deal architect

Analyst Cam: Strivr - the White Collar Metaverse

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Derek Belch, CEO of Strivr, which positions itself as a platform to elevate employee performance through virtual reality-enabled immersive experiences. I was introduced to him by the Workday Ventures team.

Derek played football at Stanford from 2003 to 2007. He went back to Stanford as a graduate assistant for the football team in 2013 and simultaneously worked on a Master’s thesis on training football players using virtual reality. “The whole premise was here's a VR device, a headset. The quarterback puts this thing on their face. Their body is off the field, but their brain thinks they're on the field. It's a much more realistic way to see what's going on during a play. And you can get an infinite number of reps in a short amount of time.”

The quarterback simulator was their first application and he says it was reasonably successful (I think he is being modest – Tom Brady used the tool for reps when he arrived in Tampa in 2020 and went on to win his 7^th Super Bowl). Importantly, it led to an introduction at Walmart and a foray into enterprise applications. He says “six years later we have over 20,000 headsets out in the field at Walmart, Bank of America, Verizon and FedEx among others.”

Classroom and keyboard-based learning are ineffective, he says. “Goes in one ear and out the other.” “We're building a flight simulator for any job from quarterback to janitor to CEO and everyone in between…we want the VR headset to be part of every employee’s starter pack along with a phone and a laptop”

He walks through various front line and knowledge worker use cases. The ROI is pretty compelling. “we've had customers take three-hour long lectures and e-learning (content) and boil them down to 20 minutes on a headset. Some of our customers are cutting their on-boarding times in half. And the outcome is the similar in terms of proficiency. So that is a major ROI opportunity when you add up 10s of 1000s of people. Some of these are very high churn roles.” He says there may be focus on augmented reality and blue collar roles down the line. Plenty of white collar opportunities to focus on for now.    

He walks through his platform and the content creation ecosystem he is growing. Very nicely done in about 20 minutes. There is plenty of sports talk, quotes from Confucius and use cases for the white-collar Metaverse.

BTW I think I have found another recruit for my Technology and my Passion series. He has 264 golf balls and growing in his “stamp collection” from courses from around the world.

Analyst Cam: Wellthy

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, Co-Founder and CEO of Wellthy, which provides a caregiving support solution. I was introduced to her by the Workday Ventures team.

Lindsay starts with her personal experience. She supported her mother through a chronic condition for 28 years (it started when she was a kid) and found the healthcare system in the US (and most other countries – they also service Canada, UK and Ireland)) assumes aging care is the responsibility of family members. She says families take on 90% of long-term care in the US.

They have since diversified beyond the focus on aging parents to also cover kids with special needs, spouses with chronic conditions, and during the COVID pandemic expanded into child care. About the last, she says “it remains a crisis. We've seen daycare shutdown, a reduction in the number of folks who are taking jobs as nannies or in-home aides. Families are really struggling to set up care as many companies have returned to more hybrid work environments, encouraging people to come into the office.”

The solution broadly consists of 3 components

• Care Dashboard – digital tools such as medication trackers, document storage
• Care Concierge – a dedicated coordinator and shared access to other team members who help advise on Medicare, insurance, other funding sources, care nuances etc.
• Wellthy Community

They started the business in 2015, supporting families and started working with employers in 2016. Business exploded through the pandemic. Today they support 1.1 million covered individuals. And expect to be closer to 2 million by the end of the year. Lots of big brand employers and 4 of the top 6 companies on the Fortune 100 Top Places to Work list.

They can show quantifiable outcomes like lowered absences and attrition at employers which offer their service as a comp benefit. The best endorsement she says comes from employees moving companies who say to their hiring person, “you know, I would like to retain access to this very important benefit”.

She says it is a  “very sticky benefit.”

Very nicely done in 20 minutes.

Business as Unusual

19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the quote ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’. Since then, it has been used by many to inspire resilience and strength during adversity.

In the last few years, that resilience has been repeatedly tested by shock waves from large digital transformations, adapting to climate change, surviving COVID, and now navigating the Ukraine crisis. No industry or country has come through unscathed. Yet, like championship boxers, a breed of executives has learned to bounce back and keep on fighting.

In their dogged persistence, they are helping the world create new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new chemical formulations, new financial instruments, new ecosystems, new customer pathways, new business models.

Thanks to the sponsorship of Thomas Saueressig, Executive  Board member, Product Engineering and Peter Maier, President of Industries and Customer Advisory at SAP, I have been part for the last several weeks of a magical tour of this ‘Business as Unusual’

We have talked to countless executives at SAP, at its customers and its partners. The conversations have covered over 25 industries and 20 countries and involve a changing business vocabulary with concepts like molecular recycling,  green v blue hydrogen, decentralized energy markets, smart insurance, parametric testing in fabs, personalized medicine  and outcome based contracts. The transcripts of the conversations already exceed 2,000 pages.

We are organizing the threads along a series of themes such as Sustainable Energy Transition, Everything as a Service and Future of Capital. You will be hearing lots more about them in the next few weeks.

You already know about S/4HANA and SAP’s cloud products like SuccessFactors. You will get to hear more about products like AIN, BRIM, e-Mobility, Fioneer, GreenToken and many others which are helping with innovation at the edge of enterprises in their labs, their EV fleets, their treasury, their warehouses.  

Importantly you will hear in first-person from many of these ‘boxers’ who keep coming back for more.

Welcome to a New World. 

Analyst Cam: Salesforce Verticals – Health and Life Sciences

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Amit Khanna, SVP and GM, Health and Life Sciences at Salesforce.

The health and pharma markets have gone through an extremely challenging last couple of years. How will they emerge from the ups and downs? Amit presents on some of the trends they are seeing:

• 42% of the members say they're frustrated by the experience they get from their health plans/providers
• 77% of the providers say that non-traditional care revenues, such as retail health, care anywhere, are becoming more important
• 93% of the pharma companies are still not using AI effectively because they believe it's too complex or are unsure where to start.
• Almost a third of the $3.5 trillion the US spends on healthcare (nearly 20% of its GDP) is in administrative costs, much of it waste.

He explains where Salesforce plays – around the areas where EMR and ERP vendors play. Salesforce is more focused on longitudinal care outside the hospital, multi-channel engagement and the entire chain to provide personalized care.

He covers a lot of ground around vaccine management, telemedicine and other trends which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But, over and over it comes back to making the patient the center of the universe. I like his closing “Simple concepts (we are used to in other sectors) don’t seem to apply to healthcare. Providers ask you the same questions over and over…my date of birth doesn't change. Knowing about me is a concept (which seems foreign to) healthcare. If we can solve that, through the lifecycle of the consumer, we will reduce tremendous amount of waste in the system.”

Very crisply done in about 15 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Buday Thought Leadership Partners

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Bob Buday of Buday Thought Leadership Partners. For over 3 decades, he has been helping organizations think big at CSC Index, Bloom Group and now at the firm he leads.

We have a really invigorating conversation around “blockbuster” ideas which have influenced so many of us including Michael Hammer’s reengineering, Clayton Christensen’s disruption, CEB’s Challenger Sale concepts and several others.

He shares techniques which work (and do not work) when it comes to developing what he calls “momentous” ideas. Many of the ideas he has helped up shape end up as management books and influential articles in publications like the Harvard Business Review.

Nicely done in under half an hour. It is a nice primer to his new book Competing on Thought Leadership.

Analyst Cam: IFS Verticals - Manufacturing – Part 2

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This is part 2 of the conversation with Maggie Slovic and Andy Burton, Global Directors for Process and Discrete Manufacturing, respectively for IFS

In Part 1 yesterday, they provided highlights of 6 sub-verticals that falls under their definition of Manufacturing – Automotive, High-tech, Industrials, Food & Beverage, Chemicals and Life Sciences. They talked about the circular economy, servitization trends in product companies, industrial robotics and COVID’s impact on manufacturing.

Today they cover functionality in the IFS Cloud, discuss a few of their customers and some of the supply chain and other threads they picked up at the Hannover Messe, which is always a trailblazer of industrial trends.

Analyst Cam: IFS Verticals – Manufacturing – Part 1

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Maggie Slovic and Andy Burton, Global Directors for Process and Discrete Manufacturing, respectively for IFS

In Part 1 today, they provide highlights of 6 sub-verticals that falls under their definition of Manufacturing – Automotive, High-tech, Industrials, Food & Beverage, Chemicals and Life Sciences. Aerospace and Defense, an area IFS has long been strong at, is treated as a separate vertical.  They talk about the circular economy, servitization trends in product companies, industrial robotics and COVID’s impact on manufacturing.

Tomorrow in Part 2 they will cover functionality in the IFS Cloud, discuss a few of their customers and some of the supply chain and other threads they picked up at the Hannover Messe, which is always a trailblazer of industrial trends.

Nicely done – this one is only about 15 minutes long.

The New Polymath: The SAP version

I don’t like to play favorites across my books, but many readers say they really liked my 2010 book, The New Polymath.

The book bio read

“A Polymath—the Greek word for Renaissance Man—is one who excels in many disciplines. From Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin, we have relied on Polymaths to innovate and find creative solutions to the problems of the day. How would these Renaissance men and women manage our current technology bounty? Which disciplines would they choose to focus on? Would they work on the architecture of next-generation green cities, or focus on nanotechnology?

As our challenges have grown exponentially we need to bring together da Vinci, Franklin, and many more. The New Polymath is an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.”

I had a call with a SAP banking customer this week which took me back to the book:

    “He: Vinnie, a lot of these terms I have discussed will be new to you. So happy to revisit and clarify if we need to.

    Me: Believe me, as part of this project, I've gone from the auto industry and all the changes there (electrification, sharing, autonomy etc.) to healthcare to supply chains…

    He: it's fascinating, is it not? SAP is at the center of it all.”

I could have told him about also learning about a dazzling array of new business models,  carbon capture, cold chains. green hydrogen, molecular recycling, robotics in food service, reverse logistics, pharma track and trace and more. And the underlying tech it takes to support them including augmented reality, blockchain, computational chemistry, digital twins, not to mention hardened, high-reliability computing.

Over the last few weeks, SAP has allowed me to “walk the halls” with its executives, its customers and its partners. It has been demanding - not jet lag, but clock lag from Teams and Zoom sessions at all hours with folks in 20 countries so far - and trying to keep up with so much coverage SAP has across verticals, geographies and business processes. I replay the conversations as podcasts when I drive, I have nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts to mine.

Here we are in 2022 and we are worried about climate change, COVID and Ukraine. If you get away from all the political noise, our businesses are thankfully still focused on new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.

And the realization that we cannot do it alone. I heard a story about how a high-level auto executive came to visit Christian Klein, CEO of SAP as supply chains were being disrupted and told him “‘We have a couple of challenges in our business which I cannot solve alone and I don't think we can solve it with just one software company.’ That was the genesis of the auto industry network, Catena-X and since then SAP has been thinking about networks for many more industries.

“We cannot do it alone” is showing up in SAP’s rapidly changing ecosystem. Long dominated by SIs, I have talked to strategy firms, Industry 4.0 operational partners, startups in the SAP.iO Foundries accelerators. The ecosystem also has digital agencies, NGOs, outcome-based outsourcers and more.

Not every customer tells me “SAP is at the center of it all”. Many of them talk about S/4 or BRIM or hundreds of other SKUs in the product portfolio. But then you see the forest for the trees - what the broad SAP family is working on. It about so many edge applications – it’s not just about new medicine, new energy, new algorithms, it’s about new everything….

Demanding it has been, but as I felt when I wrote the book in 2010, most of these conversations make me go “wow” – and optimistic about the state of the world.

Analyst Cam: Reveal Value

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Martin Rowan, Managing Partner of Reveal USA, based in Chicagoland.

Their website says “Our mission is to use our knowledge of the supply chain as an indispensable link toward commercial success and social good.”

Their client base ranges from global companies like BP to local Chicago-based companies with two common threads - they run SAP and they run some kind of a supply chain. “So, they make, buy, sell, distribute something - whether it's minerals, petroleum, petrochemicals or consumer goods.”

With 160 projects over the last couple of decades. he says he can actually guarantee results for clients - inventory reductions, turns and service level improvements, process efficiencies and product production throughput increase.

I like the client maturity model and the operational use cases he shares. And the sherpa metaphor he uses to describe how they help clients scale mountains.

Nicely done in 20 minutes.  

Exxon Mobil in an "energy magic quadrant”

I have spent a lifetime watching new market segments emerge, mature, get disrupted, morph and consolidate. The energy sector is going through a massive disruption and renewal.  If I were building a 'magic quadrant" I would factor wind, solar, tidal, nuclear fusion, oil and gas, hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal and other alternative energy sources. My view is we need all of the above so we don’t have to become dependent on tyrant politicians or businesses. I wrote recently energy independence is as important as a focus on emissions.

And as I have in many tech sectors, I would be listening to pitches and doing a lot of research around each. And sure enough there would be bad-mouthing, with players calling the other evil and worse. My job is to ignore that noise.

I have been talking to a number of oil industry executives and listened to a couple of interviews Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil has done recently including one below. It is one of the largest publicly traded international oil and gas companies.

Here are some of his remarks (slightly edited) about his company, his competition and his thoughts on public policy. He is feisty at points, but generally, comes across as a geek and an economist, something I like when I listen to vendor pitches.

• We've been doing this for 100 years. When we first started out, we were basically making kerosene for lighting. When the electric light came on, we were moving into gasoline. We've moved into chemicals. And so, this industry and our company have been evolving since its inception.
• We are a company that knows how to manage and manipulate hydrocarbon molecules. What we're trying to manage with the energy transition, it's essentially a hydrocarbon, CO2 carbon management challenge. And that's right up our alley.
• The more folks we engage trying to solve this (transition to low-carbon) problem, I think the better off the world is going to be. I've seen a big difference just in the last several years with the number of different companies, big thinkers, focused in this space.... I mean, two years ago, it was wind and solar, period. Today, it's wind and solar, and you got carbon capture and hydrogen and biofuels and ammonia.  (Btw, he did not touch on the potential of many other sources I made above. As a CEO, he sees the competitive landscape differently than I do as an analyst)
• Ultimately, I think, by 2040, every vehicle in the world could be electric. And so, you would not have gasoline sales. Oil demand would (still) be what it was back in 2013/2014 time frame. We were pretty successful business in 2013/2014 . So, our view (is EVs are) not going to make or break this business or this industry.
• What's driving growth in demand for oil is chemical products, which play a really important role in people's lives today. The other big driver is industrial fuels, transportation fuels, and so heavy duty.
• Europeans are making a strong case for green hydrogen which is made through electrolysis. Blue hydrogen is developed primarily through methane, and then capturing the CO2 that comes out. The US has abundant methane, we've got abundant places to store CO2. And so, the answer for hydrogen in the US I think, is going to be blue hydrogen. In Europe, they don't have the same abundance of methane, they don't have the same co2 capture capacity. So, electrolysis and green hydrogen makes more sense for them. And so rather than coming out with a dictate that says it's got to be green hydrogen versus blue hydrogen is let the market figure it out.  What we will find as you go around the world, that the natural endowments, the advantages that you see, the technology progress, you see is going to manifest itself differently.
• I think political leaders ought to be focusing on how we get to a solution and working collaboratively. Not only with NGOs, but with businesses that have the experiences and the skills and the understanding to figure out solutions that help meet all of society's needs, not just one aspect.
• Don't incentivize one technology because you think that's a better answer than the other. Put incentives out there for all technologies and let the productive capacity of the market work, let the technologies of companies go to work to solve those problems. We are an advocate for a uniform price on carbon across the economy is because it incentivizes every individual player, irrespective of the industry or in respect of the technology that you support. You put your effort into finding a solution to capture that value, and reduce CO2. It's too complicated, it's too difficult to predict exactly what the solution is going to look like. Instead, we should put the incentives out there and let the market do what the market does.
• We've been doing this for 100 years. In the technology space, people recognize that we're serious, we have capabilities, and we're at the table, trying to bring solutions to that. We have a reputation for doing big projects, at scale, convening industries, bringing together different parts of governments, other commercial enterprises to come up with big picture solutions.
• We could spend forever debating what was said 30 years ago or we can focus on what are we doing today to try to make progress in this very complex space. I'm very proud of what we're doing today. And I think we will make a big difference; we will be an important part of the solution.

The next energy transition

Mankind has been through multiple energy transitions. Our ancestors burned wood, used peat bog and other biofuels. The Romans were particularly ingenious at using water and wind power. Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. The 1900s belonged to oil and gas especially as humans became much more mobile.

We are in the midst of another major energy transition as we all move to low-carbon futures. To me, the exciting thing is we will likely end up with a cocktail of energy sources – wind, solar, tidal, gas, nuclear fusion, upgraded biofuels, hydroelectric and geothermal combined with storage in the form of hydrogen fuel cells and electric batteries. And I could make that list much longer.

We should be celebrating this coming abundance. Instead, we are vilifying one source or another, using FUD to try and accelerate the transition to our favorite flavor. My projection - there will likely never be a single solution. Different countries will take their own paths. Just look at how they have been evolving in the last few decades, each with their own version of energy independence

• Germany deserves a lot of credit for maturing modern versions of wind and solar (wind mills and photovoltaic cells have been around far longer). And yet the majority of its energy still has come from its coal and from Russian gas. Going forward it will continue with its wind/solar but diversify with LNG logistics and a hydrogen future.
• The US image is dirty – yet between 1990 and 2020 its greenhouse gases stayed steady, even as its GDP went up 5X. The largest single contributor was that many of its utilities switched from coal to much cleaner gas. And that gas had its own remarkable story thanks to entrepreneurs like George Mitchell who contributed to the US version of energy independence
• France gets 2/3rd of its electricity from nuclear power. While much of the world conjures up images of Chernobyl and other disasters, the French reacted to the OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s with the brutally realistic assessment of “No oil, no gas, no coal, no choice” and embraced nuclear and continues with it.
• Norway has the highest per capita adoption of electric vehicles in the world. And these EVs are the “greenest” in the world. Over 90% of its electricity comes from hydroelectric sources. It is a country blessed with plenty of deep valleys and rivers. It is doubly blessed with plenty of North Sea oil and gas which it mostly exports – valued at over half of all of its exports.
• Iceland, Kenya and the Philippines (among others) get much of their energy from geothermal. Factoid – after solar, geothermal is the second most abundant source of energy available to humans.

Update - someone asked me what about the BRICS countries and others like Indonesia and in Africa. They have been trying out their own version of energy independence. Brazil pioneered ethanol from its cane decades ago. China has invested heavily in modern hydroelectric. Their challenge is they are still too heavily dependent on fossil fuels, particularly coal. They will have to innovate their own path to low carbon. They cannot pretend the rest of the world will make up for them. Their emissions more than offset the improvements we are seeing in some of the countries named above.

I have personally been dismayed by the demonizing of the oil and gas sector. In fairness, the industry has done a poor job marketing its contribution to our lives. Did you know over 6,000 items we use every day from lip balm to carpeting get their start in crude oil?

I worked in the oil patch in the 80s in Texas, Saudi, Holland, Bahrain among other places. It is an incredibly complex and brave industry. I say brave because they work in some of the most forsaken, hostile, risky places on earth. And have mind-bogglingly complex protocols for safety on rigs, tankers, refineries etc.

But importantly here’s why we will continue to need that sector to combat climate change. They have some of the only companies in the world that can run multi-billion $ projects, plan 20 years out, have tons of chemists, physicists, quantum computing wizards etc.

I have talked to some oil execs recently and it’s impressive what they are thinking about carbon capture/storage, LNG logistics, green hydrogen, geothermal etc. Low carbon is a definite focus.

The Ukraine crisis has reminded us once again of the essential need for energy independence. It is AND, not OR as we worry about emissions. Vice versa, for the BRICS and many other economies it cannot just be a focus on independence, it has to balance their massive emissions.

Go back to what I said earlier. In no previous transition has mankind had so many choices in energy sources. It’s a reason to celebrate, not bicker. That should be the best middle finger we can show Putin.

Analyst Cam: Salesforce Verticals – Financial Services

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Eran Agrios, SVP and GM of Financial Services at Salesforce.

Vendors tend to have different ways of defining “financial services” - so, it's nice that Eran provides a historical perspective on how Salesforce’s definition has evolved

“Over the past 23 years, our financial services customers have trusted Salesforce to drive deeper relationships with their customers, through mostly front office digital innovation. Seven years ago, we launched our first purpose-built product, Financial Services Cloud and I was part of that small team. We did that starting with wealth management firms, then expanded into banking and insurance. Last year we launched our first corporate and investment banking solution. Notably, in 2020, we acquired Vlocity which allowed us  to bring automation capabilities to front, middle and back-office operations.”

She says speed was a huge driver for these customers during the pandemic “I've been at Salesforce for 15 years, and we stand up solutions quickly. But customers were doing it in in hours and days. It was incredible.”

She says for their financial services customers, the focus now has shifted to efficiency and productivity. “Making every investment dollar count is part of every conversation we have with customers today.” She provides examples “such as straight through processing of an insurance claim or the orchestration of customer address changes across multiple systems of record.”

She also shares use cases from Prudential and their life insurance, retirement planning and investment solutions: and from KeyBank around wealth management and their commercial banking operations.

It is a brisk presentation – under 15 minutes - and a nice set up for the Salesforce World Tour New York which kicks off today at the Javits Center. Prudential and others are presenting there. Register here to catch them on-demand.

And for a slew of other breaking Salesforce financial services news announcements check out this post

Analyst Cam: Salesforce - Consumer Goods

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Sunil Rao, VP and GM of Consumer Goods presenting on trends in that sector and an update on Salesforce’s offerings.  

I like his broad definition of consumer goods - “it's the washing machine. It's the detergent you put into the machine, and the clothes you put in, and probably the snack you're eating while you're watching the clothes get washed.”

He starts on with trends including one of margin pressure: “whether it's retailers continuing to double down on products that they're introducing that are white labeled and brands that are going direct to consumer”,  supply chain issues, consumer privacy concerns and several others.

He then covers several new product features – more in the announcement which went out today.

• Trade Promotion Management (based on some IP developed by Accenture)
• Offline “Penny Perfect”  Pricing – with all the inflation, they should have branded it “nickel perfect” 😊  
• MuleSoft Accelerator for this industry – to tie to consumer and product master data in other systems

Finally he covers projects at two big global brands – retail execution “re-imagination” at PepsiCo and operational excellence (including that for field reps and drivers) at ABInBev

Sunil does a really nice job covering all that in half an hour.

 

Analyst Cam: IFS Verticals - Construction and Engineering

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Chris Knight, Global Industry Director for Construction and Engineering presenting on trends in that sector and IFS capabilities.

He talks about global trends and how spend on infrastructure projects will overtake residential construction. How 50% of projects will be partly supported by modular or prefabricated construction within the next few years. How the industry is also blending with manufacturing models with technologies like 3D printing. Like many industrial markets and servitization trends, this sector is improving margins by learning to operate, not just building and handing over. He covers silos in the construction IT landscape and how IFS solutions are helping an industry through its significant productivity challenges.

Lots of coverage of a sector where most competitors largely focus on labor part and project management/PSA technology.

Chris does a really nice job in half an hour.

Analyst Cam: Infor Vertical Strategy

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Soma Somasundaram, Chief Technology Officer and President of Products at Infor.

He does a nice job providing a 20 minute overview on their architectural evolution and how their 3 major ERP families – LN (Baan heritage) allows them to focus on industries with discrete manufacturing and complex projects like automotive and aerospace & defense, M3 (Intentia heritage) on process manufacturing and attribute-based industries like food and beverage and fashion, and the financial and HR products (Lawson heritage) on service industries like healthcare and public sector.

I have invited him to return and present a drill down in an industry across each of the families and focus on applications which have become much more relevant in the last few years like telemedicine and EMR in healthcare and direct to consumer in fashion.

This is a crisply done overview by Soma, who I did not realize was employee #1 at Infor. He is also one of the nicest execs in the enterprise software industry.

Burning Platform: The Right to Repair and Service

In the 75th episode of Burning Platform, we host Tomas O’Leary, Founder of Origina which provides independent support for IBM software products. He is also President of Free ICT, a not-for-profit foundation actively promoting the ICT Secondary Market. Their objective is to secure the right of ownership and the freedom for consumers and businesses to freely choose their providers to trade, maintain and repair products.

We have moved to a world of “everything as a service”. Whether labor-based or digital services, everyone wants a piece of the post-sales service business. In the industrial world, product companies see “Servitization” as a way to differentiate against global competition which can rapidly commoditize core product margins. Being asked to deliver on outcome-based contracts, they increasingly want to also own the service chain. Many are not offering products for purchase but on a long term contract. Keeping ownership of the product allows them to better manage repair, refurbish and other “circular economy” activities.

These new models are leading to friction with other customers who would prefer to pay and own, service the products on their own or with a service provider of their choice. It is also leading to legislation supporting customer “right to repair” on their own.

Tomas brings his perspective from the enterprise software sector where as products age, we have seen that prices do not decline and for that the quality of service is often pretty poor or non-existent. Tomas is passionate about customer choice and we spend the entire episode discussing why such choices are being compromised, how customers can protect themselves and also how regulators are starting to help.

Fascinating and much needed conversation.

Burning Platform: Experience, Inc.

In the 74th episode of Burning Platform, we host yet another author, Jill Popelka, President of SAP SuccessFactors. She kindly took time out of her book launch schedule to summarize themes from Experience. Inc.

She describes the inspiration for the book - her observation of the “loss of human connection” during the pandemic and the need to double down on improving experiences for employees, The book is a guidebook to business executives on how to deliver those.

She covers major takeaways from the book – employees need purpose, agency, a sense of belonging, recognition and what she explains as a “storm home”

She also talks about how technology can help improve employee experiences and talks about the SuccessFactors opportunity marketplace which employees can use to discover new learning and development opportunities within their companies. She also discusses their Workzone which fosters employee belonging and with tools like Appreciate drive recognition.

The book is already a best seller. Get your copy at Amazon here

Analyst Cam: Zoho Marketing Plus

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Zoho announced today its Marketing Plus platform and in prep I had Prashanth “PVK” Krishnaswami, CX Futurist present the “problem definition” and Dilip Nagarajan who heads CX product management do a “light demo”.

The product’s focus is both B2B and B2C mid-market enterprises ideally with less than 200 marketing employees

PVK presents what he calls 4 “existential challenges” CMOs face and Dilip presents features to tackle each of them.

• Visibility in team projects and initiatives
• Shared view of customers
• Collaboration across projects internally and outside agencies and resources
• Accelerating revenues – pipeline visibility, support for campaigns etc.

Sundeep MV, CMO for Techademy, an early adopter, has said this about the platform

"We embraced Zoho Marketing Plus, integrated Zoho CRM, and now we have a full-stack, unified sales and marketing solution wherein every relevant stakeholder in the organization is armed with the data and tools to increase engagement and drive customer experience. Our evangelism, marketing, pre-sales, and sales teams collaborate within a single dashboard on the platform, which houses all of the content and data we use to derive actionable insights and grow the business."

There's more in the press release announcing the solution, but PVK and Dilip cover a lot more group in roughly 40 minutes

Sapphire Preview: Next-Gen SAP

It’s been a wild decade so far - COVID, accelerated climate change focus, now a Russian-triggered energy crisis. Throw in supply chain issues, mass resignations, diversity and other crises, and Churchill’s famous quote “never let a good crisis go to waste’ comes to mind.

So, I have been asking every vendor what have you done to take advantage of the last two years? More importantly, what have you done to help your customer through these shocks and chaos?

At its Sapphire event next week, I expect I will hear plenty from SAP. Sure, lot of it will focus on S/4HANA, RISE and cloud properties. But one on one, I have heard plenty more.

It started last September when I approached Peter Maier to present on various verticals in the Analyst Cam series. Here is the index to the presentations SAP executives made.

There was a big difference in what I heard from SAP compared to most other vendors. They were talking thematic trends which cut across multiple industries, geographies and business processes – Direct to Consumer. Circular Economy. Everything as a Service.

Similar is happening in their ecosystem. The SAP.iO Foundries have been organizing bi-annual cohorts of startups in their 10 global accelerators based on themes. Here are some I profiled in the Sustainability and Circular Economy cohort.

I have seen presentations on an Industry 4.0 automation center and a Retail customer experience center. I will see a few more at the show floor at Sapphire.

So why is all this different? It’s not horizontal,or vertical or geographic positioning. It is what I call orthogonal. In comparison, most vendors and my fellow analysts are still talking market categories which were born in the 90s. (So is SAP – they still need to make their numbers). All those recessions and crises later and we are still talking an ancient language. I personally take blame for acronyms like ERP!

I went back to Peter and to Thomas Saueressig and I said you are doing something very different. Their response was we could show you much more. So, over the last couple of months I have had a chance to interview many of their thought leaders around Energy Transition, Digital Health, Smart Government, Autonomous Enterprise and many other themes.

I have heard more about the hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear fusion, LNG logistics from them than I have from any other vendor. Not just high-level ESG metrics, operational details. Patient-driven Data Networks. Industry Networks which tackle direct Tier 1 and 2 type suppliers not just paper/pencil and MRO suppliers.

Next, they are introducing me to customers and partners who are working with them to create next-gen applications. I am learning a ton and the content will be released in book and other formats. The important thing is SAP is speaking a brand-new language and helping customers survive and thrive in this crazy decade we find ourselves in.

The 1920s started off well but ended badly for most countries. I have a feeling we are reversing course in the 2020s. We are paying it forward. Things can only get better. But we all – especially my side of the aisle - need to get used to a very different script. It’s about new energy, new medicine, new algorithms.

Let’s not let this mother of all crises go to waste.

Workday’s Relentless Discipline and the Power to Adapt

Some of us are old enough to remember Workday’s pioneering analyst summit in August 2010. I wrote back then

“Few vendors have the guts to be open to such a smart and opinionated bunch as Workday was during its Technology Day yesterday. Like a marathon tennis match with plenty of volleys and lobs and aces, the back and forth was something to watch.  As you can see from the Twitterstream and blog posts from the day a wide set of angles were covered - object models, user interface design, change management processes, analytics and integration tools (in a SaaS market where both are still weak), stuff from the labs - tablet and voice interfaces, mobile applications - and more.”

So, when we were invited to the latest iteration of their Innovation Summit for analysts last week, I had two questions:

• How many of my peers would show up given continued pandemic travel restrictions and worries?
• What would count for innovation at a company which is now almost 80 times as large and for an event whose theme was a confident “Made for this Moment”?

The first question was relatively easy to answer. I ran an informal survey when I arrived and tweeted to a colleague

“…talking to a few analysts here, we have become more selective about attending in-person events. Travel experience is still not that business friendly. Puts more pressure on vendors to rethink events. Well-crafted analyst summits like #wdaysummit are ideal format.”

It helped that this was their first in-person summit in 3 years and they took elaborate COVID testing precautions. They shipped a Lucira kit for PCR quality testing at home. We ran a test 24 hours before our flight to Silicon Valley and repeated that test upon arrival at the event hotel. About 20 analysts showed up.

The second question turned out to be far more complex. Ray Wang of Constellation Research would have liked to have heard about the metaverse, DeFi and more contemporary tech trends. Other analysts had other questions like “what about treasury management?” I myself would have liked a bit more about how Workday is reacting given the "made for the moment" theme to current events in Ukraine and the energy transition focus it has created in every country and industry.

I have been lucky to feature in my Analyst Cam and Burning Platform video episodes several Workday executives and products in the last 2 years.  So, I expected a nice recap during the event.

What we did hear a lot about is Workday's architectural journey, their distinct M&A strategy and how their solutions enable what Workday calls the “Power to Adapt”.

I particularly liked the presentation by Sayan Chakraborty, EVP, Product & Technology where he said “We believe great applications can only exist alongside a great platform and from this combination - you get the 'power to adapt’”. Rather than try to just absorb acquisitions, Workday tries to benefit from the contemporary thinking at startups they acquire. More on how Workday’s architecture has evolved over 15 years in this episode of Analyst Cam with Sayan Chakraborty.

Pete Schlampp, Workday’s Chief Strategic Officer, told us about their growth in packaged solutions.  “Since starting this program last year, Workday and our partners have published 15 Packaged Solutions supporting the oCFO and oCHRO, with another 20 slated for FY23.” Packaged solutions are small bundles of contemporary features like VIBE they had presented to me here .

I have been pushing Workday to get more into operational areas in industries where they have plenty of presence – most in the services sector. For now, I am not worried about Workday’s disciplined approach and  continued focus on the financial, hcm and planning/analytical areas. Workday has been delivering plenty of innovation in these areas. They also have miles to go with their current focus. During the session, they talked about their global growth – there is so much more of the world to grow into. By my estimate only 5% of its employee base is in the APJ region. Same thing with the SME market – there are plenty of opportunities in subsidiaries of large companies and the higher end of the SME spectrum.

In my analyst role, I get to hear competition bashing on a regular basis. Workday is a frequent target. My question to the haters is “Why are you letting Workday so dramatically narrow your definition of addressable market? There is so much white space around them for you to exploit”.

Frankly, I wish they would speak like C0-CEO Aneel Bhusri did at the event. He generously complimented his peers and said he was proud of the software industry for how it had responded to the pandemic.

Analyst Cam: Limeade – all about employee well-being

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Dr. Patti Fletcher, CMO and Larry Colagiovanni, Chief Product and Technology officer at Bellevue, WA based Limeade.

There is a lot of talk about “employee experience”. Of course, everyone wants happy, productive employees but a better UX in a transactional system may make them a bit more productive, but by itself does not contribute much to employee happiness.  

Employers face a daunting set of challenges – coping with the “mass resignation” trend, employee burnout, trying to get the right mix of work-from-home and in physical office. They are responding with a variety of perks – Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office, many offer mental health aids in addition to many traditional benefits. Limeade helps employees navigate this menu of myriad benefits. Just as important via its "immersion" in ERP systems, employees have a personal reason to interact more often with the system.   

As Limeade founder and CEO, Henry Albrecht commented in Forbes “Why can’t there be a great company that does for human well-being what Intuit software does for financial health, aligning what's good for people and what's good for business toward a common mission?”

Patti and Larry go through how Limeade aims to deliver both – what's good for people and what's good for business

More energy innovation

On New Florence

Supercritical geothermal energy

More on carbon capture

Geomechanical pumped storage

Hydrogen-fired train

Relocating farmland to increase carbon capture

More Health innovation

On New Florence

Digital Twin of the Human Body

AI and new drug innovation

Biophilic design for hospitals

The future of mRNA

Non-sleep deep rest

Military applications

On New Florence I knew there would be plenty of energy and health related posts this year, but with the situation in E Europe and tensions in Asia, I have also accelerated some of the posts around defense technology

Here are some recent ones:

Kamikaze drones

The amazing Blue Angels

The evolution of hypersonic aircraft

Low-intensity nuclear weapons

Vacuum bombs

The Thunderbirds and their F-16s

Analyst Cam: CaptivateIQ – Demystifying Sales Commissions

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time it is Mark Schopmeyer, co-founder and co-CEO of CaptivateIQ which has a no-code SaaS solution to manage the thorny area of sales compensation.

As with many “junction points” in the enterprise – in this case between sales operations, finance and HR compensation management - you find many spreadsheet applications and convoluted legacy/custom developed and user-unfriendly applications. CaptivateIQ has thrived in this niche. It is barely 5 years old. and says it has crunched $2.5 billion in sales commissions. Importantly it allows for transparency to the calcs so salespeople can focus more on selling and less on algorithms which drive their paycheck. No wonder they are already a “unicorn” - valued earlier this year in its Series C round at a $1.25 billion valuation.

Mark does a nice job explaining why sales commissions can be obtuse in many enterprises and how they are likely to become even more so as business models evolve and customer contracts blend product, service, data and other components across a product lifecycle.

I was introduced to them by Workday Ventures. They are an investor along with many others like Accel, Bessemer and Sequoia.

Crisply done in about 25 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Workday’s architectural journey

In a February episode of Burning Platform, we hosted a back and forth on architectural trends in the industry with Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.  Here we have him back to present more specifically on Workday’s architectural journey.  He only presents 5 slides but makes powerful commentary.

He presents some high-level philosophy, he discusses how Workday has integrated several acquisitions – some analytical, other transaction processing heavy. But I really liked his description of how Workday’s architecture has evolved over 15 years

"Today, we have a highly scalable platform that can support millions of employees on a single instance of Workday. We have elastic capability, horizontally scaling elastic capability because you have business cycles. You do payroll on particular days and times. You run specific reports at times during the month or during the fiscal year.

If we look back 15 years ago, we would see a lot of general compute engines in the Workday stack. Today, you see a lot of highly specialized compute engines, and we send the right workload to the right engine.

• If you've got an analytics workload, it will go to the Prism technology that came in through the Platfora acquisition that is designed for that type of workload and optimize for that workload.
• We have the OMS transaction service in the middle of this diagram that handles our high-performance transaction workloads.
• We've got integration servers that handle the ins and outs, as you connect Workday to systems outside of Workday.
• You have ML workloads that move into our ML environment that have a different kind of usage rate, memory consumption, CPU usage than these other workloads.

            We can optimize for all of those, and I think that's really the dramatic difference. If you time-traveled back 15 years and showed this slide to architects at Workday, what they would be surprised by is the specialization and the elasticity and the horizontal scale that's now ...

The age when you would do machine learning processing at a hardware level on standard CPUs from Intel or AMD is essentially over. The industry realized that there were these devices, these GPUs that had been developed primarily for gaming, and realized that, hey, these are really, really interesting because of the way they tackle the processing problem, and we can leverage that capability – essentially, parallel processing versus serial processing (parallel at scale) – and those kinds of problems are the kinds of problems we have in deep learning networks or other kinds of workloads within the ML AI capability."

25 minutes of wizardry. Very well done.

Analyst Cam: CRM Watchlist

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC. He summarizes the results from his latest CRM Watchlist survey. He is a repeat guest and was last on the Burning Platform episode where we discussed generational shifts in content creation and distribution.

This is the 19^th edition of his signature, annual project. He describes how the effort has evolved over the years. Lot of factors go into his scoring and they change every year. As he says, he looks at a vendor’s strategy and scores it on how well they executed on what they said they would. He then measures the impact they had on the market. Impact as a company – so not just their architectural excellence or financial performance or social responsibility posture. And it is based on the vendor’s stated strategy and market focus – which allows smaller vendors to be evaluated fairly depending on how they delivered against their geographic, vertical or size of customer focus.

He does factor in what he calls “intangibles”. His scoring for that category is a bit less transparent considering how much he guides vendors about the others. But he shares one nugget - he deducts points for “competition bashing”. Good for him.

He is tough and thorough, but very fair. Does not matter if you are a client of his or a close friend. This year, he evaluated 59 vendors reading every word of the 4,682 pages (yes!) if they were submitted to his guidelines. It is a testament to his market impact that vendors spend so much time and effort on their responses.

He has three winning categories -Winners, Winners with Distinction, and Elite. Only a handful have qualified for the Elite designation over all these years. There were 4 winners with Distinction this time around – Oracle, ServiceNow, Thunderhead and Zoho. He discusses another 12 in the Winners tier. Zoho scored highest in total this year. It also submitted the longest response at 259 pages. Paul insists there is no correlation between size of the response and his scoring.

He also shares the vendors who scored highest for each of his categories and summarizes with 4 promising and 2 concerning trends he gleaned from this year's responses.

I have run competitive evaluations of software vendors and outsourcers for many a client. At Gartner, I ran similar structured reviews for Magic Quadrants and other long-form content. I feel no shame saying I did not ever come close to evaluating 50+ vendors or reading 4000+ response pages for a single deliverable.

Next year, Paul says will be the final Watchlist. I suspect he will get an even larger population of vendors who pay homage by participating. In the blog post he said “Since this upcoming one is the very last one so, if I'm you, I'm registering to take a crack at it. Even if most companies don't win the award, they more often than not appreciate the exercise that you go through to put together the submission because it, when completed, gives you a holistic look at your company that you otherwise do not have.  It's worth it for the workout.”

I will absolutely bring him back for to describe the process for the 20th in the series. In the meantime, I need to have him back around his other passion – professional sports. We can discuss Tom Brady’s “un-retirement”, the return of baseball after a near shutout and so much else.

Analyst Cam: IFS Industry Solutions

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Antony Bourne, Senior Vice President of Industries at IFS. He presents an overview on 5 sectors they particularly focus on

• Aerospace and Defense
• Utilities, Energy, Telecom
• Construction and Engineering
• Manufacturing
• Services

While many other vendors can claim to be focused on these industries, IFS usually has a nuanced perspective. Services for many vendors means call centers or PSA – Professional Services Automation and project time and expense billing. The IFS perspective is much wider to include field services, digital twins and remote assistance to those technicians and to support outcome-based business models. Their aerospace customer base covers OEMs, operators, MRO vendors, national defense agencies – again a much wider definition.

Antony also talks about several strategic trends across these industries including:

• Servitization – where industrial companies are getting more revenues from post-sales services, adopting subscription and other business models and organizationally blending product and service organizations. (I had previously hosted Marne Martin and Mark Brewer of IFS on two episodes of Burning Platform on the topic here)
• Resurgence of Capex – as he points out 70% of industrial assets are over 25 years old so there is a growing focus on capex spend and harnessing the mountains of data that modern assets with sensors and software are generating
• Smarter Construction – Pre-fab concepts are allowing manufacturing concepts to be applied to that sector

I have invited his group to do a drill down across a few of their verticals. Antony whets our appetite in a 25-minute presentation – actually more of a back and forth. He did not need any slides. Nicely done.

More urgency around energy transition

I have been preaching a focus on balanced energy – invest in wind and solar, but also in upgrades to nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal and other energy sources. And don’t demonize fossil fuels till the others scale up significantly.  My note last year, The road to energy hell…is being paved with good intentions, predicted a bumpy transition away from fossils. The recent crisis in Ukraine and the resulting spike in energy prices are just the beginning and are forcing an urgent rethink of energy strategies.

As one of my New Year resolutions, I promised a lot of focus on energy, carbon reduction and the circular economy on my innovation blog,  New Florence.

Here are 10 recent entries:

The promise of the hydrogen economy

Tesla’s Megapacks in Alaska

Hydroelectric as most popular renewable fuel

Solar energy from the American desert

Exciting progress on nuclear fusion

Creative uses of captured carbon

The complex LNG supply chain

Solar panels covering canals – avoiding evaporation and generating energy

Synthetic biology to create carbon negative chemicals

ML maps nearly 70,000 solar energy sites with capacity of at least 10 kilowatts.

Much more to come.

Analyst Cam: ASUG – Pulse of Customer Survey

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Geoff Scott, CEO of the Americas' SAP Users' Group. He has been a frequent guest in this series and on Burning Platform. Here he summarizes results from their recent N. American Pulse of Customer survey including:

• How does the COVID-19 pandemic continue to affect organizations’ operations?
• Who is making IT buying decisions today?
• Where are SAP customers placing their focuses in 2022?
• What technology is having the most impact on digital transformation efforts?
• What’s the status on migrations to SAP S/4HANA?
• What role is cloud playing in organizations’ current landscapes?
• Why does SAP talent and training continue to challenge SAP customers, especially with the “great resignation” affecting most talent sectors?

This truly is an abridged version, though as you will see I asked a number of questions. If you are an ASUG member you can access a much longer version here. And if you are not a member yet, as Geoff says you should definitely consider signing up here

 

 

Analyst Cam: Empower – Digitizing the journey from linear to circular econo

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Wilhelm Myrer, Founder and CEO of Empower.eco, an Oslo, Norway based startup. Empower is the last in the Sustainability cohort introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ).

The US EPA defines a circular economy as one which “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”

In many ways, Norway, and Scandinavia broadly, epitomize the growing focus on the circular economy. Norway has an incredibly effective plastic exchange system - 97% of all plastic bottles are recycled, while most countries around the world barely get to 10%. Norwegian company, Tomra, has since inception in 1972, become an icon for the circular economy with its reverse vending machines which collect bottles and cans from consumers. Mark Brewer of IFS had described them here https://bit.ly/2KvjkXg

Wilhelm describes the basic principle which works for Tomra and Norway – reward consumers for each bottle returned with cash or credits and businesses with tax and other incentives. Enpower is helping companies digitize the flow from consumer through the recycling ecosystem using blockchain technology, providing detailed traceability, accountability, metrics and "product passports" along the way. The traceability is showing up in interesting ways to delight customers - he tells the example of how seats from a soccer stadium in Spain are being recycled and the end products will allow consumers to proudly brag about that origin.

While the major focus is on plastics, the concept can be applied to paper, glass, metals and so many other materials. 

Very inspirational conversation below.

Analyst Cam: Specright – making standards and specifications sexy

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Matthew Wright, Founder and CEO of Specright which provides specification data management to Fortune 1000 companies with complex needs.

They were introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ).

Specright was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year but as you will hear precision in specifications can have an impact in every  process which touches raw materials, ingredients, formulas, packaging and finished goods.

Matthew’s passion comes from a couple of decades in the packaging industry. As he describes in his book The Evolution of Products and Packaging, we have seen an explosion in SKUs and complexity in supply chains. As he says, existing ERP, PLM and other software were designed before complexity grew exponentially, and the lack of focus on specifications is the root cause of many supply chain issues we are seeing. BTW, Gartner identified them as a Cool Vendor in their Supply Chain category in 2020.

He presents on three customers and how they have benefited from better specs – one reduced scrap production, the second reduced spend on corrugate packaging and the third in sourcing a critical ingredient across multiple product SKUs. He also describes how they have helped industries set standards and work with other bodies which are tasked with defining them.

Very nicely done, and I am looking forward to reading his book.

Analyst Cam: Zoho Creator Platform 6 and low-code positioning

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

Zoho announced today version 6 of their Creator Platform and are also positioning it as a low-code development solution. As it says "Organizations currently face soaring demand for new business software, but existing low-code platforms for business users only facilitate basic app building, lacking the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools."

In advance of the announcement, Zoho arranged a conversation with Hyther Nizam. I had talked to him about his regional role in the Middle East and Africa here. In the segment below he provides a 10 minute long exec overview on the low-code market. As he says. we have “crossed the chasm” in terms of IT acceptance of citizen developers. I also liked his point how customers are using the tool for developing industry specific application extensions. 

I also had Tejas Gadhia in Product Management at Zoho present in a longer segment below about new functionality in the platform. It includes role-based access controls and comprehensive audit trails and backup to give IT more visibility and comfort about casual developers and has an embedded business intelligence and analytics engine among other features. More about the features here

It is clearly not just for citizen developers. If anything, I hope Zoho does not overemphasize the low-code moniker - the platform is being used by much more sophisticated developers 

Analyst Cam: Algramo – Redefining CPG plastic packaging

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series. https://bit.ly/34eWDMD

This time it is Carlos Oliveira, CTO of Algramo, which is helping CPG companies rethink packaging and refilling of cleaning, personal care, pet food and other products which are today mostly sold in plastic containers. Based in Santiago, Chile, Algramo translates to “by the gram”.

Algramo’s delivery mechanism is a vending machine dispenser where consumers refill in their reusable smart containers. Carlos says these containers can last up to 250 uses. RFID IDs in the containers and mobile apps help track consumption, container life and reuse patterns and also have a gamification angle. Carlos goes into some of the dispensing and sanitation technology.

The value propositions - Retailers save on shelf space. Producers like Unilever, Nestle, Colgate and Clorox are some of their customers who ship in bulk and save on packaging. Consumers pay for bite-size purchases at their point of need e,g, detergents are sold in public laundromats.  The world benefits from reduced plastic pollution. Carlos presents on data on their plastic, water and C02 savings

Carlos gave me a personal invite to go test his dispensers in Chile! But closer to many of us they are at the following locations if you want to support this creative contribution to sustainable world.

San Francisco

• Target, 115 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

NYC

• 259 Malcolm X Blvd, Brooklyn, NY 11233
• 141 Flushing Ave Building 77, Brooklyn, NY 11205
• 115 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94103, United States
• Brooklyn Navy Yard (Building 77) - 141 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn NY 11205
• Essex Market - 88 Essex St, New York, NY 10002

London

• Lidl, Stalling's Ln, Kingswinford DY6 7BG

They are also represented in Indonesia and soon will have presence in Mexico. Carlos explains how they decide on global expansion.

They were introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ). Algramo was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year.

Analyst Cam: HCL Technologies and complex industrial asset monitoring and maintenance

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

HCL is a leading Indian outsourcing firm. Differently from some of its Indian peers, it has long had a strong product engineering/testing focus, not just an IT practice. I profiled some of that prowess in a case study I wrote (see excerpt here) on the innovative Boeing 787 design and the radically redesigned supply chain for the plane’s components. HCL had helped Boeing with testing and other services.   

HCL has also been investing in and offering more in packaged software and IP, not just selling labor and project services. As an example, it acquired collaboration, commerce, digital experience, AppScan, & BigFix solutions from IBM in 2019.

With that backdrop, we had Colin Breakwell, Associate Vice President at HCL Technologies present on their iMRO and iSAM extensions to SAP’s S/4HANA ERP core for applications in aerospace and other complex equipment settings.

Many of those complex product industries have been generating more in services revenues – it is a trend called servitization – see episodes here and here which go into more of that trend. That transition to services is calling for a wide range of asset tracking, digital twin, field service, spare part inventory, outcome based business models, SLA management and other functionality and as Colin points out coordination across a vast ecosystem of cross-border equipment makers, operators, lessors and service providers. 

It is also leading to legislation around the world under the moniker of “Right to Repair”. Customers want the choice to maintain these assets on their own or with third party service providers, not just be forced to sign up for multi-year service contracts with the equipment maker.  

Colin does a nice job describing in about half an hour this new world of making, maintaining and monitoring some of the most complex aircraft engines, wind turbines, mining, oilfield, medical, transportation and other equipment. And the wide range of software functionality SAP and HCL offer this sector.

Analyst Cam: Limeloop – Circular Economy Logistics

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time it is Ashley Etling, co-founder and CEO of Limeloop, which is blending material and computer science to redefine packaging, shipping and reverse logistics for retailers

They were introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ). Limeloop was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year.

In Limeloop world, products are shipped by retailers in their reusable packaging (in 3 sizes - weatherproof and temperature controlled) instead of cardboard boxes. The fabric is made from recycled billboard vinyl. Consumers use a prepaid shipping label to return the packages to a 3PL which sanitizes and redistributes them. They are designed to be reused over 200 times. In contrast, cardboard boxes can be reused only a handful of times. They supplement the packaging with sensors and a platform to track and trace shipments so the retailers get plenty of data beyond tracking information – package open rates, temperature data etc.

That could potentially eliminate millions of tons of waste in discarded boxes, emissions during recycling and countless hours in dealing with customer calls and returns, not to mention lower packaging costs for retailers – Ashley says 40% in those savings.  

Ashley does a nice job is under 15 minutes covering her customer base, the landscape of other players in the emerging circular economy/reverse logistics space and the pedigree of her management team, investors and advisers.

Burning Platform: Winning in the 4th Industrial Revolution

In the 73rd episode of Burning Platform, we host (again) Marty Groover, CTO at C5MI

In previous appearances he has talked about applying 4^th Industrial Revolution concepts in companies like Caterpillar.

Here we use his new book, Speed of Advance  as backdrop to discuss the changed US industrial sector with more reshoring and supply chain rethinking. SoA is a Navy term which calculates the speed of a ship anticipated along an intended track. As a surface warfare officer, Marty Groover spent more than two decades leading an intricate operational symphony of communications processes, computer systems, and weapons programs.

In our digital world, we often underplay the role of the physical, blue collar world - we still have to make, grow, transport, service lots of "stuff". Or we try to just throw technology at the problem and think that will work miracles. The labor shortages, process changes and breakdowns during the last couple of years have been a wake up call.  

In this book, Marty shows how to create an enhanced, synchronized system between technology and the people who use it to produce winning results in the 4th Industrial Revolution. The technologies include robotics, 3D printing, IoT and others which are helping redefine the shop floor, the warehouse and so much else.

Marty has a Kindle eBook launch pricing promotion at 99c for the next few days. Take advantage of the offer here

Burning Platform: Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software

In the 72nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.

Sayan is, in many ways, a rocket scientist. He has degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT. He started his career as an engineer on interplanetary spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on the early commercialization of global positioning systems (GPS).

However, in his career he has influenced more of the arc of enterprise software. He arrived at Workday in 2015 through their acquisition of GridCraft which he co-founded. Prior to that, he led teams focused on next-generation collaboration products at Oracle. Leading up to that he worked at several startups for two decades

So, the conversation is a bit of a walk down memory lane. We invoke terms like SOA, CPU speeds and OLTP as we discuss today’s microservices and how Workday deals with scaling of massive transaction volumes across finance, hcm, procurement functions while also becoming a powerhouse in the planning/analytics space.

We have a bit of a debate on whether consumer tech is leading enterprise tech when it comes to ML and AI. That leads to threads on data regimes and bias in AI.

We have an interesting section on the need to rethink enterprise application categories and definitions, to break down traditional silos and to rethink business processes. As he says, the pandemic has forcefully shown us an enterprise is not just a “campus of buildings”. He discusses how Workday’s string of acquisitions has already helped challenge some of the traditional thinking.

This a master class on IT architectures.  You can see and hear Sayan's high-energy and passion for his role in shaping the industry in his body language and tone.

An absolute must watch.

 

Burning Platform: Enterprise Software in Emerging Markets

In the 71st episode of Burning Platform, we host Hyther Nizam, President, Middle East and Africa for Zoho.

Let me start off by saying I became a fan of Zoho way back in 2006 after this session with the CEO, Sridhar Vembu. Over the years I have written plenty about their business model,  his leadership style,  his humble philosophy about life and rural revival and what he calls “transnational localism” 

I had a chance to talk to Hyther about an exciting new product release (he also wears a product development hat) announcement planned for early March. I asked him if we could also talk about “transnational localism” as applied to his region which spans 10 countries across the Middle East and Africa. He does in the conversation below and you have to marvel at the product enhancements (like RTL – right to left UX needed for Arabic and other scripts), the sweat equity, the pricing subsidies and other investments Zoho makes in developing each market.

Contrast that to most other enterprise software vendors who try to replicate their expensive direct sales, partner heavy model when they look at global expansion. Additionally, most of them prioritize English speaking countries in their global plans. No wonder most SaaS applications, even after two decades, have very little customization for most of the world’s local languages, currencies and regs.

Zoho’s investments in MEA are clearly paying off as Hyther shares. His is one of the fastest growing regions at Zoho. Not sure other vendors can match their pricing model, but there are several philosophical and behavioral attributes they should consider emulating.

Personally, I am in awe of how Hyther managed to accomplish so much with global travel constrained in the pandemic affected last couple of years. And how he seems to fairly easily juggle his product responsibilities as well.

More on the product announcements next week.      

Analyst Cam: pymetrics – Talent matching with a focus on soft skills

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Dr. Frida Polli, co-founder and CEO of pymetrics which utilizes neuroscience and AI to assess candidates and employees across a range of cognitive, social, and emotional traits and algorithmically recommends the best-fit talent to companies. Using algorithms that are trained on high-performing employees at a company, Pymetrics builds a trait profile of a company's top performers to select best-fit talent.

Their major differentiators include their focus on soft skills, AI fueled by plenty of data which maps skills to wide range of occupations and validation across several global customers. Throughout the presentation, the word “unbiased” came up often (especially when it comes to ethnicity and gender), with concerns about bias being built into machine learning algorithms.

She makes a strong case for why measuring soft skills is critical. She quotes that 89% of HR leaders believe that failed hires lacked appropriate soft skills. She believes such skills are inherent, durable and future-facing.

Pymterics has patented a set of 12 core exercises which capture cognitive, emotional and social traits. They measure soft skills like generosity and focus which have been matched to various occupations. They are supplemented with assessments of quantitative and communication skills.

It is a testament to how the workforce environment has changed when she says half the use cases she sees now have an internal mobility/reskilling and workforce insights focus. When they started a decade ago, it was primarily focused on talent acquisition. 

She covers wide ground including ROI from her platform and 3 case studies (including two in Asia/Pacific). That brings out nuggets about soft skills across global cultures, and the applicability of her tools to entry level staff v experienced hires.

I was introduced to them by Workday Ventures. They are an investor along with many others like General Atlantic and Khosla. It is a fascinating conversation with someone who is a Harvard PhD and has spent plenty of time in the cognitive sciences.