebel and his new company, C3, are developing a similar program to what we had at Siebel Systems. So, I believe the principles are as valid today as they were back then.

When you look at the cloud apps market there are so many white spaces - major geographies, industry verticals etc - and they do not seem to be targeted by established vendors or even by startups. How are investors like you guiding them through these white spaces?

Cloud computing with its subscription business model - and delivery and usage model -has democratized business application software. Prior to cloud computing, it was prohibitively expensive for smaller companies to acquire and implement enterprise-class applications.

But, by dramatically dropping the cost of these solutions, I suspect it has constrained the application providers’ ability to support smaller geographies and industry verticals.  Going after smaller markets that require significant translation and support infrastructure at much lower price points isn’t practical. 

Even with traditional (re: higher priced) enterprise software, it was always challenging to create localized versions of products for a specific market.  Most US companies started out with the English speaking markets and then typically moved to countries such as Germany, Spain, and France with relatively large populations.  But, when they were asked to support a Dutch or Finnish version, it was seldom worth the upfront and ongoing cost.

For a large company to continue to grow at a significant rate, it needs to acquire or build new solutions that add significant revenue streams – quickly. In that context, let's talk about SAP and Salesforce.  One is a classic enterprise technology company with primarily a perpetual license business model.  The other is the "modern" cloud computing company with a subscription business model. 

The challenge with both of those organizations is that to grow meaningfully they have to build or acquire something of meaningful size.  Moving into a small geography requires the same resources or at least the same FTE costs that might be invested in something else and could generate a much larger impact.  So, it should be little surprise why we are seeing these large companies look to make large acquisitions and avoid niche industries and geographical markets. 

To your point, one might think, “Hey, if these market leaders are not seeing a lot of companies growing fast enough to make a measurable impact on their top line why aren't they helping smaller companies to grow so that they can eventually acquire them?”

Technology leaders may want to look at making investments in smaller technology companies where they see strategic value. These leaders can protect their interests by exchanging an equity investment and access to their channels with a Right of First Refusal (ROFR) that allows the leader to acquire the smaller company when it reaches a certain revenue threshold, at some predetermined price based upon a number of factors such as the acquirer’s stock multiple at the time. 

With respect to investing in and expanding the number of verticals supported, there may be a dearth of deep domain expertise inside some of the larger technology companies to do that well. I don't know whether these companies have initiatives to try to hire subject matter experts from industry to help them drive their product management.  They may and I'm just not privy to it. 

I do know that Salesforce took a run at creating vertical solutions and it wasn't as effective as they had hoped, at least not at the time. This is one of the reasons that led to their investment in Vlocity.  I think this makes the case that the technology leaders, at least those in the B2B markets and not normally inclined to partnering, could really benefit by embracing partnerships. 

Instead, it looks like the majority of them sit back and wait to see which startups “make it”, without their help, and then acquire the few that do. This seems rather silly because by doing that they have to then compete in the open market – and pay a premium - to keep them out of the hands of competitors.

What do you find interesting in today's enterprise space?

Roughly every ten years, new technology is introduced that dramatically changes our work and personal lives.  In the 60s it was mainframe computing. In the 70s it was minicomputers. In the 80s it was PCs. In the 90s it was client/server computing and in the 2000s, it was largely cloud and mobile computing which spawned “digital transformation”, beginning in the consumer markets with companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, NetFlix, Google, etc. Digital transformation has now moved full speed into the enterprise markets.

I believe digital transformation - digital disruption - is such a big transition it will require multiple decades.  I think it has a chance to undo a lot of the current market leaders in every industry.  To your point, maybe vertical providers will emerge and dominate the markets due to digital transformation issues.

The emerging opportunity in the enterprise is in systems of intelligence. This is where I think vertical solutions can dominate.  Systems of intelligence use the data generated and captured by systems of record and systems of engagement to enable companies to derive better business insights, faster and far more accurately than ever before.  I mean real-time insights and real-time responses, without humans involved, that can be triggered via key business events and moments of value. 

Here is an example in the retail space. Let’s say I'm walking through PetSmart and I'm a repeat PetSmart customer. I’m a member of the PetSmart loyalty program. If PetSmart has implemented a system of intelligence and placed beacons throughout the store, I have PetSmart’s loyalty application on my phone, and I provide my permission to send me offers, PetSmart can enable brands to generate contextually-relevant real-time offers to me as I walk through the store.  An offer could be from a brand I don’t normally buy for my dog. The system of intelligence has access to POS data from my prior store purchases. PetSmart makes $ by serving up the competitive offer and if/when I decide to redeem the offer in a coupon that could be set to expire if I walk out of the store without making the purchase. Powering this type of application requires a different type of computer and systems architecture. 

The biggest opportunity may come from vertical systems of intelligence built on top of the older systems of record and systems of engagement.  In my PetSmart example, it means that you've got to be able to interface with an existing point of sale system, not replace it. This is where I would advise B2B application startups to focus. Trying to replace the existing systems of record and engagement is tough to do. 

Trying to rip and replace technology is hard to do.  Building next-generation systems of intelligence that utilize the existing systems of record and engagement is far easier. That's what a lot of the startups we work with are doing.

Unfair to NetSuite?

For a fleeting moment I felt guilty I am not at SuiteWorld. Mark Hurd was talking about shipments from Shanghai and inventory allocations while in transit. I perked up at the webstream. But just as quickly he was talking about recruiting. And his comments were from a decade ago when he was at HP. I went "here we go again - like at Oracle MBX/MCX couple of weeks ago, finance and HCM seem to be Oracle's comfort zone. They are allergic to talking operational applications in the cloud".

The next session I was told to watch was about NetSuite products but the stream did not work. I can see from Albert Pang's tweet they are talking operations  "Allison Auclair, VP Product Mgmt of Oracle NetSuite, outlines what it takes to do next-gen manufacturing & retailing, covering everything from sourcing to online selling and from ordering to warehousing in its stepped-up effort to improve commerce & CRM experiences." Just my luck. I will try and watch a replay.

This is the first SuiteWorld I have missed in years. I much prefer analyst summits but NetSuite has never held one - I have asked multiple times. Oracle has moved away from them. I feel I am intruding on customer time when I go to user conferences. When I do go, I like a schedule which has plenty of customer and executive time. Oracle has not been able to deliver that so I have been watching their events from afar. Sorry, NetSuite.

I hope Oracle and NetSuite convene an analyst summit like I requested here. Every one of their competitors does one and they keep getting better each year.

I WILL show up for such a summit. If I am invited, and if the agenda does have operational and vertical functionality.  

Bruce Cleveland: Part 1- Traversing the Traction Gap

Bruce Cleveland, who many readers may remember from his Siebel days is now an investor and has a new book out, Traversing the Traction Gap. I had a long ranging conversation with him about the book and also about trends he sees in today's enterprise software industry. In this part we focus on the book, in Part 2 tomorrow he will discuss partnering and how to go after white spaces in the market.

How did the book come about?

Many people have asked, "How long did it take you to write the book?"  It took about a year of nights and weekends and a bunch of rewrites with others helping along the way. Not writing the book – I did that - but performing the interviews, creating graphics, getting legal sign off to use the quotes we collected, and that type of thing.  I learned it really does take a village to get a book out - at least something that's meaningful. More importantly, it took me 35 years of experience to accumulate the knowledge to write it. It required 10 or 12 years on the venture side and 25 years on the operating side.  

I was fortunate to work for and with some of the most amazing technology CEOs and leaders in the Valley.  Luminaries such as Larry Ellison and Tom Siebel were - and still are - the visionaries who created massive markets and incredibly successful technology companies.  Tom's new company, C3, is doing exceptionally well.  I had the advantage of a ringside seat observing the decisions they made and helping to execute them. Over the course of ten years as a venture investor, I met with and listened to presentations from at least 1,000 teams. I learned from those experiences as well. Finally, for the book, we interviewed dozens of successful founders and CEOs to better understand what led to their success.  So, the Traction Gap Framework is something that I developed but the ideas came from the cumulative knowledge and experience of many smart and talented people. 

Over time, patterns began to emerge as I began to see what tended to cause startup failure: 80% for enterprise or B2B oriented startups. B2C -- 90% to 95% failure rates.  CPG -- 98% failure rates. I realized that there are a lot of great ideas and very talented teams, yet many make mistakes that are avoidable. 

So, I started to unpack all of this.  When I joined two other people to create a new venture firm, Wildcat Venture Partners, I brought those ideas with me based upon the patterns I had observed. The most common cause of failure? Many phenomenal product teams stumble when it comes time to take their products to market. While they may have great product engineering skills, most teams lack “market engineering” skills – a term I came up with to represent category creation/redefinition, thought leadership content, market validation processes, pricing models, etc. I decided to double-click on this. 

All early stage startups – and new products inside an existing company – must go through 3 phases: go-to-product, go-to-market, and go-to-scale. There is a lot of help from angel investors, incubators and accelerators for the go-to-product phase. There is also a lot of help in the go-to-scale phase from groups such as Bain, McKinsey, etc. However, there is very little help for that murky go-to-market period. And, the evidence – 80% failure rates and higher – shows us that this is the most challenging phase for startups.  One of my partners is Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”. That book has taught millions of entrepreneurs how to think about markets. 

Most of the groups we invest in come out of great colleges or great companies, be it Salesforce, Google, Facebook, or wherever. There, they have learned how to develop a product. However, many of those groups have never experienced bringing a product to market. And, there has been virtually nothing written with respect to how to do it successfully.  There are no prescriptive guides.  There aren't’ guardrails or guideposts for startup teams to follow. I decided that, based upon my personal operating experience taking an early stage startup from an idea to a billion-dollar outcome and investing in multiple early stage startups that went on to become billion dollar outcomes, that I would share my experience and the experience of others who had succeeded.

The Traction Gap Framework

We don’t need more acronyms introduced into the technology landscape. I decided to adopt Minimum Viable Product – MVP -  a term that Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Marc Andreessen propagated, and derived the names of the value inflection points for the framework from that term. It may be debatable about what constitutes an MVP, but it's something that people are familiar with.  In my experience, if you can explain new ideas in terms people already understand, then they can quickly pick up on those ideas. 

I adopted the “minimum viable” format and applied it to the value inflection points associated with the framework.  The reason that I call them value inflection points is that as you reach each successive point, your company increases in value because you have diminished risk in the eyes of the investor community. In fact, it’s a step function change in value, not a smooth curve.

The first value inflection point of the Traction Gap Framework is called minimum viable category or MVC.  Creating a category, or redefining an existing category, is critical market engineering work.  You must to this early, while you are in the process of deciding whether the product has a viable market. You need to define/redefine your category because the current “category king” defines the “rules” – the attributes - of the existing category and you will be compared against them. This is not a battle you can win – well, at least not very easily.

The next value inflection point is called initial product release or IPR.  This is the first time that you make your product available publicly.  It can be an alpha or beta version, but it's basically the time at which you first place it in front of people, and they tell you whether it's great or it sucks.  Based upon the feedback during this period, you polish it up and, eventually, you reach what you declare to be a minimum viable product or MVP; something that you can begin to actively market. 

The next value inflection point is minimum viable repeatability or MVR. This is the point where you have successfully built and released multiple versions of the product, hired multiple people, experimented with and hardened pricing models, and are now beginning to build the systems such as sales, marketing and governance processes that you need to scale your company.

Then, finally, if you can scale for 12 to 18 successive months - growing quarter over quarter - you will reach this theoretical point called minimum viable traction or MVT. There are actual metrics associated with each value inflection point, including MVT.  But, to provide you with a visual image; you know you’re at MVT when you travel to “Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park” (Venture Capital Row – although SF has become far more popular for VCs over the past few years), meet with the venture capitalists located there, and they begin to sell you why you should take their $ vs. you selling them.

In addition to the value inflection points, the Traction Gap Framework consists of four architectural pillars: product, revenue, team, and systems.  These pillars are present from the moment of ideation and last in perpetuity, as long as there is a company. 

At the various value inflection points, the Traction Gap Framework architectural pillars take different points of prominence.  In the go-to product phase, product and team take center stage. From MVP to MVR or minimum viable repeatability, revenue architecture comes to the fore. Then, finally, as you reach MVR on your way to minimum viable traction, systems finally become important as you prepare to scale. 

The Traction Gap Framework breaks down this very murky time where there is very little data. It provides startup teams and investors with some guard rails and milestones they can target.

During this time, most startups are what I call “PowerPoint companies” -- they don't have a lot of market or customer data to prove that their products will succeed or feedback regarding what it will take to generate success. The challenge for startups at this stage is to get to a point where they become a “Spreadsheet company”; a company with performance data —metrics - that the team and investors can react against. Most venture firms are not comfortable investing in early stage startups that are still in “PowerPoint” mode.  Some will – like the Pre-Seed/Seed firms. And, even the best-known firms will invest early if they know the CEO and/or have strong conviction about the market opportunity. But, most teams will find that the venture community is hesitant to invest until they see tangible traction. 

Understanding what constitutes traction has been elusive for entrepreneurs because there's typically not a lot of feedback given to them by the venture community. And, most venture investors haven’t personally built a company from startup to scale, so there is little expert counsel they can provide based upon personal experience.  I wanted to expose some of the metrics venture investors associate with traction (e.g., capital raised, net burn rate, revenue growth, and usage rates) and how to achieve them. 

That's the background on the framework, the reason I developed it, the terminology I created, and the overall rationale for it.

How portable is the Traction Gap Framework?

I sat down with Geoffrey Moore and asked him, "When you were thinking about publishing ‘Crossing the Chasm’, were you worried that you didn’t have enough proof of concept?  At the time, your ideas were quite nascent, right?”  Geoff said that he wasn’t really worried about that. Geoff said he published it and subsequently augmented and supplemented his original thoughts as needed. So, that gave me the confidence to put my framework out there.

I use variable names for the value inflection points of the framework so that it can support a variety of different business models.  In fact, I treated very lightly - in this book - the B2C business model.  The reason is that most of the investments I make use a B2B or B2B2C business model. 

But, I gave considerable thought to the framework’s applicability and adaptability to other business models and other industries.  We've now accumulated metrics for B2C and we can swap in those metrics at their appropriate value inflection points.  Over time, I can see us doing something similar by industry verticals.  So far, it seems to hunt well.  I suspect it will readily work with other business models.

And, for the most part, I believe the framework is flexible and adaptable enough to scale to other geographies and cultures.

In Part 2 tomorrow we will cover Bruce's thoughts about the current enterprise market. 

Workfront - a system of record for "Work"

I have been pushing software vendors to deliver vertical operational books of record in the cloud - for utilities, retail etc. There are plenty of horizontal books of record -Workday for employee data, Salesforce for customer data, ServiceNow for service ticket data etc. But as I learned from a recent briefing by Workfront, there is space for at least one more horizontal book of record - that for "work". I had previously reviewed CEO Alex Shootman's book "Done Right" and knew they were focused on making work more enjoyable and productive.

Steve ZoBell, Chief Product & Technology Officer, described to me the problem they are helping solve:

"Work happens in a very ad hoc way today.  Strategy is not aligning with execution in companies.  Many times, company leaders don't realize that the most important work isn't being prioritized.  They have no visibility into  what is happening, who is working on what, what the deadlines are and if the work is being completed. 

Much of this happens because every single enterprise is reinventing process. But it is worse than that.  It's every department, every team reinventing the process over and over, resulting in them working harder than they have before, but they don't feel like they're being effective.

There is a study that says the average worker only spends 39% of their day working on the job they were hired to do.  That's just a travesty.  We need a system which can measure anything and see everything, providing complete visibility.  This is the value that we are bringing to  customers who are utilizing Workfront as an operational system of record for work."

The graph below shows the breadth of Workfront’s enterprise coverage.

An example of enterprise wide visibility to work comes from one of their customers, a global real estate company.  150+ teams composed of over 6,000 associates are doing tasks like building inspections and refurbishment projects,  which are all managed within Workfront. It's well beyond that traditional notion of projects and portfolio management.

Under NDA they shared examples of big brand companies where they "landed and expanded" - start off with a specific work area, and increasingly expand to other areas, particularly those involving knowledge workers.

They actually do better with creative work at digital agencies or marketing departments where by definition, work can be spontaneous, even chaotic. Below is a graph on some of the activities they help organize in a Marketing function.

I am going to meet some of their customers in the next few weeks and look forward to learning more use cases and how Workfront "lands and expands".

Image Credit - Workfront

 

SAP Nation 3.0 excerpts: Chapter 2 The Enterprise Computing "Continent" in the 2000s

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and for pre-order in the Kindle version (will be released on Friday). As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.

Chapter 2 focuses on missed opportunities for SAP competitors over the last 5 years to deliver a knockout punch while SAP was distracted and vulnerable. It also covers 8 very large markets that SAP and its cohorts missed out in the last two decades.

"SAP looked vulnerable when I wrote the first volume of this book series, five years ago. Besides the runaway costs and massive project failures at some customers, even more concerning was the fact that the competition was circling around.

Oracle had a decade’s lead with its Fusion cloud applications over what SAP was working on — S/4. Microsoft had already invested billions in its Azure cloud data centers, and could have used them to significant advantage in business applications. Infor had a new management team that was focused on vertical applications for many industries.

Customers were using Workday, Ultimate Software and Salesforce to “ring-fence” SAP, and were deploying lighter cloud applications, like NetSuite, in global, two-tier ERP settings. Those SaaS vendors had introduced the efficiencies of multitenancy to the overpriced enterprise applications market. They bundled software, application management, hosting and upgrades into one contract, which was priced as a per-user service.

TPM vendors like Rimini Street, Spinnaker Support and Support Revolution, with their cut-rate pricing and, especially, their support for customizations, threatened to hollow out SAP’s highly profitable ECC maintenance revenue stream.

S/4 has not been a runaway success, but SAP’s competition has not exactly gone for the kill either."

"But from a customer perspective, you cannot run your enterprise without order entry, billing, manufacturing, logistics and industry-specific functionality. There is only so much you can do with Salesforce, Workday or ServiceNow. You can do even less if you are outside the U.S.

It is a bit like the aviation sector. Southwest is one of my favorite airlines. I love it because it flies nonstop to over 30 cities from my home airport in Tampa, FL. But flights on its 737s average only two hours, and that cannot take me on global treks . If I lived in Germany, Singapore or Rio, it would be even less interesting because Southwest has chosen to stay focused on the North American market.

Partly because SAP’s competitors did not target it aggressively enough, and partly because its own cloud acquisitions and developed products afforded it a shield, the company has come through the threat of the last five years relatively unscathed. In fact, when you look at the mob of strong competitors that it had to fend off, it has done remarkably well. In those five years, SAP’s customer count has actually increased by 50%. Wall Street has not been as generous to SAP as it has to cloud vendors, but the existential threat that SAP faced has passed."

"My Deal Architect blog focuses on enterprise tech — so I could see what SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, etc. were doing. My New Florence blog, on the other hand, had a broader STEM focus and covered innovations in health tech, clean tech, consumer tech and other emerging markets. In 15 years, it has catalogued over 6,000 posts. It also gave me the ammunition to write a number of books that profiled hundreds of case studies. This contrast between the two blogs allowed me to see several trillion-dollar markets emerge — markets that SAP and its cohorts have mostly ignored. The following eight subsections will describe those missed opportunities:"

" The new rock stars were product designers like Jony Ive at Apple and Yves Behar at fuseproject. Contract manufacturers like Foxconn, Jabil and Flex and design firms like IDEO benefited from this massive new market. But SAP, Oracle or even Indian outsourcers? Not so much. In fact, based on the attractive design increasingly prevalent in consumer markets, enterprise vendors started to be scrutinized for their own poor UX. I have heard Mark Hurd, co-CEO of Oracle, quantify these trends in his presentations. He says consumer spend on technology has caught up to enterprise spend — annually about $1 trillion each — and is growing faster. Even more dramatically, over 80% of enterprise tech is spent on keeping the lights on, not innovation. In contrast, the consumer is getting almost pure innovation for her dollar. What Hurd does not point out is that because of Oracle or at his previous company, HP, or peers like IBM, software maintenance, EDS outsourcing and other charges have been large contributors to the enterprise tech stagnation. They have delivered nowhere near the price/ performance improvements or innovation that consumer tech has seen. It should be no wonder then that the tech the consumer gets at home on Sunday night or in her car is so much better than what she finds at work on Monday morning."

"CRM vendors are increasingly focused on the entire customer experience and CX is the new byword for this sector. And yet, most of these vendors (with exceptions like the Adobe Advertising Cloud and Salesforce’s Datorama acquisition) have missed out on some of the biggest budgets in the CX segment — digital advertising. In the last two decades, digital advertising has grown from near zero to over US$200 billion a year. Eons ago, digital advertising had already outrun print advertising. Now it has overtaken TV advertising. Marketers have moved to programmatic advertising, where machines, more than humans buy advertising. Google, Facebook and increasingly Amazon are the big beneficiaries of this shift in marketing dollars. With the massive growth in digital advertising, Accenture Interactive has aggressively acquired digital agencies, making it now the biggest agency in the world. It would be fair to say it is influencing CX trends as much, if not more, than the early- generation CRM software vendors did. Accenture Interactive has little in common with its traditional IT outsourcing brethren. Accenture’s IT outsourcing group does plenty with ERP and CRM software vendors. Interactive does fine on its own and includes as clients the chief marketing officers (CMOs) of over three-quarters of the Fortune 100. It does not need to chase after Salesforce or SAP."

"GE had talked about the “power of 1%”: 1% in fuel savings for aviation and utilities, 1% of productivity improvement in healthcare, 1% reduction in oil and gas cap-ex, etc. The payback they described was in the hundreds of billions. You hear similar claims from IT vendors, but somehow the tiny 1% factor made it much more believable.

GE has since had a meltdown over issues related to its capital and power business units. But the presentation I saw back in 2012 woke up executives in every industry to the power of listening to machines. And it has led to a batch of smaller vendors like C3 and Uptake as well as other industrial asset companies like Siemens and Schneider Electric that are helping companies realize that 1% payback."

" I hear similar comments from CIOs around the world: Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — who expected them to be so innovative with data centers and networks? This was a technology infrastructure market where IBM, HP with EDS, Oracle with Sun and large telcos around the globe had dominated. They should have been leading this market in investment and innovation, but for years chose not to do so. Now they are play- ing catch-up, and others should give up as Blumberg suggests."

" Other enterprise vendors have similarly struggled to keep up with these industry changes. This has led to opportunities for new players. For example, the fintech sector is fragmented with many promising start-ups and offerings from large institu- tions like Goldman Sachs, but little from the major application vendors. In China, mobile apps like Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat now enable half-a-billion Chinese people to access a dizzying array of financial services to make payments, get loans, monitor investments and credit ratings, pay for taxis and book travel."

"Most enterprise vendors are now talking about AI and ML, but not automation on the shop floor, in logistics or in the oil patch. Also, if you peel their ML onion, you realize many are merely leveraging voice or image recognition technology from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. When you look at the massive amount of image and vocal-accent data their machines had to be trained on, you wonder where enterprise vendors will get their own training data, given that most of it is squirreled away in on-premise customer data centers. They have been creative with branding — Salesforce with Einstein, IBM with Watson and Infor with Coleman (as in Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, the NASA mathematician profiled in the movie Hidden Figures) — but with limited enterprise impact. Indeed, when Salesforce and IBM announced Einstein and Watson would work together, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty chuckled in an interview with Fortune that “It’s good comedy.”"

" Most of these vendors have brilliant technology visionaries: SAP has Dr. Plattner; Oracle has Larry Ellison and Thomas Kurian (till he moved to Google); Salesforce has Parker Harris; Workday has Stan Swete. The list is long. However, they don’t have enough process visionaries who can dream up next-gen shop floors, emergency rooms or warehouses. So you see the industry continue to invest in infrastructure, platforms and tools."

" By 1820, Americans were well ahead in the race against other global powers like the British and Spanish in the effort to dominate the North American continent. Five years ago, it seemed improbable, but by 2020 SAP will have a similar opportunity to lead the enterprise technology “continent.” It is build- ing momentum, and has been going through massive changes."

Be like Bill and Warren and Elon ...

Michael Simmons writes about the 5 hour rule of many successful executives

"Over the last year, I’ve explored the personal history of many widely-admired business leaders like Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg in order to understand how they apply the principles of deliberate practice..... Many of these leaders, despite being extremely busy, set aside at least an hour a day (or five hours a week) over their entire career for activities that could be classified as deliberate practice or learning.... For the leaders I tracked, the 5-hour rule often fell into three buckets: reading, reflection, and experimentation."

If you want to emulate them from the reading angle, you are in luck - as there is a bumper crop of just-released books 

I am a long term member of the Enterprise Irregulars. We are known as a group of analysts and bloggers. Well, almost to make the point that long-form content is still alive and well, 5 of us have just released books. Denis Pombriant and Brian Sommer have already contributed guest columns about their books on this blog. I am interviewing Paul Greenberg about his book next week. Thomas Otter has just finished his dissertation around data privacy and is turning that into a book. You have been reading on this blog excerpts from my new book, SAP Nation 3.0.

That's just the start. I interviewed Bruce Cleveland about his Traction Gap book and will run a two part conversation next week. Similarly, I talked to Tom Bogan at Adaptive (now part of Workday) about their new eBook and will run that interview soon. I hope to talk to Brian Solis about his new book, LifeScale.

Two people I have long admired, Tom Peters and Rick Karlgaard both have books on very different topics, Excellence and Late Bloomers, that I hope to review soon.

Paul says it very well for every author in his book intro

"Sigh. Every time I finish a book, I vow never to write another one. They are so hard. But then, within two to four years, the book is almost obsolete because a sea change of some kind comes along and makes dramatic alterations to institutional thinking, approaches, systems, technologies, and cultures that stirs my blood and makes me get back into it again."

The books I am reading and reviewing cover a wide range of topics from Denis with renewables to Rich with societal expectations. Paul's books are always chock full of interesting anecdotes. My book has plenty of history - that of enterprise tech in last two decades and that of the US westward expansion in the 1800s.

For me, each of my 7 books has opened up opportunities for conversations before, during and after writing the books. I interviewed over a hundred SAP customers and watchers for my new book. After he reviewed the book, I interviewed Ray Lane about what he is seeing now as an investor. These conversations in turn give me ideas for my blogs and make our client services richer. It is a virtuous cycle for my three roles as advisor/analyst/author.

Budding authors now routinely ask for my advice. To me, that is so heartening. And if more readers start following Bill, Warren, Elon and others in their reading habits, it will be so much more.

Brian Sommer guest column: The origin story of "Digital with Impact"

Vinnie’s readers might not know that he and I frequently team up on larger client projects. Yes, we’ve been arch-enemies at times but have done lots of deals and even launched a dot-com together.

About two years ago, we noticed a number of client projects that weren’t coming to fruition. I distinctly remember Vinnie one time opining that “51% of all ERP selections were ending up with a no-decision conclusion”. I was seeing something similar, too.

As time wore on, we individually and collectively encountered many projects of various names that were prematurely being halted. Some of those project names are in the following exhibit.

While Vinnie loves to document transformation successes in his books and his New Florence blogs, I thought more energy was needed around the digital misfires that were all too common.  I wanted to find out why we always seem to read about the same 8-10 digital transformation success stories in the business press and never about the ones that didn’t make it. 

And so began a journey….

Early into this journey, I noticed all manner of projects getting digitally washed with the digital transformation moniker. Many projects were a simple “introduction of digital technology to a process”. This isn’t transformation: it’s incrementalism. I also ran into lots of consultancies and integrators who were rebranding their ERP practices as some sort of transformational journey guides. They weren’t. In fact, little of what I encountered would really qualify as transformational or a project that was going to harness vast amounts of new data types (e.g., IoT sensor data).

But there were the great clients and companies that really wanted the holy grail. Sadly, many of these went looking to their old technology and integration partners for solutions. And, even when Vinnie and I would try to tell them what they were going to find, they just wouldn’t believe us. Radical new solutions and business models may require you get new partners who truly understand the modern digital world.

My research into the space took me to numerous firms, factories, industries, geographies, etc.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many business journals and other reference materials I also poured through. What I learned was that there was no one reason that these projects suffered. But patterns did emerge. And in those patterns, I also saw the way forward for other firms.

The book, Digital With Impact, is designed as an executive guide. It takes readers through four phases that must be completed if a digital transformation project is to be successful.  And, as straightforward as those four phases seem, there are significant pitfalls in each of them.

While this summary won’t do the book justice, these phases are See, Think, Reconcile and Transform. The See phase is where transformation teams need to get out of the office and kick the tires of dozens or hundreds of new innovations. They need to see what the art of the possible is with new technology, new business models and emerging competition. The Think phase is where the team starts designing radically new (not incrementally improved) processes, businesses and more. The Reconcile phase looks at the company’s resources (e.g., employees, skills, capital, plant & equipment) and compares them to the new project requirements. Just because a firm can dream up something big doesn’t mean they can get it done. The Transform piece is something a lot people actually have experience with; however, the scale of these initiatives could make even the best people wince.

Digital misfires often occurred when firms tried to skip or shortcut one or more of these phases. Surprisingly, many firms flat out tried to go straight to transform without doing any real research or developing new designs. I just can’t emphasize enough that firms must do the work if they ever want to get the rewards.

Vinnie and I even made some visits to non-clients to assess their digital savvy. Amazingly, some didn’t see any need or urgency to change. Some, incorrectly, think they can get to a new (but undefined) future state on their timetable without any concern re: net-new competitors. You had to be there for some of these meetings!

Somewhere in the middle of this work, Vinnie and I met in Chicago to spend a day or two documenting exercises and activities that companies could use to work through these phases. Since then, I added more exercises and experimented with several of these with real business people. Not surprisingly, many people are very close to their job/company and find ideating radically new business concepts to be hard to do. I’m starting to think my business cards need to reflect my real value add to clients: pusher. I push people out of their familiar comfortable business world and into one that is unlike anything in their past.

I finished up the manuscript a few weeks ago and started to shepherd it through the publishing process. I got some great feedback on the manuscript from a number of tech leaders and colleagues. And, thankfully, their feedback was positive and I even snuck a few of their better suggestions into the book itself.

If this book helps just one team be successful, it was worth it.

Brian

p.s., a big thanks to Vinnie on his pushing to get me to write this.

Denis Pombriant: Green New Deal is a tipping point

Many of you may know Denis Pombriant as a CRM analyst. He is way deeper than that as his bio says "Denis Pombriant lives in the Boston area and writes about the enterprise software market. Denis specializes in disruptive innovation and its effects on business and markets. He has been researching and writing about climate change for a decade."

He has recently finished another book, this time on sustainability and I invited him to write a guest column about it.

I consider Denis a friend - besides analyzing technology vendors, we share a love for history and good food. On this topic, I am ambivalent - I catalog many renewable innovations on the New Florence blog, but renewable energy has repeatedly disappointed, and so we need to show it tough love not continue to write blank checks as I wrote here. However, he makes many points that merit healthy discussion   

With the Green New Deal, the national discussion about pollution and global warming has taken on the cast of an economic challenge and this should be seen as a watershed. But what kind?

As I write in my book, “The Age of Sustainability: The Space Race, Disruptive Innovation, and Ecosystem Services,” the science and technology aspects of solving climate change are already well in view. What’s missing is a discussion of economics.

Solving climate change is like solving a Rubik’s Cube. You have to solve all sides at once else you could end up with one perfect side while the others still look like a dog’s breakfast. Solving “the cube” requires minute tradeoffs and negotiations in one’s mind while iterating towards a solution and much the same can be said of climate change. To solve climate change, we need interlocking solutions for carbon abatement, energy provision, and economics.

Up to the present moment a discussion of climate change might likely include controlling emissions and the tacit assumption that our energy paradigm, our reliance on fossil fuels, can somehow remain intact. But both are flawed assumptions. There’s already too much carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, enough to cause severe weather conditions that are getting worse. So, controlling emissions will, at best, slow down the rate of increase but that’s not a solution.

Also, our reliance on fossil fuels is nearing an end, something few want to discuss. But we haven’t found net new oil anywhere on earth since 2003 and the current boom in hydraulic fracking may help extract oil from existing fields, but it’s not a discovery tool. Experts tell different but related stories about oil. For instance,

A 2013 article in The Guardian states, “Official data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), US Energy Information Administration (EIA), International Monetary Fund (IMF), among other sources, showed that conventional oil [production] had most likely peaked around 2008.”¹⁹ The article quotes Dr. Richard G. Miller, who worked for BP from 1985 until retiring in 2008, saying, “We need new production equal to a new Saudi Arabia every 3 to 4 years to maintain and grow supply. . . .New discoveries have not matched consumption since 1986. We are drawing down on our reserves, even though reserves are apparently climbing every year. Reserves are growing due to better technology in old fields, raising the amount we can recover—but production is still falling at 4.1% p.a. [per annum].”²⁰

–The Age of Sustainability

In addition, the 2014 BP Annual Report stated that the Earth had a 53-year supply of oil remaining in the ground (proven reserves) if extracted at current rates. At some point soon, we’ll need to face the reality that we need an energy plan B because it will take time–probably all of those remaining years–to convert to renewable energy sources. So, we’re faced with the unpleasant reality that the current energy paradigm is doing significant harm to the ecosystem we live in, and it’s running out. Humanity is cornered but there are ways out of this maze.

Also keep in mind that we only burn about 60 percent of the fossil fuels we extract the rest goes into products. For instance, there are 500 pharmaceuticals based on coal and it’s an important part of steelmaking. Natural gas is used extensively in making polymers like plastics and other materials, and most carbon sources can be used in making fertilizers, rubber, paints, varnishes, glass, cement, and much more. Petroleum is also the raw material for making jet fuel, something we’ll always need for air travel and defense. So, the fossil fuels that are left are rapidly becoming too valuable to burn in most applications.

Enter economics

The question of economics is becoming important for two reasons. First, it is the gateway to a discussion of writing down the significant investments in the fossil fuel paradigm. This amounts to many trillions of dollars in global ventures supporting oilfields, ocean-going drilling platforms, pipelines, refineries, mines, tankers and more. Most of them will become worthless over the next half century as our energy diet inevitably shifts. There are also storage facilities, liquified natural gas terminals, and distribution channels that we are barely thinking about.

Just consider pipelines. In the US alone there are more than 185,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines; 320,000 miles of gas transmission pipelines and more than 2 million miles of gas distribution pipelines bringing natural gas to homes and businesses.

We need a serious discussion about how to write down all of this sunk investment without causing a global recession.

The second economic question worth considering is the so-called Green New Deal, a call for government involvement in all of this. Certainly, there’s a role for government in this massive transition. For example, supporting road construction to both repair the existing infrastructure and to prepare us for electric driving makes sense and is a traditional government responsibility. But there doesn’t appear to be a good reason for government nudging, or investment in, such things as electric vehicle manufacture for instance.

Most major car companies have already announced plans to deliver electric vehicles to the market as soon as this year. It’s a long list including the usual suspects like Ford and GM and most Japanese and German manufacturers including Porsche and BMW. But also, smaller companies like Volvo and the super luxury maker Aston Martin have all made commitments to building electric vehicles.

K-waves

So the Green New Deal exists in a very different economic time and space than its namesake, New Deal from the Great Depression and some contrarians are already griping about the significant costs that could be involved, perhaps rightly so. The original New Deal formed a Keynesian economic stimulus, an approach that put money into the pockets of working people to get a stalled economy moving again. But that’s not the case today.

To understand this economic moment, you need to understand the normal ebbs and flows of modern capitalism that began in the Industrial Revolution. Research shows that on a schedule of 50 to 60 years, the capitalist economy goes through a cycle of invention, distribution, consolidation and decline based on one or more significant disruptive innovations.

For instance, there was an age of steam and steel in which steel-making and steam engines powered the economy. When we developed steam engines small enough to fit in boats and on rails, we ignited a huge transportation disruption and we learned to build those engines out of steel while laying down steel railroads that spanned the continent. That age, as all ages do, eventually commoditized. We still rely on steam to generate electricity and we still build skyscrapers and bridges from steel, but neither drives the economy as they once did.

Today we live at the tail end of the age of information and telecommunications. From the time the silicon chip was patented in 1959 until the present, that innovation has changed or inspired such industries as computers, software, cloud computing, handheld devices, and social media, to name a few. Communications is digitized and from POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) grew the Internet and communications satellites and much more.

The next age

K-waves take shape because a technological disruption ideally fits the demands of an age. Steam power served the power needs of an industrializing society, railroads and the telegraphy system they brought along, knitted together a continent-girding republic. Computers and modern telephony enabled the information management needs of modern business and finance.

The next K-wave will focus on the energy needs of a world population that will reach 10 billion by mid-century. Some of those needs are well established such as transportation but others are only now emerging. Consider fresh water for example. Many countries are experiencing the early climate-linked effects of desertification when insufficient rainfall and irrigation make farming difficult or impossible. Other regions are experiencing too much rain and flooding during critical planting seasons. Historically, we’ve regarded fresh water as an ecosystem service, something that nature provided and that we didn’t need to think very hard about but that’s changing.

Syria provides an important lesson. Drought hampered wheat farming in Syria, forcing agricultural people to migrate to cities where crowding and resource scarcity contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with their government. The resulting civil war is ongoing, but the diaspora of millions of Syrians has destabilized governments throughout Europe and beyond. The planet cannot afford for this to normalize.

So, some of the new energy inputs will need to be dedicated to things we've taken for granted like provisioning fresh water and providing better irrigation support for dry farming regions. We’ll also need to manage water where it is hyper abundant. There will be other resource needs that we traditionally got from nature that we will need energy to satisfy too.

Final thoughts

The great thing about K-waves is that the seeds of the next one are planted in the present though we might not immediately realize their significance. The first computers were developed in secret near the end of WWII or just after. They were room-filling things made of vacuum tubes and they were hand soldered together. The tubes gave off enormous amounts of heat too. They were the impractical playthings of geeky scientists and few people thought they would lead to pocket size devices that are tens of thousands of times more powerful today.

Our handheld devices represent what could be the ultimate commoditization of computing. There may be a lot of life left in the information technology sector but, like steel-making, it is becoming simply part of the economy and not its driver.

The new economic driver is likely sustainability. The term sums up the most important needs humanity faces in this century. That need translates into demand and with the global population trend this demand will likely translate into the greatest jobs creating, industry producing, and wealth generating opportunity in human history. Failing to take advantage of this opportunity could also spell doom for our species. But history shows we’ve always made the right decisions in similar situations. The opportunities only come around every 50 to 60 years and

SAP Nation 3.0 Excerpts: A tapestry of customers and strategies

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and for pre-order in the Kindle version. As with my earlier books, I will excerpt roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs. While there is plenty in the book about what Brian Sommer calls "shale-fracking customers' wallets" and Jarret Pazahanick calls the "Wild West" of the SAP SI ecosystem, the bulk of the book is customer case studies.

I personally interviewed the majority of executives who are quoted. They spent countless hours talking to me, reviewing their transcripts (nearly 1,500 printed pages) and their book profiles (distilled down to 250 book pages). For a handful of other customers, I extracted the text from videos of their presentations at SAP and other events or from their quotes in articles.

They are spread across 4 customer categories I used for the book - Risk-Takers, Modernizers, Diversifiers and Bystanders. They represent over 20 industries and over 15 countries, and talk about experiences across a wide range of relatively new SAP products - S/4HANA, C/4HANA, SCP, IBP, AIN and also Salesforce, Workday, Plex, Rimini Street and other surround products and services. They are balanced - critical of SAP where needed. In book, I am also critical of SAP's competitors for their own missed opportunities.

Across these and other customers I noticed a wide range of customer strategies

"Here is a sampling:

• Ring-fencing ECC with many of SAP's own cloud properties, as with SuccessFactors at Terumo BCT and components of C/4 at Pregis.
• Two-tier deployments with SAP ByD and S/4 in their subsidiaries.
• Migration from ECC to S/4 on-premise at Johnsonville Sausage.
• New implementations in the S/4 Public Cloud as at a restaurant chain.
• New implementations of the SAP Analytics Cloud as at the Executive Huddle at the San Francisco 49ers.
• Trying out relatively new on-premise, but impactful SAP functionality like IBP at Louisiana-Pacific.
• Trying out Leonardo ML pilot projects as at Costco and Queensland OSR.
• Developing new ISV functionality on SCP as Vertex has done with their indirect tax app.
• Moving to new licensing and hosting models like Bombardier with IBM.

We also are seeing blends from this growing toolbox of strategies. So, some are moving to S/4 in the cloud, and at the same time have shifted to TPM for ECC support while they gradually migrate. GEBHARDT has been implementing a variety of SAP cloud products around its ECC on-prem implementation. Additionally, it has developed a customer portal and set of predictive maintenance services using Leonardo IoT and AIN capabilities.  

Given the wide proliferation of products and terminology in SAP World, my firm, Deal Architect, recommends (and often facilitates for clients) an intense offsite meeting to help customers take a fresh look at SAP and the broader market. That confab should cover and assess the fit of many of the strategies above, while also evaluating internal and external talent and fit with emerging technology trends."

More excerpts to come over the next few weeks....

Oracle: How about an Application Analyst summit?

It's no secret. I have written in several posts that to me the highest value vendor event is an analyst summit. I feel like I am intruding on customer time at user conferences and similar events.

Workday started off the trend with its first analyst summit almost a decade ago. Since then, the quality of such summits has kept improving. Plex often combines them with customer plant visits or allows us to mingle in a Customer Advisory Board meeting. SAP recently combined their analyst summit with the Qualtrics X4 event. Other vendors have their interesting twists - lots of access to executives, customer presence, often an interesting social activity.

I raved about a cloud summit Oracle hosted four years ago. For some reason, Oracle has moved away from such summits - it has short 3-4 hour ones which seem hurried. In fairness, they may hosted longer ones I have not been invited to. Unlike other vendors, Oracle persists with a "caste system" and has different agendas for those they consider "independent analysts" versus those from my former employer, Gartner or other bigger firms.

So most of my Oracle exposure has come from OOW or its thematic events.  It would be nice if they would facilitate connecting us with customers, executives and partners at such events. That has not happened much in recent years.

As a result, I have not traveled to Oracle events in the last year. In retrospect, looking at the agenda, I should have gone to MBX/MCX events last week. Oracle suggested I at least watch 4 streamed keynotes. 6 hours is an investment I will gladly make especially if I don't have to put up the wear and tear of travel.

So, I watch the first MCX keynote here.  First 25 minutes are marching bands and cute Ann Handley talk. Then come buzzwords about the "Experience Economy". Finally after 50 minutes, there's a customer on stage. Judy Sims, CMO of Oracle does a nice job interviewing Jennifer Storms, CMO of NBC Sports Group for about 20 minutes. Then more announcements. No product demos. Not a strong start I say. My grade for this segment = C. Without the NBC Sports customer segment it would have been be a D. 

On to the next keynote - this time from the MBX track. Marching band again and introductory comments for first 15 minutes. Charlene Li of Altimeter then talks about "Disruption". She is very good on other topics, but was a bit flat here. When I hear disruption, I expect example after example a la Clayton Christensen. Around 40.00, Steve Miranda of Oracle takes over. He spend a few minutes on history of change in enterprise tech. Starts demo around 50.00 - does a credible job, but focuses mostly on digital assistants and ML. Around 60.00, Steve interviews an executive from Caesars Entertainment. Around 75.00, an Accenture partner discusses some jargon - mercifully for a consultant, he does not have 80 slides in tow. He then interviews an exec from Willis Towers Watson. Most of the focus in the session has been on hcm and financial processes. Nothing on SCM or operational processes. My score for this session = B

On to the next MCX keynote - to me, the best of the four keynotes I watched. I enjoyed the tap dancing and hand jiving that kicks it off. Around 15.00,there is some product focus with Oracle thoughts on Design. Then, it gets better. Co-CEO Mark Hurd talks about sales and marketing trends at Oracle, the 80 customer "touches" it takes to sell enterprise applications, his efforts to recruit salespeople straight from campus. He was initially mocked for the idea but Oracle has persisted and now has 10,000 such recruits, many in inside selling. That is followed by an interview with Andrew Sinclair of Motorola Solutions. Very impressive description of how the company supports emergency services around the world.

My score for this session = A-. Would have been higher with more Oracle product exposure

Finally, the second MBX keynote. At around 10.00 Willis Sparks of Eurasia Group covers geopolitical trends. He is very good. At 40.00, Mark takes over. He presents his view on the industry. Nice if you have not heard him - but I have heard many variations of this from Mark. Around 70.00 he brings customer executives on stage - Hormel Foods, Adventist Health for 10 minutes each. Again more focus on financial and hr processes. Finally, a half-hour session on digital trends by Deloitte.

My score for this session = B- . It would be even lower without the Willis Sparks segment.  

4 webcasts - little over 6 hours. Not enough product or customer exposure, a little too much time given to partners. I listen to Jon Reed and Brian Sommer's podcast and read Bob Ferrari's posts from the event. They do not appear to have picked up on much new functionality in Oracle products. Brian comments the event was "crawling with chatbots"

After my research for SAP Nation 3.0, I believe SAP's competitors need to step up. In Oracle's case I would love to see it showcase much more intensely how its applications are growing in function points across geographies, industries and processes. Mark keeps predicting 80% of production apps will be in the cloud by 2025. After 15 years of Fusion and countless acquisitions, Oracle still mostly showcases CRM, HR and financial apps. Unless this changes, it will have a very small share of what Mark is projecting for the 2025 cloud enterprise apps market.    

Oracle, how about a 2 day analyst summit focused on your applications? Focus on SCM, operational, vertical applications you are working on. Allow us to spend some time with your application visionaries and customers who are pushing the boundaries of your applications. Entertainment and partner sessions, optional. 

I will gladly travel for that. How about it, Oracle?   

Update: someone just reminded me Oracle NDAs and admin processes can be pretty onerous. I suspect even if Oracle decides to host a summit I request above, there may need to be some negotiations before analysts decide to show.

SAP Nation 3.0: Early Book Reviews

I got very nice feedback from tech executives I respect who had seen early copies of the book

"Don't be fooled by the title - the book is not just about SAP. It is about drama in enterprise computing. As Vinnie points out, few would have speculated in the late '90s that Apple, near dead or Google, not born yet would have many times revenue of SAP or its peers.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have a front row seat overlooking this market both as executive and as investor. With new startups and developer communities reshaping the industry, SAP’s opportunity to reshape itself is still on the table, but only if it is willing to take a zero-sum approach. Platform vendors have to use their market cap and sales organizations to offer new services.  Otherwise Amazon, Google and Microsoft will within a few years position to operate enterprise workloads, anywhere at any cost. Vinnie deftly brings out the trajectory at SAP and its enviable blue chip customer base, but also its many missed opportunities."

Raymond J. Lane,

Managing Partner, Greatpoint Ventures.

Previous Leadership/Board Roles at Oracle, HP, Kleiner Perkins and Carnegie Mellon U.     

“A prolific writer and prescient observer of technology trends, Vinnie Mirchandani has produced an intriguing look at the many forces shaping enterprise applications today.”

Francisco D’Souza

Vice Chairman and CEO

Cognizant

"In previous books, Vinnie has painted a rather dim view of SAP as an expensive, back-office system, grudgingly accepted by business as a necessary evil. The fast changing and rapidly expanding digital landscape in the enterprise now presents incumbents like SAP a fresh opportunity to move into front-line operations in many industries. Will they be able to dominate this new digital space or will they squander the opportunity? This book does an excellent job of examining this question, taking a somewhat optimistic tone about their chances of success supported by a number of examples. Time will tell how the story ends."

Phiroz Darukhanavala (Daru)

CTO , BP (Retired)

"We are in the midst of massive digital transformation.  Software companies are not immune.  The shift from on-premises to cloud and now the shift from clouds to data driven digital networks will leave some vendors behind as the industry consolidates and evolves into digital duopolies.  Vinnie’s book looks at the shift and asks key questions about how SAP and other software vendors will make this transition.  More importantly, he raises the question on how the software market will look like post a financial engineered world,  asking what strategies they should take, where they should invest, and whom they should partner with.  A must read for those who want to know how the software market will evolve in the next decade."

R “Ray” Wang

Founder and CEO of Constellation Research

Author of Disrupting Digital Business

As usual, Dennis Howlett was the first to publish a media review on one of my books. His summary "SAP Nation 3.0 is very much a book of its time that will surprise, delight, infuriate and more." 

Dennis did not, however, get the first review in on Amazon. Marco gets that honor.

"This is the third volume in Mirchandani’s unfurling saga of the SAP software juggernaut and its ecosystem of clients, app providers and other partners. As in the previous two installments, he manages to *animate* the enterprise computing space like no other commentator I’ve encountered. His secret weapon is that he is attuned to – and integrates throughout the book – all the key aspects of the Big Picture: the technological dimension, the business side, user experience, market behavior, vendor dynamics, etc. While this approach succeeds at dramatizing this ongoing technology/business story, and even instilling an element of intrigue – will the software giant rally and prevail? – Mirchandani does not shoehorn the narrative into any pat conclusions, but rather lets the dozens of sharp voices of the interviewees tell the tale in their own words. He subtly emphasizes what the subjects bring up, such as how SAP has or hasn’t succeeded at addressing individual vertical markets or cloud deployment and what styles the firm uses in negotiations, etc. As with any picture drawn with great detail, the eventual image is loaded with complexity and yet it is coherent. This detail is culled from many dozens of diverse participants from throughout the business and technology value chain … and for anyone with a stake in enterprise or application software, the insights they continually offer are gold nuggets. Perhaps the book’s biggest takeaway – and the main reason this work could be vital to the whole C suite, not just CIOs and CFOs – is the myriad ways that technology is driving innovation and business success."

There will be plenty more reviews. I am sure there will be reaction from SAP, its partners and its competitors.

As one of the sections in the book says "It's not your Dad's SAP". I see a lot of one-dimensional commentary on SAP - related to rumors of its recent restructuring, about its Indirect Access stance, its SI ecosystem. To me, SAP Nation is a fascinating, complex, evolving organism. It deserves a fresh look every few years. I hope I start that process this time around for a number of readers and with customer executives I advise. 

Here comes the sun...and the book

It is a glorious Spring day and I heard the Beatles this morning - this song cheers me up no matter what time of the year. Then I got an email from Amazon "Congratulations, the paperback edition of your book "SAP Nation 3. 0: Manifest Destiny" is live in the Amazon Store." 

It's available on the amazon.com site here. It may take a couple of days for Amazon sites around the world to show as available. This is the print-on-demand version and works best for orders in small quantities. If you want 25+ copies at a much better unit price please send me a note. Corporate Graphics is running a bulk job and those copies should be available by the end of April.

The Kindle eBook version should be out by early April. You can pre-order here.  Many other channels are serviced by Ingram-Spark and they also have a print-on-demand version uploaded.

Whew! As the Beatles sang "Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here".

This had the longest gestation period of all my books. I wanted to explore many dimensions of the ever-changing SAP Nation. I started the book thinking it would mostly be S/4HANA focused - that gets plenty of coverage, but so do many of SAP's new products including C/4HANA, SCP, AIN and IBP. My last few books have averaged 250 pages - several readers told me they liked books they could finish on a long flight. I broke that rule for this one - it is 400 pages long. I would be remiss to shortchange the 35 case studies which make up 250 pages in the book. As it is, their raw transcripts are five times as long.

I personally hope lots of customer executives read what their peers told me over the countless hours they spent with me. And that they revisit their view of SAP and their own investments in software and talent.

"Given the wide proliferation of products and terminology in SAP World, my firm, Deal Architect, recommends (and often facilitates for clients) an intense offsite meeting to help customers take a fresh look at SAP and the broader market. That confab should cover and assess the fit of many of the strategies above, while also evaluating internal and external talent and fit with emerging technology trends."

In the meantime, thank you to the village which helped bring the book to  life. As the lads sang "I say, it's all right". 

Conversations with ASUG

Merriam-Webster defines ecology as a "branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments". If ecologists were to study today's software vendors they would be fascinated not just by how the core organism functions but by the tapestry of their environments. Their halo includes layers of resellers, systems integrators, hosting firms, ISV partners, platform participants, developer communities, analysts and other influencers, media and other watchers. And then you have user groups. SAP alone lists 38 user groups around the globe.

In my long career as analyst, advisor and author I have interacted with most of this "surround" environment around software vendors. Honestly, the one element with which I had the least interaction is user groups. I am on mailing lists of a few, and I periodically reach out to their leaders but never could get a continuous conversation going. I blame myself for not trying harder.

That changed last year. I approached Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG to see if we could talk every few weeks. Geoff's wonderful assistant, Kim made sure we didn't ignore each other. She would diligently reschedule calls if needed and made sure we talked. So talk we did, openly, off the record about what we were seeing in the SAP ecology. 

As I was writing SAP Nation 3.0, I asked Geoff if he could describe from his vantage point, on the record, how SAP and ASUG have changed in the last 5 years. I liked his first draft so much that I asked him if he could reshape it as a foreword to the book. I am glad he agreed. The book is about customer conversations - 35 case studies over 250 pages make up bulk of book, so the foreword from the head of one of SAP's biggest user groups is like the cherry on top of the dessert.

Here is an extract from his section

"As SAP has changed to become more cloud-centric, ASUG has changed, too. We invested in new ways of learning and connecting like-minded SAP customers and partners, and we launched new programs and services all with the goal of helping our customers maximize the return on their SAP investments.

The process has taken time and energy, and key to it has been the involvement of our members, including our 12-person Board of Directors and more than 300 volunteers. Which leads me to an example from 2017-2018, one that is emblematic of how much the relationship has changed and how it’s benefited SAP customers. The topic? SAP licensing and indirect access (IA) of SAP software."

It went further. He introduced me to several executives from his Board who ended up describing their companies and their SAP investments. Very honest feedback about the software and the relationship with SAP - on the record, as you will see in the book.   

Tom Wailgum, part of analyst relations at ASUG, facilitated those interviews. He later told me 19 of the companies profiled in the case studies (most I had identified from other sources) are ASUG members. He also identified a few journalists I have since sent a media review copy of the book. He also shares with me periodic ASUG research like he did this week about the "State of the Community". The extract below is a small fraction of the long infograph - check here for full graph. Drill down here and you get more detail below the infographic. Even then, it is a very high level summarization of the nitty gritty of what users do on a daily basis. And the conversations they have with each other. That's what ASUG facilitates -  as their site says

"From the outside, we’re a huge organization of more than 100,000 members from thousands of companies—from global enterprises to startups—spanning traditional and emerging industries across North America. But the real power of ASUG lies in informal partnerships formed through knowledge-sharing and commitment to a common cause."

In the book, couple of CIOs talk about how they find it easier to find answers to their questions by networking within ASUG than going through their contacts at SAP. ASUG is a mother lode of information that I hope I get to mine further in coming years.

Having had this experience with ASUG, I hope I can open up conversations with some of SAP's other user groups around the world. Even more, I would love to start conversing with user groups of other vendors. That is if they can be as open as Geoff and Tom have been at ASUG.

 

Oracle Applications: a new chapter?

Steve Miranda, EVP, Applications Product Development at Oracle briefed analysts about this week's co-located Modern Business Experience (MBX) and Modern Customer Experience (MCX) in Las Vegas. He also blogged about it: "we are bringing together marketing, sales, and service with HR, finance, and supply chain, because we are seeing more and more similarities between each area."

On the earnings call last week, Mark Hurd, co-CEO of Oracle glowed about the applications business

"Fusion Apps, 35% up, Fusion ERP revenue was up 47% organically. NetSuite revenue was up 28%."

Steve is one of the nicest guys in the software industry. He is also one of the smartest application architects in the industry. Mark has run some of the most sophisticated supply chains and salesforces in the tech industry. I have talked to him about complex business processes and applications. I know they know business applications cold.  

And yet when I was researching my new book, SAP Nation 3.0, I repeatedly saw Oracle miss out over the last two decades on opportunity after opportunity to become the dominant enterprise application vendor.

"Oracle continues to dominate the database market. By many measures, Oracle should also by now be the undisputed leader in enterprise applications....Starting with the PeopleSoft acquisition in 2004, Oracle went on its own binge, claiming it was time for "industry consolidation." They made significant acquisitions: PeopleSoft for US$10.3 billion, NetSuite for US$9.3 billion, Siebel for US$5.6 billion, Micros for US$5.3 billion and Hyperion for US$3.3 billion. Other investments like i-flex, Portal, Primavera and Retek brought them banking, telecom, complex project and retail functionality, respectively.  By 2006, they were loudly celebrating that they were "halfway there" in developing their own next-gen Fusion cloud applications....For all that, Oracle has done just OK. It has seemed more intent in going after Amazon for the cloud infrastructure and platform markets ...Around business applications, Oracle has focused more on Workday and Salesforce with HCM and CRM functionality, and not so much in manufacturing or other verticals where SAP has greater presence.....While it has launched an exciting autonomous version of its database—which it calls "self-driving"—it has not brought a similar level of automation to enterprise applications. "

Mark explained during the q&a during the earnings call that he is not that concerned that his on-prem customer base is not moving to the cloud. He said "our user base actually knows our cloud roadmap. They actually have confidence in our R&D, they know we’re going to be there to migrate them when they want to be there. They actually have less of a sense of urgency in many cases to move than the (competitors like Deltek and Lawson) you’re describing, Brad, because they’re in much more desperate situations without a roadmap, without knowing how they’re going to get from here to there, knowing their competitors are beginning to move."

In the book, I  point out that after two decades of cloud applications (Netsuite was founded in 1998), we actually now have an industry crisis. CIOs are reporting it is increasingly difficult to recruit talent to their on-prem environments. The customizations and technical debt around those applications are increasingly a security and compliance risk. And they have little hope of seeing the benefits of better UX, multi-tenancy, machine learning or IoT any time soon. 

In this post I called for SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft and other on-prem apps vendors to "tilt the bell curve". Of their own customers - not worry about those of competitors.

Mark also said "Our vertical revenue was up 38% and our annualized revenue in the verticals is now over $800 million." I would love to see details - to me vertical applications do operational stuff - merchandising in retail, claims processing in insurance, net metering in utilities, support robotics and wearables on the shop floor etc. If it has those, why is Oracle not aggressively showcasing these capabilities? I like the fact that they are bringing marketing and hcm executives under the same tent in Vegas, but why not operational executives in various industries? I asked Steve and he basically said the risk was the agenda would become unwieldy. On the other hand, that would hugely differentiate them from what Workday, Salesforce, SAP and others can offer today or in the foreseeable future. Also, in the last wave of ERP and CRM projects customers mostly implemented back office functionality and showed poor payback. This time around many want to start with operational areas.

Under NDA, Steve described exciting new features in the horizontal applications they will showcase in Vegas this week. Every time I listen to Steve and Mark, I get excited about Oracle's application future. 

But when I step away and look at what could have been, I turn cautious.  The industry could use a much more focused and vibrant Oracle applications business. Are we seeing the start of a new chapter with the new event format in Vegas? I hope they can turn my caution to enthusiasm.

SAP Nation 3.0: Those who ignore history.....

The book is available for advance purchase on Amazon here. I am sending out media review copies this week. Over the next few weeks, as I do with all my books, I will share about 5%  of the 400 pages in posts on this blog.

I recently summarized the book for a SAP Executive. I told him there were three waves of history in the book:

a) The ongoing turnaround at SAP since the first volume of SAP Nation 5 years ago has been impressive and in many ways unrewarded by Wall Street or analysts. Most of the 35 customer case studies talk about SAP products that did not exist/had not been acquired. Many of the SAP executives I profile in the book have a sense of urgency I find lacking in its competitors.

b) When you look at the industry from a 20 year lens, however, SAP does not look that impressive. Many, many missed application opportunities while SAP has been distracted with platforms and databases. I also cover plenty of "unforced errors" SAP has made like its Indirect Access licensing policy. As the book says "Few of us would have speculated that Apple, near dead or Google, not born yet would have many times SAP's annual revenue. The market is fragmented—waiting for fast followers who missed out on the first wave of opportunities."

c) I also profile the race in the North American Continent in the 1800s. There is plenty for SAP and its cohorts to learn from how that history evolved. Two extracts from book:

• In 1800, the United States, then the original 13 colonies, was a young, skinny country. Two-thirds of the population lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. You could have placed bets on who would win the race for North America—would it be the Americans, the Spanish, the British, the French, or maybe even the Russians or the Dutch? Over the next few decades, Americans had the biggest market share.
• (The Louisiana Purchase) was a major risk for President Jefferson but it doubled the real estate of the young United States. What if the population had just yawned and clung to the Atlantic Coast and not moved to the new territories? That's a good analogy to what SAP faces. It has new real estate in the form of S/4, Leonardo, SCP, HANA and its cloud properties, and yet the majority of its 400,000 customers are clinging to the "coast" of legacy products. Helping them migrate is SAP's major short-term opportunity.

In 400 pages, I cover a lot of ground - actually, the customers in the case studies do quite a bit of work for me. If you want to hear gossip about SAP's recent restructuring you wont find too much in the book. Nor will you find too much adulation about the $8 billion investment in Qualtrics. Both are there as milestones in the journey.

There is plenty on how the enterprise software industry continues to morph.  And as I ask in the book

"Are they ready to issue the Manifest Destiny clarion call to go from "sea to shining sea"? The continent of enterprise computing is waiting to be tamed."  

Look forward to your input as various formats of the book become available for purchase throughout April.