Dennis has announced he is retiring. I knew it was coming - he would often fret he did not have enough time for his large and growing family - but I would have bet it would be towards end of this year. Or next. I am glad I managed to record a couple of episodes with him in the last few weeks.
We had our fair share of disagreements - show me someone who has been spared that by Dennis? :) But I admired several things about him and let me share a few things you may not know about him
a) he is a Polymath
Every few months I would learn something new about him. Listen to his bio in the excerpt below - it will blow your mind. And he does not even mention here what he has been up to recently - building and painting 1/35 scale armored vehicles (three in progress and 18 more in his 'stash' he says)
b) a true blogging pioneer.
It hit me when Dennis, Frank Scavo and I recorded a Christmas episode. We took a walk down memory lane - see excerpt below. Each of us has been blogging for 15+ years. He was a purer play than either of us. Frank and I had advisory distractions. I spent a fair amount of time on my many books. He dedicated the last phase of his career to making enterprise blogging and the independent analyst model a respected source of industry influence.
c) he made time for so many
He was a whisperer to so many in the industry - check out the flattering comments on his LinkedIn post where he announced his retirement. I was constantly amazed how he could find the time. I certainly benefited - he reviewed every one of my books.
So, Dennis, thanks for the many laughs and cries. Enjoy time with the family and your train rides.
But please come back and record more episodes from time to time. I want the opportunity to say it a few more times - GFY :)
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I had a chance to catch up with Darren Roos, CEO of IFS and he gave me a sneak preview on the IFS Cloud which it will launch on March 10.
It's been good to see IFS use the pandemic to accelerate its focus on enterprise service and asset management (see this episode with use cases like Rolls Royce), the investment in its cloud and also its rebranding. CMO Oliver Pilgerstorfer provided details of the branding exercise in this episode here.
Following my conversation with Darren in video below is a snippet of the vibrant displays IFS has at Times Square in New York, Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Piccadilly Circus in London.
More details on the cloud offering to follow after the launch in a couple of weeks.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
SAP hosted for analysts a Industry Cloud briefing last week. I have excerpted below about 15 minutes from an hour long session.
Peter Maier, President Industries and Customer Advisory kicks it off and I liked that he gave several examples of new industry functionality. SAP (and in fairness other large vendors) often talk about industry qualifications in generalities and about past efforts ignoring that every industry turned upside down last year.
I had interviewed him last May and you can definitely see progress.
At 6.50, Peter and Kai Finck, who heads Industry Cloud Program respond to a question about industries where SAP has seen most momentum in the last year.
At 9.15, Svend Wittern, who heads Industry Strategy and Peter explain that business networks where SAP plays a big role with horizontal functionality from Ariba, Concur and others are increasingly moving to industry versions.
At 12.18 Ralph Stemler, who heads Industry Ecosystems mentions that strategy firms like McKinsey may be partnering with SAP and getting into the IP business with their industry knowledge
At 13.30 Steffen Schad, Product Manger, SAP Business Technology Platform talks about how partners and customers are starting to use the platform (including recent acquisitions of Signavio and AppGyer) to build industry functionality
Overall, I liked the momentum Peter showcased, but I still don't think SAP is thinking small enough. It has missed the boat on so much demand we saw for vertical edge apps like telemedicine, distance learning in higher ed, warehouse automation, last mile delivery in retail and food service, virtual open houses in real estate in the last year. It is still focused on big "intelligent enterprise" type positioning which will take years to flesh out.
Also, in the next briefing, it would be nice to hear much more specifically about how strategy firms (and the traditional SI partners) and low code tools are helping develop specific industry functionality. Similar about how RISE with SAP is being verticalized.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Today is a huge day for IFS with a major rebranding exercise. Oliver Pilgerstorfer, CMO gave me a sneak preview of the many dimensions of the project. They considered changing the name IFS, but kept it and instead added an energetic new logo, a new typeface, a focus on the tagline of "Moment of Service" (with their growing service management and enterprise asset management/maintenance focus) and a vibrant new shade of purple. They also have a major launch of the IFS Cloud in a couple of weeks
The video below leads off with that "reveal", then with my session with Oliver. In the middle of the interview are high-visibility displays they have at 3 iconic places around the world - Times Square in New York, Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo and Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Piccadilly Circus in London will have the big finale next week.
At the end of the interview is an asset which focuses on the Moment of Service theme.
I have been to each of the 4 display locations in the last few years. With the pandemic curtailing travel, the locales brought back to me "wow" memories - as I am sure it will for many of IFS's global customers.
The whole thing is very tastefully done. I hope IFS sets up a gift store with swag to showcase the new art and colors. I definitely would like a couple of items!
In the meantime, kudos to Oliver and his team. Amazing amount of work - particularly with having to navigate all the quarantine restrictions around the world
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I attended a few sessions at the Adobe Developers Live event and have excerpted about 20 minutes from two very interesting sessions, both hosted by Bertrand Delacretaz, and involving Principal scientists and senior software engineers at the company.
The first is from a q&a with Roy Fielding, co-author of the HTTP protocol and inventor of REST. He talks about the evolution of HTTP from early days ( the whole www was a grand total of 48 pages when he started!) to current work on QUIC & HTTP/3. I particularly liked the audience q&a where he was asked what makes him go "wow" as he sees the evolution. I wished he had more time for the question about how state and other actors are trying to limit access to so much of the content we take for granted on the Web. The full session is here.
The event was also aimed at what Adobe calls "experience builders" - their big differentiator. So, I enjoyed and have excerpted starting at 9.27 from a panel with Ian Boston, Tomek Rekawek, and Carlos Sanchez, on how they successfully migrated Adobe Experience Manager to the Cloud. While many vendors have moved single tenant, on-prem apps to the cloud in the last decade, it is always fascinating to hear about the innovations in each move. This panel discusses efficiencies like the Golden Repository and automation in the form of hibernation that they engineered into the solution. The full panel session is here.
You may enjoy other sessions from the event - the replays are here.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Barbry McGann, Executive Director, Office of the HRO at Workday returns to present on the new Vaccine Management solution. It expands on their Return to Workplace offerings. She had previously presented in this series on their VIBE offering (which is acronym for Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity)
The Vaccine Management solution addresses multiple goals - as a way to educate employees on a growing variety of COVID vaccines (mRNA, vector, protein subunit etc), to guide them where and how to get vaccinated, to allow them to confidentially report the vaccination details. In turn, corporations can identify employees who should be prioritized as vaccine inventories become more widely available in the health ecosystem. They can use the data to make smarter decisions on which offices and sites to safely reopen and plan on workforce availability and related workspace and resource (like PPE) needs. There are plenty of dashboards and compliance analytics.
Barbry says 60% of companies are encouraging employees to get vaccinated (though not necessarily mandate it). No wonder the initial interest in this solution has been huge. They had over 1,900 registrations (a record for Workday) for a recent webinar on the solution.
In the 31st episode of the series I am joined by James Governor, co-founder of Redmonk.
In September 2000, Steve Ballmer was ahead of most executives in loudly cheering for software developers. The video below leads off with his exuberance at Microsoft's 25th anniversary celebration. Since then. we have seen an explosion in developers in every corner of the world.
James has had a front row seat to these changes. Along with Stephen O'Grady and others at Redmonk they are a bit more subdued than Ballmer but they have been influential cheerleaders for developers, DBAs etc - and not just those with the Microsoft flavor.
James' view is we have gradually moved away from top-down dev mindsets to bottom- up ones facilitated by the intersection of Cloud Computing, Open Source and Social Coding
We cover wide ground - the trend towards more buy v build in the industry, the growth in citizen developers (see also the session with Amit Zavery of Google Cloud here), software quality, vertical differences. We discuss the growth of software communities around the world - he has some really interesting comments about Salesforce Trailblazers and the relatively untapped community in Nigeria. We also discuss Armenia, China and India and several other parts of the world.
Lots of positive energy from James - as there is in the rapidly multiplying developer pools around the world.
In the 30th episode of the series I am joined by Mark Taylor, SVP and Global Practice Lead at Cognizant Digital Experience.
I first met Mark when I profiled Cognizant's research on the spurt in voice interfaces in 2020 in this Analyst Cam episode. He has lots of experience in the digital agency world and brings a very different perspective on evolving expectations of customer experience than you hear from most CRM vendors.
He emphasizes the importance of a brand "to act like a human". As he eloquently puts it "The voice of a brand is no longer a metaphor, it is a reality." Technology should allow a brand to do that with empathy at scale.
We discuss several verticals and how the pandemic has accelerated the "direct to consumer" trend in many of them.
I love how he cites examples from several leading brands around the world. And how ML and other technology should allow you to blend "intimacy with industrialization". He covers a lot of ground in 22 minutes.
In the 29th episode of the Burning Platform series is Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG (Americas' SAP User Group). He provides perspective on RISE by SAP - the recently announced SAP initiative. See Analyst Cam post about it here. Dennis Howlett of Diginomica had provided his feedback here.
Geoff and ASUG had worked with SAP in envisioning RISE and he provides that nuanced perspective and that of his membership. We have a friendly debate on the topic - we keep it light hearted weaving in the Super Bowl and the iPhone 12.
I make the point that RISE is a complex bundle. In his keynote, Christian took at swipe at the term "simplification". That's been SAP's mantra for the last decade or so. Key execs like Christian, Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig are articulate about RISE. I told him I was reminded of Thomas Kurian's encyclopedic knowledge when he was at Oracle. We discuss if that level of intimate product knowledge can carry over further down the organization, in the field and in the partner ecosystem. Geoff rightfully points out SAP deals with complex, global customers - anything like RISE cannot be simple.
SAP has historically not done a great job managing its SI partners, so how would RISE improve that? The pandemic has shocked the SI ecosystem with WFH and travel restrictions and pressure on them to automate operations. It would be nice for RISE to build on that not just continue to pass along poor SI performance. Geoff points out he would also like SAP to deliver more tooling to automate implementations.
During the pandemic we have seen customers move to bite-size, industry specific projects. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, others have accordingly made some adjustments. We discuss why RISE with S/4 looming large does not come across as bite-sized, or verticalized enough. Geoff provides the perspective that he is seeing growing interest in S/4 in his membership. Throughout March ASUG is running a series of S/4 Best Practice sessions and they are seeing huge interest - register here
We also discuss the BPI imitative, SAP's hyperscaler partners and much more. I think Geoff does a nice job explaining which SAP customers should care about RISE and why.
In the 28th episode of the Burning Platform series is Amit Zavery of Google Cloud. We discuss the exciting growth in no-code, Citizen Development.
Amit and I discuss how the pandemic has revealed several problems in on-prem systems and also that most cloud application packages were mostly horizontal in reach. Boutique vendors had to step up in many industry areas like ecommerce, fulfillment, telemedicine, distance learning, digital real estate etc. It would suggest we are at a tipping point where customers will need to build more rather than wait to buy functionality from their traditional vendors for agility in the changed world.
Yet, IT has it hands full with new issues around WFH, previous dev backlogs, enhanced security focus. It would suggest more of a focus on low- and no-code development to bridge the gap. Not just dev - we have seen acceleration in democratization of analytics, integration with other enterprise apps, the ability to use voice interfaces to do so much without much IT involvement. Amit describes how healthcare workers stepped up to build fairly sophisticated hospital applications.
The impact on small businesses has been even more dramatic. Restaurant owners have been forced to adjust to a digital world of customer interaction and last mile delivery. Small merchants have been forced to embrace e-commerce, real estate agents adjust to virtual open houses and digital mortgages. They have become tech-savvy in a hurry. It's not just DevOps - it's digital business transformation.
We also discuss platforms of SaaS vendors like Salesforce, those of mostly on-prem vendors like IBM and Oracle, and those of hyperscalers like Google.
In the past, citizen IT tools have led to a lot of duplication and proliferation - millions of spreadsheets, Lotus Notes databases everywhere. We discuss how to put guard rails to avoid similar sprawl this time around and also factor security concerns which leads cynics to call this "shadow IT"
Amit has long been a cheerleader for low-code, no-code. His excitement comes through very clearly. We are definitely at a major inflection point in the industry. We have a lot more tech-savvy users and citizens than we did a year ago. That is exciting and scary at the same time.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings and events, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I have been encouraging Rimini Street to share more info on its global reach and operational "secret sauce" like they did in this episode where they described how they deliver tax and regulatory updates as part of their support earlier than the much bigger software publishers.
So, I was really pleased to see that in their virtual investor day last week, they focused on customer case studies, addressable market shares and operational details. In fact, the CFO, Michael Perica waited his turn till the last session of the event, just before the analyst q&a.
I have excerpted about 15% of the 2 hour, 45 minute session, and in some sessions a number of the speaker's slides. You can watch the whole webcast by registering here.
Leading off after the Forward Looking caveat is Seth Ravin, CEO and Chairman who provides a historical perspective since the company was founded in 2005, and the expanded focus starting in 2015 to include application management services.
At 5.27, Sebastian Grady, President shares case studies across 8 industries and geographies.
At 8.46, David Rowe, CMO discusses addressable markets. I love that he actually describes components of his marketing technology stack. Didn't I mention they were serious about discussing operational details?
At 12.10, Gerard Brossard, COO discusses how the field is being reshaped to reflect a much more global Rimini customer base and for a sales force with many more products in their bags.
At 17.09, Brian Slepko, EVP Global Service Delivery discusses root cause analysis at Rimini, the continuous improvement culture and their TLR (Tax, Legal and Regulatory) group.
At 21.39, Daniel Winslow, Chief Legal Officer provides his perspective on the long running court battles with Oracle.
This is definitely not your Dad's Rimini Street! I first wrote about them in 2006. They have gone through many twists and bruising legal battles, and have emerged stronger and much more differentiated.
Head over to the whole webcast on the Rimini site to hear fuller comments from each of these execs, from the CFO and also listen to the Q&A.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here . Last couple of months, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho, Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications, Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures and Mark Smith of Ventana Research
In the 27th episode of the series is Dennis Holwett, co-founder of Diginomica. Like me, he is a long-time SAP watcher and we discuss last week's RISE with SAP event. I had written about the event in the Analyst Cam series here.
We cover a lot of ground - it is the longest episode of Burning Platform.
RISE is a complex bundle - in fact, in his keynote Christian took at swipe at the term "simplification". That's been SAP's mantra for the last decade or so, but key execs like Christian, Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig are pretty articulate about product details. I told him I was reminded of Thomas Kurian's encyclopedic knowledge when he was at Oracle. We discuss if that level of intimate product knowledge can carry over further down the organization, in the field and in the partner ecosystem.
Dennis responds to my observation that Christian led off with his SI partners and had the hyperscalers further down in his presentation. Shades of the old SAP or signs of likely co-opetition with the hyperscalers especially at the platform layer?
During the pandemic we have seen customers move to bite-size, industry specific projects. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, others have accordingly made some adjustments. We discuss why RISE with S/4 looming large does not come across as bite-sized, or verticalized enough.
I told him I thought RISE would focus more on execution mechanics and economics. Instead they broadened the product mix with the Signavio and the MS Teams announcement and glossed over what will be hairy execution and contractual issues. SAP has historically shown little ability to manage its SI partners, can it additionally manage the hyperscalers and its own broad product portfolio and deliver coherent economics, SLAs etc?
We discuss the changing hyperscaler landscape. IBM has joined the Big 4 - AWS, Azure etc in the SAP infrastructure stack mix, but not Oracle. During the pandemic, Oracle appeared to pick up some momentum with customers like Zoom and TikTok. Oracle, at least at the database layer, is also more prevalent in the SAP customer base. We discuss how customers are likely to navigate SAP's choices.
We do agree that SAP should never be underestimated. It has an amazing global customer base, spread across industries and is increasingly cultivating a dynamic, young executive suite.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I explained here I have been trying to fit the many Analyst Cam episodes - vendor demos, analyst surveys, excerpts from vendor events - into a 20 to 30 minute format. Events have been the hardest to force -fit. It is tough to excerpt from hours of sessions into 20 minutes. Vendors need permissions from customers. Events folks are exhausted and the last thing they want to do is get me many GB of video.
Still, I persist and I requested SAP share video from their RISE with SAP session this week. They delivered the videos promptly but they deleted customer and partner sections from the CEO Christian Klein keynote (likely due to permission issues). They shared the Q&A with Christian, but I decided to let the Christian keynote dominate the 20 minute excerpt below.
Christian's fluency with the broad SAP portfolio is nothing short of brilliant. I remember seeing a Thomas Kurian presentation when he was at Oracle which was as impressive. Enjoy his mastery of the "Business Transformation-as-a-service" offering below.
In addition, I would recommend you spend some time on a few other sessions during the day, particularly the sections I highlight in them:
Thomas Saueressig of SAP talks changing business models, sustainability and many other global trends with Gabriela Azzali, Chief Transformation Officer, Orica and Ulrich Stoerk, Chairman of the Management Board, PwC Germany here
Juergen Mueller of SAP does a deep dive around the Business Technology Platform and involves Damian Bunyan, CIO, Uniperand Liz Fasciana, Global SAP Offering Leader, Deloitte Consulting here
The Business Process Intelligence section with Rouen Morato of SAP and with Gero Decker of Signavio, that SAP announced it is acquiring starts at 8.15 here
The customer sections in Christian's keynote with Dr. Roland Busch, Deputy CEO, Siemens and with Jodi Monelle, Founder and CEO and Kees Kruythoff, Chairman and CEO of LIVEKINDLY are at 8.15 here
The section about Collaboration and integration of MS Teams with Satya Natella, CEO of Microsoft is at 31.30 here
The complexity of the offering led to a number of questions. Here is the Q&A with Christian. Disclosure - none of the questions are mine, certainly not the one which asked "aren't you a bit late to the party?" With a young baby and a demanding CEO role, I doubt he has energy left to go to many parties :)
I will be sharing my analysis from the day over the next couple of weeks and in a couple of Burning Platform sessions with other analysts. But here is a quick take:
a) I am pleased to see so much focus on the public cloud. Just about two years ago, I told Christian I was worried how many S/4 projects were on-prem and in private clouds. I told him he risked a repeat of ECC overruns. Worse, it would be difficult to apply ML concepts with data siloed across so many data centers
b) I understand why he had to highlight all his SI partners - but with the pandemic and travel restrictions they have been learning to do virtual projects and use more tooling and automation. I wish he had focused on how they have evolved. SAP and its customers cannot afford the old way of doing projects.
c) One of the biggest payback areas in justifying a move to S/4 is retirement of ECC customizations. I fear the BPI/Signavio tools and the army of SIs will get the green signal to launch another large wave of customizations, this time bloating S/4.
d) During the pandemic we have seen a move to bite-sized projects like the SAP Amplify initiative and in vertical "edge" areas - like telemedicine in healthcare, digital real estate, distance learning in higher education, automated fulfillment in retail and many others. What SAP presented was mostly horizontal processes and far from "bite-sized"
e) The contracting for RISE appears very ambitious. While that is good business for advisers like Deal Architect, no business executive enjoys months of negotiations when they are under extreme pressure to get their digital projects going.
For now enjoy the brilliance from Christian, Thomas, Juergen and others. Nobody would accuse them of being small thinkers.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I have had several industry analysts join me in my Burning Platform series over the last several weeks. I invited Russell Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of IT Central Station which offers a crowdsourced knowledge platform that helps technology decision makers to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.
I thought he would provide some insight into the many IT categories his site tracks from Firewalls to RPA tools. Instead, he did something that most analysts have smartly stayed away from in 2021 - making predictions after most went so wrong in 2020.
Russell makes 6 predictions on how enterprise tech procurement will change this year.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the last few months we have seen growing interest in bite-sized applications in various vertical sectors. I have written about edge applications like telemedicine in healthcare, eCommerce and fulfillment in retail and food, distance learning in higher ed and many others.
Jason Prater and Marty Black, both ex-Plex, presented on their startup, Cella Technologies which is focused on waste on the shop floor. Machines often wait for materials (which have often traveled thousands of miles without an issue) while handling staff drive around in forklifts with walkie talkies. They are like taxis looking for pickups when digital technologies like "ride-sharing for forklifts" could eliminate the gap. Machines are getting smarter and predictively issuing requests. In the meantime, COVID has amplified the already difficult task of hiring workers for plants, their absenteeism and reduced productivity.
They say the waste from such "downtime waiting around" often exceeds that from scrap in many facilities.
They also describe other use cases to connect MES to the supply chain.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
This time it is Marty Groover, Partner, C5MI. C5 in the company name comes from his background in the Navy for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Counter-intelligence. He also spent years at Caterpillar and is now a big advocate for Industry 4.0 - digital factories and the industrial Internet of Things.
With ubiquitous sensors, machines are talking a lot more, and we are learning to understand their language. Marty talks about their Live Factory concept with uses cases like WIP and critical parts tracking, and others involving predictive maintenance around industrial assets.
He covers a lot of ground in under 15 minutes. You may also enjoy the longer interview I did with him in May here.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of months, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho, Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications and Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures
In the 26th episode of the series is Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer of Ventana Research. We discuss how Business Continuity plans performed in what I call a Black Swan(S) year. How do you plan for continuity, disaster recovery and contingencies given one crisis after another - health, financial, diversity, sustainability?
We discuss how various forms of planning performed, whether they are too siloed and whether we will revert to long term, econometric, scenario planning.
Even more than corporations, it would appear government bodies need to revisit BCP. Their guidance, especially around public health to citizens has been chaotic. Their guidance to corporations around site re-opening protocols has been conflicting. Mark comments how one positive from the chaos is increased public/private collaboration.
We discuss how technology vendors have stepped up, especially planning vendors and how vendors like Salesforce and Workday have delivered new health and diversity related offerings.
We cover a lot of ground - going forward we will need to balance the desire for continuity and predictability with the reality of continued chaos and need for agility. As Mark says "every day is a new day - the sun rises and the sun sets - and anytime in between something can go wrong"
Brian Sommer and I recorded the first 12 episodes in this series. Since then, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho and Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications. See the index here
Kicking off this year in the 25th episode of the series is Paul Coester of Big Blue Ventures. He has played a role in 20 SAP ECC and 12 S/4HANA projects - most of them in the Asia Pacific region. We discuss how 2020 played out for SAP in that region and how 2021 is likely to shape up - around S/4HANA, its cloud properties and its industry applications.
We also discuss how SIs and hyperscalers have evolved over the last couple of years. Finally, we discuss the growth in "fractional IT" - he is a prime example of that with his simultaneous hand in enterprise architecture, quality assurance and other roles on multiple projects.
I have always known Paul to call it as he sees it. He appropriately calls himself a "SAP Whisperer" Nice to get his perspective from "Down Under".
Most people I know cannot wait to say good riddance to 2020. Very understandable - so many have lost friends and family to COVID, others have lost friends to ugly politics, it was financially devastating to so many of us.
But 2020 also saw unbelievable business heroics, innovation, digital acceleration and so much else which will define this decade. My personal hope is continue with all that goodness.
In an episode I recorded with Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica last week, I presented some of my personal positives from 2020 - it is about 2 minutes long. In there I mentioned I have uploaded 3,000 minutes of video across the various series I launched during the pandemic - Acrobatics during the Crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform. That was from 20 gb of raw video.
Over the next few days, I will run an even tinier excerpt on the New Florence blog. About a hundred minutes of highlights - unbelievable scaling up/down, rapid innovations, business pivots, leadership. And also basic decency - humor and humanity. That is the side of 2020 I hope we continue in 2021 and beyond.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here Last few weeks, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy and Sandra Lo of Zoho
This has been the year of the cloud - unbelievable scaling of ecommerce, wfh etc - so nice that I can wrap up the year with an episode with Bob Evans who authors the Cloud Wars site. As you can see, both of us are basking in the sun - helps the mood at the end of this crazy year.
We cover a lot of ground - how the hyperscalers have picked up momentum as companies look at lifting and shifting on-premise, legacy apps to their clouds. Google, Oracle, Microsoft and AWS in particular get a fair amount of time during the session.
We discuss the increasing focus of both the infrastructure and application vendors on the platform layer and the likely turf wars there.
We cover recent public offerings from Snowflake, C3, Palantir and momentum of vertical players like Teladoc, Shopify, nCino and what that means for the incumbent players.
Bob also talks about every company in every vertical becoming more of a software company and what that means to the industry as a whole. The SaaS, IaaS etc definitions of the last few years look increasingly dated.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This executives profiled in this series (and those in Analyst Cam and Burning Platform series) have talked about all kinds of human heroics - in healthcare, vaccine development, diversity moves; in IT, in HR, supply chains and more during the crisis. They have talked about massive scaling up/down, rapid innovations, pivots etc. In the huge ecommerce volumes of the last few months, the unsung heroes are, in addition to humans, warehouse robots.
Guy Courtin of 6 River Systems had demoed here their Chuck collaborative robots and how they can be deployed in smaller locations, closer to customers, without needing to invest much in traditional conveyors or large warehouse infrastructure. While Amazon and its Kiva robots get much of the attention, 6 River (now part of Shopify) and Chuck robots also deserve plenty of kudos.
So, I was really pleased to have Jerome Dubois and Rylan Hamilton, co-founders and co-CEOs of 6 River join this series - they were pioneers with Kiva, and now with the smaller, more agile Chuck robots. We talk about changes coming as more companies move to "micro-fulfillment" (as compared to very large Amazon fulfillment centers - see my tour report here) to accommodate new models like flash sales, order on-line, pick-up in stores, regionalized inventories, last-mile delivery expectations and constraints while keeping warehouse workers safely distanced, quickly trained and incredibly productive. We have a wide ranging conversation around how supply chains and the cold chain have stepped up during the pandemic and why we will need more automation to keep supply chains sustainable. We also have a philosophical segment about accelerated automation in every sector and the likely impact on society. As I described in Silicon Collar, automation has historically taken over "dull, dirty and dangerous" tasks and they describe how Chuck helps both employers and workers.
It is a fascinating conversation. Watch it and the demo of the Chuck bots. Acrobatics for sure. It's a nice way to wrap up this series on business heroics we have seen so much of this year!
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Yesterday, in Part 1, I ran a presentation by Mark Brewer of IFS on their Service Management offering for complex, asset-intensive industries and trends in those industries, especially during the pandemic.
Below is a 30 minute demo by Jonathan Hyden and Paul White which covers 4 segments:
Workforce Forecasting (across real-time and longer time horizons)
Remote Assistance (which has been especially handy during the pandemic)
Lots going on in this demo - road maps, heat maps, GANTT charts, merged reality (using a iPhone 8 cam, not an elaborate AR headset), simulations and dashboards
I have invited them back to demo some of their asset management/predictive maintenance capabilities.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere and Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.
This time it is Sandy Lo of Zoho. Not an analyst but an amazing musician and a wonderful AR executive - read here how talented she is
She sent me a beautiful holiday gift - a video of her playing carols on the piano. I asked her if I could share with the world. She kindly agreed.
Last week I shared the Curmudgeon Christmas Card with Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett. That was a lot of fun.
This one is pure joy - certainly has been the easiest episode for me to edit:)
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests -Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Bob Ferarri of Supply Chain Matters
This time it is Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy Consulting. She has been a tech industry pioneer - I called her a "marathoner" in this 2018 interview.
We cover a lot of ground in the video below about what she has seen in tech marketing during the pandemic.
She talks about the initial wave of empathy that guided vendors to focus on customer problem-solving and not come across as "ambulance chasers". We discuss how some vendors still want to pitch what they had in their bag in January, not reflective of how dramatically most markets have changed. We talk about "influence v intelligence" when it comes to industry analysts in changed markets, and whether AR would be better positioned in product development v marketing. We also talk about changed messaging as the whole world has moved to video communication and a much more digital world.
She shares a few details about her upcoming book with a working title of "Make it, Don't fake it". It is part autobiography about her leadership style, and part philosophy about her integrity and "getting to the truth and sticking to it". Should be a fascinating read and timely given some of the crazy expectations we are seeing on Wall Street. I look forward to bringing her back to present on the book in much more detail.
In the meantime, enjoy this really invigorating session.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
When I interviewed Darren Roos, CEO of IFS in September (see here), he provided examples from several complex, asset intensive businesses like aerospace and engineering/construction. He also pointed out how important field service is to them, and how complex that has become during the pandemic.
IFS is better known as an ERP vendor but its asset management and service capabilities are increasingly a differentiator. So, I invited them to present in this Analyst Cam series on their Service Management offering.
Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director for the Service Management product line presents below for about 15 minutes. He says Service Management accounted for over half of IFS's revenues in the first half of 2020.
He covers several industry trends including a shift in business models - he showcases Rolls Royce, Tomra and Kyocera and their outcome-based contracts in aviation, recycling (reverse vending) and copiers. He also discusses how aging field workers are being moved during the pandemic to remote, often from home, service guidance roles.
Tomorrow I will run Part 2 with a demo of the functionality.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere.
This time it is Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.
We talk about how the pandemic severely stressed so many supply chains – PPE, toilet paper, anything China sourced, the cold chain for food and now vaccine distribution among others. Yet, we somehow coped and moved so much of the flow from brick and mortar to ecommerce. Bob describes the war rooms many companies set up to cope.
We discuss how many companies have reacted to both the demand and supply shocks - rethinking historical demand forecasts, simplification and reduction of product choice with rationalization of multiple product SKUs and BOMs. How companies are rethinking global supply chains (with strategies like China+1 or 2 or 3) and re-location of manufacturing to increase resilience.
We next talk about the cold chain which has been challenged all year - first with food distribution challenges now with the daunting COVID vaccine logistics, while simultaneously coping with the holiday shipping load.
Bob describes several of the supply chain planning and execution technologies he has been impressed with, that have helped enterprises cope with the unprecedented stress.
It truly is a riveting conversation about the acrobatics it has taken the supply chain community to keep us hundreds of millions of us fed, sheltered, entertained during 2020 and the many changes we are likely to see in 2021.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research and Holger Mueller of Constellation Research.
This time it is Tamas Hevizi, Global Head of Private Equity at Automation Anywhere. I had interviewed him in May about acrobatics he was seeing early in the pandemic. In June, he had invited me to his show to summarize some of the acrobatics I had seen. He also wrote a guest column for me in July describing his unbelievably disciplined digital work habits.
So I invited him to update me on more of the Digital Acceleration he has seen in the last few months. He also talks about the 7 C's of excitement he is seeing in the private equity world he lives in - commerce, cloud, collaboration, cybersecurity etc. Finally he provides many examples of acceleration in "citizen developers", especially in small businesses.
We may never become as digitally disciplined as he is, but the examples he shares shows that as millions of us have moved to WFH, as small businesses have moved to digital commerce, we are individually feeding the digital acceleration of the last few months.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here . Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras and Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research
This time it is Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. He follows architectural, platform and other technological underpinnings of application vendors like SAP and Workday and of hyperscalers like Amazon and Google.
He talks about how the public cloud has scaled amazingly during the pandemic. He also says first-generation SaaS players will have to adjust to the growing strength of the hyperscalers. SAP has been talking about its 4+1 strategy and Salesforce has announced Hyperforce. He sees an opportunity for application vendors to not emphasize their platforms but to re-imagine business processes. Traditionally, they have relied on customers and SIs to help them codify business process logic - now they can lead using new technologies like ML that their traditional sources of guidance are not that familiar with as yet.
We talk about AWS, Azure and Google and why Europe still does not have a player like Alibaba. We discuss the prospect for Oracle in this segment.
We talk about how it has been an amazing year for new data streams - COVID-19, election polling, census, shortened sports seasons, all kinds of planning/forecasting scenarios, video streams and new players like Snowflake and Palantir. In the enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth" Yet the citizen on the street is actually cynical of much of the data because definitions are inconsistent and the media has been cherry picking data to suit its narrative. It's the Mark Twain's quote updated for today - Lies, Big Lies and Big Data. We talk about how to build trust in data.
We discuss developer communities - Salesforce Trailblazers, SAP breathing new life into ABAP, Apple, Microsoft and Google expanding their developer communities and what that means in the meta context of building v. buying enterprise applications.
Finally, we have some fun. You can see his playful side and how he convinced a Starbucks barista to brand my cup as "Sugar Daddy". I was the only one on the Southwest plane who did not realize it, even though they were laughing at me. He finally showed me a photo of my cup. No more freebies for him:)
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica and Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras.
This time it is Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research. He pioneered coverage of the Professional Services Automation (PSA) category two decades ago.
We talk about how the pandemic has affected services firms and the PSA category. He also discusses initial findings from his annual survey of the market - way more promising than he anticipated earlier in the year.
We also discuss why just about every application vendor has developed PSA functionality but are loath to develop operational functionality for so many other, wide-open industries. As he points out when he was at Oracle in the late 90s, the PSA functionality did not require as much investment as that in manufacturing or financial services, and yet generated a nice, predictable revenue stream. Also, since then just about every industry has had a growing services revenue component - field services, training etc - what he calls embedded services and have become new candidates for PSA.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests like Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.
The BLM movement this summer has brought more urgency for HR and procurement groups to diversify employee and supplier bases. Related to this, I did interviews with two prominent African-American tech executives, Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer at Salesforce and Charles Phillips, Chairman at Infor. Also a presentation by Barbry McGann of Workday on their new VIBE product which allows companies to better visualize employee diversity from multiple dimensions. The Tech sector should be proud of its efforts.
While the recent intense focus is nice to see, it would be remiss to not point out we have been making steady progress for a long time. I invited Cindy Jutras, President of Mint Jutras to talk about her 45-year career at software vendors and analyst firms, and draw from her experiences on how gender and ethnic-based diversity have evolved in the industry. I add my own experience as an immigrant and someone who has worked in and traveled to 70 countries and seen the US "from the outside in" in the video below.
I particularly liked Cindy pointing out the movie, "Hidden Figures" about a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a critical role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. As she says "we have come so far"
We also touch on age discrimination. Silicon Valley and outsourcers tend to be focused on young recruits, but even corporate IT tends to be ambivalent about older employees. The pandemic has resulted in many older employees who are traumatized or those who finally having spent more time at home with families and have relished the experience. Both categories are opting for early retirements. These accelerated (and unplanned) exits may also bring more of a focus on the age attribute as companies refine their diversity policies.
It is a not a "woke" conversation. It is a realistic discussion about why a system of meritocracy, more enlightened executives and driven individuals work better than forced mandates for diversity.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting and Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel have joined us.
This time it is a special episode with two of the longest tenured players in IT world - Frank Scavo at Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.
We cover three major topics:
- At 0.40, we take a walk down memory lane going back over 15 years when each of us was pioneering blogs focused on enterprise tech - you will enjoy the photo archive we banter around
- At 7.08, we look back at 2020. Hint - it is not all negative.
- At 17.52, we look ahead to 2021. Fair warning - none of us is dumb enough to make forecasts after a year like 2020:)
As a special episode, it runs twice as long as others in the series. But I promise there are plenty of laughs, and lots of name dropping. Watch it, you may have a mention!
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here
For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last couple of weeks Rob Kugel of Ventana and Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting have joined us.
This week, it is Bonnie Tinder, founder of Raven Intel which monitors project management trends and SI quality metrics.
We discuss how project management has undergone a major transformation during the pandemic. The accelerated clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccines have certainly raised the bar. In IT projects, especially HR projects she tracks, the key word as she says is "shift". Some have been postponed, some shortened, a new category of projects has been fast tracked,
We also discuss how SIs have been doing during the pandemic. Many smaller and midsized SIs are being squeezed out by the larger SIs as bigger projects disappear.
She provides a nice Raven's - bird's eye - view of the state of project and program management.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
"When we look back on the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll realize that one of the unhailed victims of the devastating virus is the touchscreen. Not only did the virus make us wary of unhygienic surfaces, but the lockdowns and social isolation that followed also spurred renewed interest in interacting with a human-sounding voice. Both realities have served to catalyze the beginning of a large-scale shift toward the voice interface."
So, I looked forward to their webinar titled "From Eyes to Ears" featuring Jason Pedone, SVP Mobile Banking and Emerging Channels at Truist, the 6th largest US bank and Mark Taylor, SVP at Cognizant Interactive. It was moderated by Manish Bahl, AVP at the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work.
I have excerpted below about a third of the webinar. I would encourage you to watch the whole session by registering here - it has audience polls and questions in addition.
Manish organized the session into three sections and my excerpts follow his guidance:
State of Voice, at the beginning
Challenge of Voice, starting at 8.55
Future of Voice, starting at 18.24
Some of the topics covered include:
why voice interfaces have accelerated during the pandemic
the brand challenge when Alexa or Siri becomes the "channel master"
privacy, trust issues
how voice can invoke empathy that visual interfaces cannot
blending of voice and visual content
many vertical examples - particularly in banking, healthcare and retail
Lots to think about when it comes to voice interfaces.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Most have helped to conserve cash and minimize supplier risk. Many are being asked to help find suppliers in new global locations and those for diversity and sustainability initiatives.
With that background, I had a chance to catch up with Nikesh Parekh, co-founder and CEO of Suplari. I first met him two years ago when the company had just started. He walked me through a 20 minute presentation and demo below on what is branded as the Spend Intelligence Cloud.
Their service allows for aggregating supplier data to allow you to see spend across subsidiaries/locations/other tags. It aggregates spend from different sources - via PO and AP data from various ERP systems, via services like Ariba and Coupa, via procurement card etc.
I really like their library of 175 machine-driven insights. Some insights are tactical - for t&e compliance or potential fraud alerts. Other insights are more strategic - for supplier base consolidation, as an example. Nikesh mentions a relationship with consulting firms like Kearney for more of the strategic sourcing projects. New insights are being developed with a supplier diversity pov and for budgeting and forecasting processes.
At the start of the pandemic, specific insights identified opportunities to conserve cash, prevent non-essential spend, predict and forecast large cash payments, extend payment terms and enforce new policies. The service also allows for easy "case" set up and assignment to specific individuals and teams. That brings collaboration and project management to the sourcing/procurement function.
I had expected they would mostly be focused on indirect spend. I was pleased to hear him say customers are starting to use services like his for their more complex, and clearly more strategic, direct spend with their Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO of TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies with what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, relying mostly on supplier-provided data or searching for new vendors via their own web searches.
Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy had presented here in the Analyst Cam series about Discovery, Diversity, Sustainability and other use cases they help many of the Fortune 100 customers and many other organizations with.
Stephany has many examples of heroics. In the first few weeks of the pandemic she describes how the UK government, desperate for PPE supplies and looking for choices beyond China, leveraged TealBook for information on 60,000 ISO certified PPE makers. She describes 170 other requests in the first 3 weeks from around the world to help source N95 masks or their components (Matt shows that use case in the video above)
During the BLM crisis and the many diversity initiatives since customers have leveraged TealBook's 800,000 certificates for black and minority owned businesses. More impressively they have helped a number of smaller businesses self-certify (she says 95% of them find formal regulatory certification too cumbersome or too expensive) and become more visible to companies. As a result, companies have reported they found $30 to $100m in spend with minority businesses they had not identified from their existing records.
The focus is next switching to sustainability initiatives and similarly finding suppliers with appropriate focus and certification on green matters.
We also talk about shifting global chains - the "China +1 initiative" in many companies. She says it is "China +2 or 3" for some customers.
We next talk about trust in data. While in enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth", the reality is Mark Twain's comment today would be about 'Lies, Damn Lies and Big Data". The person on the street has little faith in data because so much of media has cherry picked data to suit its narrative. She has some thoughts about how to build trust.
Finally we talk about data science and careers for our young. She says "we are just beginning" and clearly is a role model and recruiter for a number of young data and ML graduates.
She is a very impressive entrepreneur and we cover a lot of ground as you can see below.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here
For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last week Rob Kugel of Ventana joined us.
This week, it is Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Application Consulting.
We start off talking about a note he wrote a couple of years ago titled Mired in Mediocrity. I have written about vendor myopia - they have missed out on several large markets as I wrote here
There have been several moves during the pandemic which make both of us a bit more positive about the industry - and feel merry in keeping with the holiday season.
I have a great slate of analysts and industry observers lined up who will bring other nuanced perspectives on enterprise tech in the next few episodes
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Think of how many supply chains have broken down (think PPE, toilet paper, meatpacking plants, anything sourced from China etc). Or how many customers have entered new markets to survive or thrive during the pandemic and how many new suppliers they have had to explore. Think also about new demands as companies accelerate diversity and sustainability initiatives.
I had a chance to catch up with Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO and with Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy at TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies develop what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from over 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, rely mostly on supplier-provided data or search for new vendors via their own web searches. The supplier job is also easier as they can build on what TealBook has already harvested.
I especially like that their focus is not just on indirect spend. With so many companies re-shoring or entering new markets, there is growing interest in new Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
In the presentation/demo below Matt provides a product perspective (especially what he calls Autonomous Data Foundation in their stack) with a number of very nice vertical (particularly biopharma) and global examples. Lots of discovery, diversity, sustainability support. As he says just about every Fortune 100 company is now a customer.
Later in the week, I will run an interview with Stephany about megatrends and heroics in the procurement function.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer and Managing Partner at Sapient Insights Group presented highlights from their "2020–2021 HR Systems Survey White Paper, 23rd Annual Edition” As she says, there is a lot of conjecture about how HR groups have reacted during the pandemic, so it's nice to have results from a huge sample polling 1,900 organizations in 64 countries, representing 27 million employees.
Stacey provided more background on the survey: "The survey stands alone as a global view of the current and future plans for HR Technology adoption, crucial practices, and emerging technology trends from. The research covers organizations in all ranges of size, industry, and location and is focused on capturing the Voice of the Customer - reaching beyond over sampled early adopters and global brands; to gather realistic data from HR and HRIT leaders working every day, often in anonymity, to achieve outcomes for their organizations .This is a valuable resource for anyone making critical decisions about HR Technology and its value to organizational outcomes and the future of HR Tech."
The research shows lots of shifts in HR systems spend and direction in a year dominated by COVID-19 and WFH in a year where the world turned upside down. One example: "15% of organizations are planning on decreasing traditional HR Technology Spend in 2021, by an average of 23% of their current budgets. In contrast 28% of organizations are planning to increase spending in non-traditional HR Technology areas like infrastructure and remote working tools."
As we discuss, HR may not still not be considered strategic by many, but nobody will argue with the point that it has become Essential with a capital E. We cover a lot of ground - how talent management tech has paid off during the crisis, automation trends, moving from WFH to blended models,
Watch the video below, and also download the full report here. The report is about 100 pages, but skimming the graphics - almost one to a page - is just as rewarding. You will find it is one of the most realistic looks at the day in the life of the new, dramatically changed HR function.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I have had two Workday Ventures portfolio companies present as part of this series. I have two more scheduled. So, I invited Leighanne Levensaler, Co-Head of WD Ventures (she is also EVP of Corporate Strategy at Workday) to present on the complete portfolio in the fund of $250 million with 24 active investments.
She does a very nice job in under 20 minutes walking through the portfolio (most aligned with Workday's hcm, financial and supply chain focus). She also explains the fund's investment philosophy and approach and the benefits it brings both to portfolio companies and to Workday customers.
The fund is only 3 years old and has already had 6 exits. You get the sense of a nurturing environment for startups with its strong management team with plenty of previous operational Workday experience and with the access it provides to the Workday customer base and its product organization.
I have never been a big fan of vendors who brag about ecosystems with hundreds and thousands of partners or startups. I like to tell them show me your 50-100 best successes. I like the gradual, yet influential, pace at which WD Ventures is growing.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Dan Ashton, Senior Director, Product Marketing covers multiple databases at Rimini Street - Oracle, SAP, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server.
He presented to me results of a recent survey across 18 countries. It is focused primarily on Oracle databases, but there are plenty of nuggets that likely apply to those from the other large vendors.
Some of the interesting points that I picked up in the session:
There is significantly more dissatisfaction about the value from databases than the last time Rimini ran such a survey in 2017. Not surprising especially given IT cost pressures during the pandemic.
Beyond the fees they pay vendors, customers feel they are on a treadmill - "the constant pressure to upgrade in order to remain fully supported not only disrupts business, but wastes funds and resources"
The different types of support available from publishers may actually be confusing customers. Some support levels don't include critical fixes and certifications. As a result, some customers may have a false sense of security they are covered by the maintenance they are paying for but actually be exposing themselves to risks.
Customers have tens, if not hundreds, of database instances. While trying to manage the sprawl, they are still looking at a growing number of open source and cloud options to lower their exposure and cost of those from the larger vendors. The survey shows MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB as getting the most looks.
Dan makes a crisp presentation with lots of specific survey data in about 13 minutes. You can also get the fuller report by registering here
Thank you, Dennis Howlett
Dennis has announced he is retiring. I knew it was coming - he would often fret he did not have enough time for his large and growing family - but I would have bet it would be towards end of this year. Or next. I am glad I managed to record a couple of episodes with him in the last few weeks.
We had our fair share of disagreements - show me someone who has been spared that by Dennis? :) But I admired several things about him and let me share a few things you may not know about him
a) he is a Polymath
Every few months I would learn something new about him. Listen to his bio in the excerpt below - it will blow your mind. And he does not even mention here what he has been up to recently - building and painting 1/35 scale armored vehicles (three in progress and 18 more in his 'stash' he says)
b) a true blogging pioneer.
It hit me when Dennis, Frank Scavo and I recorded a Christmas episode. We took a walk down memory lane - see excerpt below. Each of us has been blogging for 15+ years. He was a purer play than either of us. Frank and I had advisory distractions. I spent a fair amount of time on my many books. He dedicated the last phase of his career to making enterprise blogging and the independent analyst model a respected source of industry influence.
c) he made time for so many
He was a whisperer to so many in the industry - check out the flattering comments on his LinkedIn post where he announced his retirement. I was constantly amazed how he could find the time. I certainly benefited - he reviewed every one of my books.
So, Dennis, thanks for the many laughs and cries. Enjoy time with the family and your train rides.
But please come back and record more episodes from time to time. I want the opportunity to say it a few more times - GFY :)
February 26, 2021 in Industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, AMR, others), Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)