deal architect

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.

Analyst Cam: SupplHi Industrial B2B vendor management

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 Giacomo Franchini, founder and CEO of SupplHi which provides a sourcing and vendor management platform for complex industrial manufacturers and service providers

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 to me here ). SupplHi was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year.

Giacomo estimates SupplHi’s addressable market at $33 trillion or 30% of global GDP. This includes verticals like shipbuilding, energy equipment makers and various product manufacturing. He is a former Bain strategy consultant and unafraid to tackle complicated challenges which typify that world. As an example, they have built their own standard categorizations by verticals to better classify the nearly 70,000 suppliers across 100+ countries on their platform. As he says, you can drill down into not one, but 70 different types of pumps.

He spends time talking about the sustainability challenge – this segment is estimated to account for 21% of total CO2 emissions. You can measure suppliers on their pollution, energy efficiency and waste management attributes, and other ESG metrics like those on health and safety and governance.

Their supplier base and category filters also position them as useful sourcing tools. He provides an overview on a couple of large customers who use them more broadly like Fincantieri, a shipbuilder with over 12,000 suppliers and Maire Tecnimont, an engineering and construction company with over 30,000 suppliers.

I liked several things about SupplHi. They are tackling direct suppliers in highly specialized verticals. Too many other networks primarily focus on indirect, back office spend. In a separate conversation, Giacomo told me about his global experience while at Bain. We also talked about Italy’s creativity and industrial design aesthetics. The vertical and geographic quotient of this team is impressive, to say the least.    

Burning Platform: Experiential Design in Enterprise Software

In the 70th episode of Burning Platform, we host Jeff Gelfuso, Workday’s first ever Chief Design Officer.

The pandemic has exposed all of us to the most honorable of customer services and in reverse, some incredibly disappointing experiences – in what I have called COVID copouts and Brexit BS. I worked on a project last year where I had a chance to ask a number of executives to catalog their good and bad personal experiences and I heard plenty around eCommerce, auto dealers, travel and other services. Accenture's design agency Fjord, has coined a term "liquid expectations" — "when you experience a service in one industry, it raises the bar for what you expect from other industries." I have a corollary to that: employee experiences play a huge part in customer experiences. Their frustration, fatigue, fear all negatively affect how they manifest themselves to the outside world.

With that backdrop, it was nice to host Jeff who has significant product design and R&D experience in the consumer tech world at Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. It is a fascinating conversation about the enterprise tech view of experiences and how wfh and hybrid workplaces have complicated the thinking.

Jeff talks about how he spent the first few months at Workday talking to over a hundred customer executives about their experiences and expectations. He also talks about the test bed of Workday’s own employee-centric culture and how that is helping his design thinking. His personal, virtual on-boarding experience and their HR moves like “Thank-you Fridays” during the pandemic are guiding his thinking. And how the HCM experiences are being adapted to Workday’s planning, financial, procurement and other applications.

I like his point about thinking about “end to end experiences” and being humble enough to recognize that you will never be able to anticipate how every user reacts to your software. And the resulting need to think about multiple roles, tailored experiences and to build flexibility into your design. We also discuss natural interfaces and the need to weave in external collaboration tools like Slack and Teams (and soon Metaverse tools).

He has a noble goal – simplification. He defines it as not pretending you can eliminate enterprise complexity, but pushing it more to the background. Other competitors have long promised ‘Run Simple”. Jeff is doing it in a vastly more complicated, hybrid workplace with heightened employee expectations.

Kudos to Workday for recognizing the need for a visionary design officer and recruiting someone from the consumer tech world. Jeff particularly impressed me with his empathetic approach to experiential design.

Analyst Cam: SAP.iO Foundries

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 Kange Kaneene, VP, SAP.iO Foundries North and Latin America

SAP.iO is SAP's strategic business unit to incubate startup innovation and drive new business models for SAP. SAP.iO Foundries are SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers. Today, there are SAP.iO Foundries in 10 strategic innovation hubs, including San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Tel Aviv, Singapore , Bangalore, Shanghai and Tokyo. Each Foundry runs one to two cohorts/programs a year, incubating 15-20 startups at each location.

Kange does a really nice job summarizing in under 15 minutes their impressive track record (started in 2017, they have incubated/accelerated over 370 startups), the value proposition for SAP customers, the startups and SAP itself. She also profiles some of the recent cohorts. She would also welcome interest from startup entrepreneurs from our audience who meet their filters.

Kange has facilitated presentations for me from several of the startup in the cohorts last year which focused on sustainability. They are presenting to me over the next couple of weeks and I will profile them in this series.

Awesome to see so much global innovation. 

Analyst Cam: Prevedere Intelligent Forecasting

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 Rich Wagner, CEO of Prevedere, which offers what it calls “intelligent forecasting”. I would say it is helping move that analytical world forward by helping focusing on external signals not just building on historical trends. Thanks to the Workday Ventures team for the introduction.

Over a decade ago I wrote a case study on the National Hurricane Center. I observed

“To deliver those forecasts, the NHC team takes an invasive approach to collecting a wide variety of external, real - time data. Too much business forecasting today is based on internal and historical data or looks at Google or external sources, such as Bloomberg and Gartner for its primary data.”

The case study described all the data the NHC collects via satellites, buoy and other sensors, from Hurricane Hunter flights and other sources. How it uses supercomputers to crunch multiple, often conflicting models. How it audits its performance at the end of each season and keeps improving storm track forecasts every year.

Listening to Rich, I got a similar vibe and as he wrote in Forbes

“Companies should be checking the millions of global data series available from thousands of public and private sources across the world related to markets, industry, weather, trade policy, geopolitics, macroeconomics, consumer behavior and more. Most often, companies will focus on their internal historical data trends coupled with anecdotal viewing of general industry data sets and gross domestic product (GDP), all of which are no longer predictable. Companies need all of the data necessary to provide a holistic view of global, regional and local economies in order to monitor for key signals of upcoming changes in demand.”

And these days, almost every enterprise can easily access machine learning capabilities to hone in on variables that are particularly relevant to their industry, geography, channels and other attributes.  The definition of book of record needs to become much wider. 

He also discusses how his tools integrate with other planning tools and with ERP applications like those from Workday. 

We have a nice conversation about a customer, Tractor Supply Co. They have taken advantage of market signals about the growth of a “Country Suburban” demographic and it has shown up in their new store locations and in SKUs to emphasize items like poultry in backyards.

He also has a very interesting POV on how the 2008 recession was very different from the 2020 pandemic induced one. We also discuss how enterprises are increasingly looking for integrated planning tools and emphasizing consensus forecasts across functional silos.  

I found the conversation riveting. Enjoy it below.

Burning Platform: Why are smart factories so dumb?

In the 69th episode of Burning Platform, we host Dan Miklovic of The Analyst Syndicate. He was a colleague of mine at Gartner and has over five decades of manufacturing experiences in various roles and industries.

We discuss massive changes in the industrial sector – robotics, 3D printing, the enterprise metaverse, IT/OT convergence,  the evolution of smart products, the trend of servitization in product companies and other trends. And why it is so difficult to re-shore production that was offshored, the talent shortages and the continued immaturity and the slow integration across various manufacturing technologies.

While we are snarky at times, we are both big believers in a strong US industrial sector.

And btw, the myth in the mainstream media is that US manufacturing is dead. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world after China (3^rd if you count all of the EU as one country). We would love to see it get a lot more focus and create even more attractive jobs.

It was a pleasure catching up with Dan after so long, and you will find it an educational and entertaining half an hour

Beyond wind turbines and solar panels

Renewables like wind and solar are enjoying their day in the sun, but it’s nice to see more traditional and other energy sources also seeing plenty of innovation. I am a firm believer in a broad portfolio of solutions – a balanced energy strategy leaves you less vulnerable to embargoes and supply chain chaos.

Here are recent examples on New Florence

The new nuclear movement

Enhanced geothermal systems

Pumped storage hydroelectric power

Giant kite as energy for ships

Green methanol

Gravity as energy storage

 

Burning Platform: Digital Value Trends

In the 68th episode of Burning Platform, we again host Tamas Hevizi, Global Head of Private Equity at Automation Anywhere to discuss trends he is seeing in digital markets from an investor perspective. He was previously a guest in December 2020.

He presents on 6 trends and we banter about each –  we get below the buzzwords and memes and discuss plenty of technologies and use cases across several industries

• Hybrid Workforces
• Decentralized Finance
• The Business Metaverse
• Digital Offshoring
• Convergence of Customer and Employee experiences
• The Autonomous Enterprise – not just individual processes

As he had written in his New Florence guest column, Tamas is always experimenting with new digital communication formats. He recorded this session on the riverside.fm recording and podcasting platform that he has been playing with.

In the previous episode in this series, we had discussed digital trends with Dion Hinchliffe of Constellation Research from a corporate exec perspective. Tamas presents a very different investor point of view (albeit with plenty of enterprise examples) in this invigorating half an hour.

Analyst Cam: Salesforce – 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 Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM, Salesforce Industries. He presents an update on their vertical clouds – he presented last year in the Burning Platform series

He covers a wide range of industries. He drills into micro-verticals within Financial Services, one of their strong focus areas, talking about Rocket Mortgage and investment banking. How they are helping government agencies reinvent themselves. How Slack and conversational interfaces are influencing higher ed and healthcare. How their own experiences with nonprofits and internal experience with philanthropy and net zero programs are helping verticalize ESG for various sectors. How their anonymized data across 150,000 customers in the cloud and Einstein AI are allowing for “Insights” – like a Shopping Index from over a billion shoppers and Pandemic Insights for Manufacturing. It is allowing them to move customers to more ‘impact-based” thinking – their version of “outcomes”

I like how he emphasizes their ISV, hyperscaler and SI partners.  His colleague Tyler Prince had spent much longer on their ecosystem here. Throughout the session you see the state of the economy – hybrid, working, shopping, learning from anywhere from an industry lens.

I like how he responds to my question about the vertical competitive landscape. He says “the more the merrier” and it is "heartening" that competitors are validating what Salesforce has been executing for the last few years. That reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It described an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read:

"They Say IBM's Entry into Minicomputers Will Legitimize the Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"

Jujhar is too polite to say that but he does a really nice job in half an hour given the wide scope he covers.

Analyst Cam: Google Cloud – 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 Lori Mitchell-Keller, VP Industry Solutions at Google Cloud.

Lori covers wide ground in about half an hour. She discusses solutions across a wide range of  verticals – Vertex demand forecasting, intelligent manufacturing, contact center AI, real estate document AI, supply chain twins and retail search among them. She describes use cases across a wide range of brands - Home Depot, P&G, BNY Mellon, Newsweek, Macys, Mr. Cooper, GE Appliances and HCA

While many competitors are verticalizing on top of their core ERP or CRM capabilities or leveraging their ecosystems, Google is coming in with different value points:

• They appeal to companies which want to become “the best tech company in their industry” and are looking for a partner for “long-term, durable transformation”
• They are selling the promise of consumertech speed and agility to the enterprise
• They are presenting their ESG strengths on the back of their own internal net zero/renewables, diversity and other initiatives
• They are verticalizing their Search, Translate, massive infrastructure, mobile development, image and voice recognition and other already scaled capabilities
• They are emphasizing outcomes – like 10X improvement in worker productivity – more than product feature/function
• They can show more dexterity in “lifting and shifting” older vertical operational apps to their infrastructure rather than requiring expensive and risky upgrades to a modern application

Very nicely done. Next I look forward to a drill down for some of the solutions Lori presented. 

Analyst Cam: Tecsys Supply Chain execution

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 Guy Courtin, VP of Industry and Advanced Technology for Tecsys, a Toronto based supply chain software company. He had previously presented in this series about warehouse bots when he was at 6 River Systems

Tecsys is not a new company by any means (they were founded in 1983)  but with all the supply chain chaos in the last couple of years, they have seen growing opportunities especially in the health care, retail and distribution verticals they focus on.

While Guy goes into product details I liked how he covered trends in those verticals. He talks about cold chain logistics in vaccine delivery and Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) in healthcare. We talk about reverse logistics, micro-fulfillment, direct to consumer and private label trends in retail and distribution. We spend some time on Costco’s Kirkland brand.

We talk about how lean inventories may be a thing of the past and how that is affecting inventory depot and warehouse sizing and design. He discusses the impact of sustainability on supply chains. And how consumer expect similar experiences across industries. (Accenture’s design agency Fjord has a term for that - “liquid expectations”)

He talks about how the supply chain planning market is evolving – still cannot handle the execution intricacies they can. And how broader planning vendors are still better at financial and hr planning, not supply chain.

He also discusses their own journey from an on-prem to a cloud vendor.

Nicely done in about 25 minutes

Analyst Cam: Salesforce Revenue Cloud

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 Meredith Schmidt, EVP of Revenue Cloud at Salesforce.

She paints a vivid image of the complexity of what she calls “revenue operations”.  We are witnessing an explosion of business models – single sales, subscription, pay as you go, servitization etc combined with a proliferation of customer and partner channels – eCommerce, via resellers, in product etc

Managing the whole revenue cycle – the prospecting, the selling, the order taking, margin analysis, the billing, collections, the renewals – across channels and responsive to vertical nuances and location regulations around the globe is complex to say the least. And exponentially so when you throw in trade promotions, warranties and reverse logistics,  They need functionality which today is fragmented across CRM, ERP, EAM, IoT, document management and other applications and various custom solutions and spreadsheets. She calls it “product to cash” – so much more elaborate than “order to cash”.

Meredith does a nice job explaining this in around 20 minutes, Salesforce’s progress and plans including how Einstein AI and how collaboration via Slack provide them an extra edge. I compliment her toward the end that it is impressive when someone as large as Salesforce can say their deals are “simple”.

Most rev ops teams dream of getting there some time soon.

Burning Platform: Sustaining Digital Transformations

In the 67th episode of Burning Platform, we host Dion Hinchcliffe, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT.

We talk about the progress around digital transformation projects and how the pandemic has affected them. Dion responds “the pandemic showed us we could transform quicker than we thought we could. IF we had the will to do it.”

Dion starts off distinguishing between “digitization" and “automation” as efficiency plays versus digital transformations which have at least some element of disruption, and think about the “art of the possible.”

We cover examples from retail, healthcare, food service, real estate and several other industries. He talks about tools which are definitely helping customers – digital transformation target platforms, process mining, low code and AI driven code generation. He cites use of incubators, industry consortia and centers of excellence around emerging technologies.

We discuss service providers – firms like Accenture and Deloitte, growing role of strategy firms like McKinsey and of hyperscalers like Google on such transformation journeys.

Are we hitting a point of exhaustion with such programs?  We better not  – he says only 15% of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud. In some ways we are still in the “crude, cave painting” phase of the journey. He is worried about mid market companies and companies with plenty of technical debt and those who have under invested in technology. We also cover the risk that companies will take short cuts like they did during the re-engineering wave in the 1990s. We reinforce it is a marathon, not a sprint.

We also discuss his personal digital lifestyle. This blog post about his "every day carry bag" shows you he practices what he preaches.

It is a fascinating half an hour of wisdom from Dion.

Analyst Cam: Origina 3rd party support for IBM/HCL Products

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 Hari Candadai, SVP, Strategic Alliances and Analyst Relations at Origina, Inc which provides third party support for IBM and HCL IT infrastructure products like DB2, Informix, MQ, Tivoli and Rational. It is a sprawling product family even after IBM divested several of its collaboration, commerce, digital experience, AppScan, & BigFix solutions to HCL in 2019.

The conversation with Hari and IBM’s recent announcement it is selling some of its Watson Health assets to a PE firm made me reminisce about the storied technology vendor. As a young PwC auditor I remember the PC introduction in 1981 (IBM was an audit client).  Like many in our industry my early years in computing were on the 4381, the 390, S/38 and AS/400s. I remember “what if” conversations about how our industry may have evolved if IBM had not been forced to unbundle its systems software. And how that move later allowed IBM to evolve beyond hardware in the 90s. I recall conversations with several colleagues at Gartner whose own evolution in its early years heavily depended on tracking IBM. We would often discuss scenarios if IBM would ever get serious about application software. At Deal Architect, I have helped several clients evaluate IBM outsourcing services.

I have seen the center of gravity at IBM evolve from hardware to software to services over my career. Watson’s bumpy trajectory over the last decade can be tracked back to that transition. Along the way, IBM has significantly morphed its talent base. Firms like Origina have become a safe haven for many IBM software experts. They are offering that talent as a shared service 

I have been a broken record about third party support – you can read posts on this blog going back to the last decade. Indeed in some circles, I am still called “Vinnie Maintenance”. I have long said just because you buy a new car you should not required to buy service at the dealer. If anything Consumer Reports has shown independent garages often offer better value and service. And especially if you are talking about a long used Dodge or Ford product. Most of IBM software products similarly go back decades.

Hari does a nice job in a little over 20 minutes describing the cost savings, service quality improvements, the product expertise they offer, the ability to upgrade at your speed – “take back control” as he says

A tribute to Kurt Marko and to social media friendships

Jon Reed of Diginomica called this morning with some shocking news. Kurt Marko passed away - he describes what we know so far here. As we were talking, it struck me the lengths Jon had gone to find out about a colleague across the country, including getting local police to go visit his family. 

It brought back memories of countless messages of concern I had received when I had my health hiccup a decade ago. We may argue like crazy but we have made some really strong bonds via social media.

Jeff Nolan said nicely in his tweet “His wit was just as sharp as his analytical brain, perhaps only overshadowed by his independent spirit.” I can vouch for Kurt's independence - we had many spirited conversations (most unrecorded) on a variety of STEM topics.

As was common with Kurt, he did not say what was politically expedient. As a Stanford electrical engineer, he could and would speak with a lot more authority than so many who claim to be “science based” in their opinions. You can see that on this Burning Platform episode on energy trends we recorded during the COP 26 Climate Change summit in Glasgow. There I mentioned “Kurt has the uncanny knack for demystifying complex technical topics."

My one regret – I never met him in person. We had arranged to meet in his hometown in Idaho on one of my trips and I had to cancel that trip at the last minute.

Somebody asked me a while ago if I missed anything about not working for a large company. I said “Christmas parties”. I then told this person “I hope we can convene once travel opens up, a holiday party for folks who mostly meet over social media and don’t have a corporate event to celebrate”  

Over New Year’s Eve, Kurt had shared with a few of us the wine from the Loire Valley he was planning to open that evening. Kurt, when I do convene that Christmas Party, I promise we will have a bottle of that and raise a toast to you.

Cheers, my friend.

Unpacking the “Great Resignation”

There is a lot of talk these days about the “Great Resignation” wave. To start off with, its not just resignations, there also retirements and relocations. But people are not staying home watching Netflix or playing golf, many of these ‘migrants” are starting a new generation of small businesses. It is in a wave of what I call micro-capitalism.

The changes have actually been happening for a while but the pandemic has significantly accelerated them. 5 years ago, when researching labor trends for my book on automation, Silicon Collar, I observed what I called the Alt-Job economy. People were glibly calling it the gig economy – there were many cross-currents underneath. Developers in the iOS ecosystem, people selling arts and crafts on Etsy, franchise owners, ethnic grocers, alternative healthcare practitioners among them – I summarized them in this blog post.

The last couple of years have only increased the fragmentation. Lots more small merchants are taking advantage of micro-fulfillment platforms that Spotify and others provide. Many savvy real estate professionals are launching syndicates with knowledge of regional markets and getting funded via sites like Crowdstreet.  VCs are broadly investing LOTS more in startups. According to CB Insights, Global venture funding reached a record $621B in 2021, more than double the 2020 mark of $294B. According to Venture Forward, a multiyear research program from GoDaddy to quantify this entrepreneurial activity, Americans created 2.8 million more online microbusinesses in 2020 than in 2019. If they are not starting new businesses, lots of them are actively trading on platforms like Robinhood.

I have seen it first-hand at home. My daughter is a global traveler and would come back and tell of “digital nomads” working from Chiang Mai and Bali.  As the pandemic started, she left her job in the hospitality sector and started a life coaching service and has clients around the world. After a long stint at psychiatric hospitals and clinics, my wife recently retired. But it is not “retire” in the traditional sense of the word. She is inspired by Tom Brady, the ageless quarterback of our home team, the Buccaneers. I am also seeing the “Great Relocation” as countless people move to our state and others like Texas. Some moved because their employers allowed them to work from anywhere. Many others did not move for a job. They are attracted by the potential for a more vibrant, entrepreneurial lifestyle. It is also fascinating to see them move to secondary and tertiary cities. Lots more people want a semi-rural lifestyle and retailers like Tractor Supply Co are growing exponentially as they provide them with poultry and other small farming needs.

Going forward, I plan to cover this trend of micro-capitalism a lot closer. Hopefully, in doing so, I can also help investors with some of their analysis. Ditto with HR and Procurement vendors and professionals who help with talent acquisition/development and supplier diversity. There are some truly profound changes happening in the entrepreneur, talent and supply chain economies.