deal architect

Let them do their jobs

During the joint Salesforce/Workday call yesterday afternoon Marc Benioff said

We both offer phenomenal solutions, but those solutions are better when they work together. And that's what customers want. They want that integration. They want partnership. They want vendors to have working relationships with each other.

Well said.

Talk to any customer into cloud computing for the last few years and Salesforce and Workday are part of the landscape, or have both been evaluated. Like HP which presented at Workday Rising last week, and has done several webinars with Salesforce. Like Thomson Reuters whose  SVP of Global HR Systems,  Sue Laskey-Myers was honored as a visionary at Rising, and is also a big Salesforce user. And many more.

But, I was amazed at the number of analysts on the call who started their questions with a “Congratulations on the partnership”.

I was amused with all the speculation leading up to the call.

“It’s a bromance”. Any one who has spoken to Aneel Bhusri in person or has heard him in public knows his admiration for Marc. They also happen to be neighbors and friends. Not new.

“It is meant to trump Oracle’s earnings call (which was around the same time).” or “There is a major pre-Oracle OpenWorld (next week) announcement”. Hello, Rising would have been a better megaphone last week.

Marc and Aneel and their companies deserve plenty of ink. But let’s save it for things they do well for their customers and their charities. Not for doing what they should be doing.

The move to "rich" mobile apps

Many enterprise vendors and customers view mobile UI as just another more convenient portal to their back end processes.

A growing number of companies are, however, building “rich” mobile apps to get more face time with their customers and even using their apps to reengineer their processes to delight their customers.

Here are some examples (click on images to enlarge)

Starbucks

There have long been rumors about how many thousands of combinations the Starbucks coffee configurator can handle. It’s a mystery no more. Its mobile app can display different components– the type of espresso beverages, cup size, type of coffee (regular, decaf), and so on. For the milk alone, look in the photo at the choices in type, amount of foam, temperature etc. You can similarly configure syrups, espresso shots, toppings, and additional ingredients like bananas. And after you have created your perfect concoction, you can ask the mobile app to calculate the nutritional value – calories, fat, etc.

Wait there’s more. It is a mobile payment platform. And a loyalty program platform. Every 12 paid cups on the app gets you a free one. And a constant stream of free downloadable songs and games and other apps.

 

Walgreens

In many ways, the drugstore Walgreens is the US “neighborhood store” with over 8,500 locations. So the physical location convenience should be its major value proposition. Increasingly, though its 10 mobile apps are significantly helping the brand. More than half the company’s prescription refills are now done online, rather than in-person or over the phone – many using the scanning feature on a smartphone. Another major revenue stream for the chain comes from photo printing. Its mobile apps allow users to create photo cards with special themes such as thank you, holidays, announcements and invitations. Unique collages also can be created directly from an iPhone and available to pick up at a store in an hour. Photos for these creations easily can be uploaded from the user’s phone, Facebook or Instagram albums. Once inside the store, users can retrieve coupons for other items and earn loyalty points.

 

Delta Airlines

As you would expect Delta allows you make reservations, manage your frequent flier miles etc using its mobile apps. Its app is also full of other details – the major airports and the gate maps for easier passenger connections in the miles of walking in its hub terminals (like the large one in Atlanta in the photo). It provides details of seat configurations on every type of plane in its fleet. But it goes further in using other features of smartphones and tablets. It also you to print digital boarding passes whose barcode can be scanned by airport security and its gate personnel. It allows you to scan your luggage tag to track where your bag is. It allows you to store a photo of your parking space as a reminder. For the iPad, it offers a “glass bottom plane” app. Using GPS coordinates, the app pulls in photos, Wikipedia articles, and Facebook data to show you what -- and who of your friends -- you're flying over.

 

 

Home Depot

One of the frequent complaints about the DIY store is the amount of walking you have to do in its large locations, and the infrequency of staff to help you find what you are looking for, With its mobile app you can enter a product description or scan its SKU and it tells you the exact aisle and bin number in the store you frequent. It has an augmented reality feature which allows you to overlay a product from its catalog to a photo of one of your rooms. The mobile app offers useful tools as in the photo, unit of measure converters, nut and bolt size estimators. It allows you to estimate carpet and drywall quantities for your home improvement projects.

 

 

 

Are you building interesting features in your mobile apps to build more brand loyalty and customer satisfaction? Love to hear about them and profile them on the New Florence blog where I continue to post such innovative examples.

 

Innovation from Parts Unknown

Inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s travels,  innovations from various parts of the world we don’t usually expect innovation from

Wushu Painting – Malaysia

High-tech camel racing – UAE

Global Video Blogger – Dennis Howlett

Wi-fi Hopping – Zambia

Raspberry Pi -  UK

Ice Lab - Antarctica

earlier posts in this series are here and here and here and here and here and here

Gutenberg is looking down in awe

Workday had a nice U shaped table configuration for the analysts it invited to the Technology Summit this week. It gave you a nice opportunity to easily and repeatedly scan the room for familiar and unfamiliar faces. As the day passed, I thought more of Gutenberg, he of the printing press. The man who facilitated one-to-many communication would be awestruck at the number of  ways the people in that room mass-communicate

• Dennis Howlett and his video blogging I wrote about earlier this week
• Bill Kutik with his HR Tech event and Radio Show
• Ray Wang with his prolific speaking and tweeting
• The Gartner and Forrester analysts via their analyst reports 
• ZDNet and other bloggers via that digital medium
• Me with my books and blogs

And most of us are comfortable across the majority of these channels. It is a tribute to the modern day Gutenbergs like Google and Twitter who give us the technology to allow us to communicate without the overhead of editors, physical printers,  sound technicians, travel agents and others.

Yes I sensed the ghost of Johannes in the room this week. He was beaming at the ways in which his gift of one-to-many communication has blossomed.  

The Elaborate People Side of Baseball

Every September, as MLB teams overnight expand their 25 player rosters to 40, I think about the iceberg of talent that most of us do not see on the field or in the dugout.

I got a glimpse of that as Leilani Gayles, Chief People Officer at the San Francisco Giants, joined us at a game at which Workday hosted analysts. Not an ideal setting to conduct a full conversation but got several nuggets.   Workday is used to track different compensation and benefits plans that are unique to various player contracts. Scouts use various iPad based tools to track a whole set of metrics – baseball’s version of “recruiting”. The GM’s office does the Moneyball style player and other analytics.

Leilani also told us about some morale building stuff unique to baseball. She showed off her 2010 World Series ring . She described how the Giants flew staff to be part of away World Series games. Both are small investments but make non-players so much more proud of their teams.  

A few weeks ago, I got another glimpse into baseball people management when I heard Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A’s talk about how much more analytically rigorous baseball has become. That is especially in smaller city teams who cannot afford the payroll of the Yankees. He was also proud of the Ivy League talent he and other teams have been able to attract into their front offices.  Leilani is another example of the richer talent moving into MLB – she came to the Giants from previous jobs at HP, Silicon Graphics and other tech companies.    

I asked Leilani if I could come back and spend some more time talking about the technology at the Giants. The CIO, Bill Schlough had given me a nice tour of the technology at AT&T Park 6 years ago. Time to update that with all the tech the  Giants are pioneering – in secondary ticket markets, with its Social Media café, in their growing cloud apps (Workday, Salesforce.com) portfolio and so many other areas. 

Citizens of Complex Change

Workday likes to call its customers Citizens of the Cloud. Listening to a customer executive panel at Rising, I think they could easily rename them as Jedi Masters of Complex Change

Kevin Ledford of Chiquita described a corporate HQ move to Charlotte to rationalize physical space across multiple acquisitions. Fully 75% of the companies employees left, many had to be relocated and new ones had to be recruited.

Ramon Baez talked about the urgency of the massive turnaround at HP, and how cloud apps (see my post here) are allowing the flexibility to support many elements of the turnaround.

Mary Sullivan of Four Seasons talked about the challenge of being a luxury brand in a post- recession world, and the 5 year horizon the company needs to move on average 20% of its executives each year ( incumbent employees are sent to open up and stay for assignments on new properties all over the globe)

Noel Watson of TripAdvisor talked about the need to quickly get off the systems, post divesture from Expedia and the scrutiny around a new cloud solution from a SOX perspective as they themselves have gone public

Roberta Gordon of Brown U talked about the massive changes in higher education (with MOOC, funding constraints etc.). To punctuate her point – she said “I am a Colgate (the CPG co) alum. Trust me our change is more complex than that in even large, global companies like Colgate”

I am sold.

It was Workday’s subtle way of telling the world it deals with complex scenarios in most of its customers.

Workday Rising – Comfort Food in a Complex World

The keynote this morning by co CEOs Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri was a study in contrasts.

There were plenty of reminders of the complex world we live in. Mike McNamara, CEO of Flextronics, talked about his 30 country, $20+ global operation. George Tenet, former CIA director, now a Workday customer discussed the geopolitics of a reprisal on  Syria. Rebecca Sutton, CFO of City of Orlando, a complex and innovative government entity, described her project (and media challenges of pioneering a cloud solution). The SVP of Global HR Systems  at Thomson Reuters with 60,000 global employees, Sue Laskey-Myers being recognized as a Visionary Customer.

In comparison, the keynote also highlighted “Excel Integration”, “200 million journal lines a year”,“Payslips”. They sound so simplistic and tactical when the world has moved to innovation in the form of Mars Rovers, autonomous cars and health bracelets.

It hit me when Aneel Bhusri got one of the biggest cheers when he said Workday was reducing number of annual updates from 3 to 2.

Customers want the world to slow down. And they want plenty of “comfort food”.

40% of features in release 20 came from customer specific requests – this is what they want. Sophisticated they may be, but they want basic business transactions to be done well, and in line with  a changing world

So they are reassured the features are in contemporary technologies – HTML 5 UI, native Android, capabilities, leveraging analytics in the Amazon cloud. They like the features are attractive to Millennial employees (Workday announced 300 of recent recruits were new college graduates which gives the additional comfort of being in sync with younger workers). 

And they are comforted from the many human and down home touches during the session. Dave proudly talked of family members at several points in the session. There were gentle digs at SAP and Oracle. Corny touches when Dave struggled to show off his Primark skivvies to show he is a consumer of his customer products. When Aneel and Dave threw cloud cakes into the audience from their bakery customer, McKee Foods.

It is a complicated, fast moving world. We all know that. These sophisticated customers are pretty happy that Workday is doing the blocking and tackling well for them. While making their employees smile and have fun while they focus on more complex, demanding tasks. 

On a clear Workday…

The skies are spectacular September blue as I head to the Bay Area for two Workday events – their Rising user conference, and their Technology Summit.

Both events stand out for their transparency.

At the  user conference they allow analysts to mingle with customers and prospects. The conversations are surprisingly open – last year a few prospects asked me how I rated Workday against other vendors they were evaluating. Right there, within earshot of Workday salespeople.

The Technology Summit, on the other hand, is a full day deep dive into new Workday product functionality. Not just rote demos, but a highly interactive “focus group” with several “un-shy” analysts and bloggers in the room.

Both the events take a lot of courage – to allow relatively unfettered access to customers, prospects and products.

September Blue is an apt metaphor…    

As you sow….

It started with T-Mobile. Now every carrier is on the “don’t wait 2 years to upgrade your device” bandwagon. It’s their defensive strategy to hold on to first-gen smartphone customers. But they can advertise all they want, customers long ago realized cell networks sucked and used wifi for much of their new data needs. A new device will not change that – so many are extending lives of existing devices. Concepts like UBreakiFix which repair/refurbish electronics are growing by leaps and bounds. And many smartphone customers are going with cheaper data plans from MetroPCS, Walmart, Virgin and others and forcing the incumbents to offer shared plans and other concessions.

A similar trend is playing out in the ERP and infrastructure outsourcing market.  Many 3-5-7 year deals are coming up for renewal, and many customers are trading in three contracts for software maintenance, hosting and apps support for one SaaS contract. Others are re-bidding and going with newer, much more efficient providers. Most of the incumbent providers failed to impress in their multi-year opportunities. Now most customers can see many are jut flashing shiny new innovation areas as their value proposition to continue. 

High prices, so-so service when they had the chance...now they will have to get much more creative to retain the business.

Why more market analysis is moving in-house

It’s good to see my friends Dennis Howlett launch Diginomica, David Vallente at Wikibon, Ray Wang at Constellation, Phil Fersht at Horses for Sources and others expand their firms, Michael Cote join 451 Research. These alums of Forrester, Aberdeen, ZDNet, Redmonk and their new homes show a fluid analyst marketplace.

Fresh models, fresh thinking.

And yet, most of their research continues in horizontal, somewhat mature IT markets. There is so much ground that is not covered. I observed in The New Technology Elite:

"Gartner, the technology research firm, covered the Amazon outage mentioned above extensively and has reports for its clients with titles such as “Protecting Sensitive Data in Amazon EC2 Deployments.”

But search the Gartner database for 3M and you get very few hits. In Chapter 18 we saw 3M says it has products in 46 different technology platforms. Gartner is the largest technology research firm. What gives?"

Enterprises cannot find much research in so many areas. So, where is a bank to find information on mobile banking apps from LaCaixa, some of the most successful in Europe or those from Standard Chartered with its Breeze apps in several Asian and African markets? So where is an auto insurance company to find information on the telematics in the Progressive Snapshot or Mapfre’s YCar initiatives? Where are auto companies to look for fuel cell, engine and other technologies they want to license versus develop?

The answer for many of them is to look for custom research boutiques or increasingly to build their own internal analysis groups.  Enterprises have long had competitive intelligence and industry trends focused resources. The big difference these days is technology is an even more critical component in product, channel and supply chain areas.

Their products and services are increasingly mass customized. They expect their research to be similarly so.