deal architect

The Talent Paradox

Phil Fersht wrote a cheerful (not) post this weekend where he asks

Is our sole purpose now simply to eliminate people?  We spend a couple of decades displacing "expensive" workers because we could find less expensive able ones to do the job.  Now we’re getting rid of them altogether just to keep the Buffetts and Elliotts happy? 

In contrast, I recently wrote about Mike Rowe who points out we have countless unfilled jobs

“We’ve got millions of people looking for work and millions of jobs that nobody wants. College graduates are a trillion dollars in debt and struggling to find employment in their field of study. Meanwhile, 88 percent of all the available jobs don’t require a four-year degree. They require specific training. So what do we do? We push a four-year degree like it’s some sort of a Golden Ticket.”

And Warren Buffett, who Phil invokes has said “The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history."

What gives?

In my view there are no shortage of opportunities to create new businesses, new jobs. Let’s face it – in my 2010 book, The New Polymath I had talked about a number of Grand Challenges humans face when it comes to health, energy, infrastructure and many other areas. In 2017, those challenges still remain and most will create plenty of new jobs.

The job economy has morphed dramatically but many of us still long for the permanent employment of our parents. The reality is S&P 500 companies live less than 20 years - they used to live 60+ years. So, they cannot think about lifetime employment like they used to. Most have moved to variable labor models - contractors, franchises, on platforms, at their suppliers etc. In extreme cases, only 10% of their talent is directly on their payroll.

We get emotional about profit-hungry corporations – but in many ways they struggle with talent management when such a small percent of workers are on their payroll and they can control directly. They have given poor signals to the job economy so we have the severe mismatches Mike Rowe talks about. But their broader ecosystems have created tens of millions of what I call “Alt-Jobs”. And labor mobility has increased quite a bit too. In the US the average employee will have 8 to 10 jobs in their lifetimes often across different occupations.

As for as automation killing jobs, I have a contrarian view I expressed in this article titled Slow-Motion Automation. History shows that new technologies evolve faster than society adopts them.

In my view it is much better for individuals to quit thinking of what our parents enjoyed in terms of stability and instead look around for opportunities we have that our parents would have drooled about. They often stayed decades in their jobs they did not enjoy just to qualify for retirement benefits.

Thousand points of influence

It’s been a decade since I wrote this post in which I said

We all have our roles to play - but put yourself on the grid of 1000 and see what steps, decision makers, and influence impact you have on a technology buying decision. I do it all the time on transactions I help with. It is a humbling experience to see how little I individually - and for that matter all other influencers and advisors - have in the decision.

I am smiling when I read Tim Kopp’s post taking potshots at analysts like Gartner and Forrester. To start with I like his investment in G2 Crowd and its crowdsourcing of buyer ratings of technology products. I like the fact that they are focused on “mid-market, emerging categories and SMB software solutions.” I particularly like it since my Enterprise Irregular colleague, Mike Fauscette, is Chief Research Officer at G2.

But Kopp is stretching his point if he thinks companies just rely on Magic Quadrants or Waves – or if he thinks they will just rely on the G2 ratings in the future.

And like my other EI colleague, Jason Busch points out even Gartner has plenty of peer based, in some ways a more qualified crowdsourced, input. As a Gartner analyst I took thousands of client calls a year and that was our “finger on the pulse” of the market.

Technology buying and selling is a complex dance which may some day be done by machine to machine negotiation, but not anytime soon. Try doing that when vendors have hundreds of “engines” each with its own licensing units – users, employee count, virtual machines,  revenues etc. And have learned to make a significant revenue stream from audits to trap customers who don’t comply with such arcane licensing rules. Try doing that when buying organizations need multiple signoffs for anything costing more than $ 1,000.

Frankly, more than its Magic Quadrants, I worry more about Gartner’s planning assumptions which clients factor in their decisions. In writing my last book, Silicon Collar about automation and impact jobs I was dismayed with several of its wild projections. I hope Gartner mans up and acknowledges that these projections for 2018 will not come true now that we are only a few months away

• 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.
• more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “robo-boss.” 
• 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.
• Digital businesses will require 50% fewer business process workers

But back to technology evaluations - with so many people and complex jargon and legalese involved in a technology transaction, it is naïve to expect we will shrink the “thousand points of influence” any time soon.

“CIOs love their jobs”

I have not heard that in a long time and so was struck by that statement in this press release from Harvey Nash, the recruiting firm and KPMG, the public accounting and advisory firm announcing results from their annual CIO survey. I asked for an advance copy and they kindly sent me one.

CIOs thrive in times of change. They have been brought up in a technology world which disrupts itself and others on a regular basis. We are living in times of mega-change – nationalistic trends and related economic uncertainties across the world, digital disruption in most industries, cyber vulnerabilities growing on a daily basis. In this times of chaos, many CIOs are  shining. For the first time in a decade, more than seven in ten CIOs (71 percent) believe the CIO role is becoming more strategic. 92 percent of CIOs joined a Board meeting in the past 12 months.

The survey is the largest IT leadership survey in the world in terms of number of respondents. It covered 4,498 CIOs across 86 countries with interviews between December 19, 2016 and April 3, 2017. The infograph covers some of the results. (click on image to enlarge)

To get a copy when it is released and to attend one of the launch events in many cities around the world, sign up here.

Enterprise Cross-currents – observations from this year’s “event season”

Over the last few weeks I have had a chance to listen to Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, NetSuite, Plex, SAP,  Salesforce at conferences or their analyst summits.

Here are some common threads:

a) We have entered the era of intelligent and autonomous applications

Whether it was Workday’s Prism analytics or Worksheets or SAP’s Digital Boardroom it was hard to miss the growing emphasis on data versus process in the enterprise apps world. Inspired by or perhaps threatened by specialists like Anaplan and Tableau, enterprise apps are getting much broader and prettier in the data they present. And more autonomous – Oracle’s Adaptive Intelligence apps and Salesforce’s Einstein emphasize Machine Learning. But that is just the beginning. If my sample of 50+ work settings in Silicon Collar is the harbinger, drones and 3D printing will reshape logistics, robotics and wearables will reshape shop floors, natural interfaces will reshape healthcare and most service industries – machines are changing the nature of work and as a result processes everywhere and enterprise apps are starting to reflect that.

b) There’s still plenty of white space around vertical functionality

Most vendors have competitive intelligence units. Either they have been asleep at the wheel or their analysis is being ignored. We have way too many new-age software products with core finance capabilities or those offering support for services businesses and hardly any for all variety of “books of record” for other industries.  Utility billing, retail merchandising, electronic medical records in healthcare, travel reservation engines and countless others have been ignored by most software vendors as they develop their next-gen products. Customers in those markets are living with engines which are decades old and could benefit from today’s cloud, in-memory, micro-services efficiencies, but all these customers can find are boutique vendors many of which will not scale or survive the 20-30 years customers expect these engines to last. Ok, so you could argue those industries are outliers – but how do you explain that very few vendors can like Plex show that 50% or more of the data in their cloud originates from the shop floor? or like NetSuite can effectively support the megatrend of the last couple of decades – eCommerce? There must be safety in numbers with everyone offering their own flavor of General Ledger.

c) We are seeing revolving partner doors

Sure you still see a Michael Dell or Vishal Sikka on stage, but it is fairly noticeable that hardware, telecom and outsourcing vendors are not as strategic these days to software vendors. There is much more excitement around Google, AWS or Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson or Microsoft Azure. The exhibition floors still have plenty of outsourcing booths and the titanium/platinum sponsors are still many of the old brands, but ask most attendees what they remember of the sponsor and they will likely mention their social event! In fact you could argue that for some software vendors the event sponsorship is the biggest value many of the vendors are bringing them.

d) Customers are much savvier

In each of the events in the last few weeks I have been struck by how much more sophisticated customers are becoming. Customers have learned to ring-fence, two-tier, multi-source over the last decade and so you see the same marquee customer names show up in many vendor conferences. They are spreading their budgets. Many companies have also learned to embed technology in their own products and services and know quite a bit about platforms, subscription pricing, revenue recognition etc.  Other customers have started their digital transformation without involving software vendors. It’s not all goodness – you still hear of spectacular project write offs but in general, a better educated customer is healthy for the industry.

SapphireNow–is SAP poised to lead the industry again?

I went to SapphireNow in Orlando last week.  I am getting requests to write an update to SAP Nation. There is plenty I could write about – how thousands of SAP customers are trying out one or more of the “coping strategies” I had outlined in the book to manage their exposure to SAP and partners – ring fencing with cloud apps, third party maintenance, two-tier ERP etc. The anxiety in the customer base is palpable as SAP gets aggressive with the indirect access clause. As I have written before the clause has poisoned relations with many a customer. I could write about the changed competitive landscape where Oracle appears more obsessed with Amazon than it is with SAP. Where Workday says it is not worried about either SAP or Oracle.

But I am a Camus fan, especially of his quote 'In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer”. I feel SAP is poised for a turnaround. So I approached them to get a balanced perspective for the book, not just input from competitors and less than happy customers. I want SAP to put its most positive foot forward. SapphireNow, which is usually a very polished event, gave me a chance to see some of their positive marketing. I hope they also follow through with my request to interview several of their executives and customers that stand out.

While most of my Sapphire notes are for the book, here are some perspectives I picked up after a break of a few years from the event.

Executive depth and continuity

It was good to see “The Professor”, Hasso Plattner do his annual keynote. His sense of humor has improved as he took gentle swipes at Larry Ellison, President Trump, the digital agency for his hockey team, the disconnect between his development teams around the world, even SAP marketing for going overboard with some of their claims.

CEO Bill McDermott came across as a statesman as he answered a question about nationalistic trends around the world – “in the US, we have not seen free trade being inhibited” and the EU is likely to hold after the recent French elections. He came across as a very respectful interviewer as he hosted two sports greats – Derek Jeter and Kobe Bryant.   

It was good to see diversity in the form of a friendly Rob Enslin (a South African who has traveled the globe with SAP) and two ladies, Adaire Fox-Martin and Jennifer Morgan on the Executive Board. 

Empathy as watchword

McDermott introduced the word last year to snickers. He doubled down and used it often this year and so did many other speakers. Kicking off Sapphire, McDermott tackled right away the cloud hanging over the event in the form of its Indirect Access clause claims against  customers like Diageo and InBev. I was pleasantly surprised when he said (italics mine)  “static, read access in third party systems is your data. Competitors charge you for static read in third-party systems, SAP will not." He also announced “simplified pricing” with “procure to pay’ and ‘order to cash’ processes to be priced based on orders.

As they say the devil is in the details, and I heard from a couple of customers – “what took them so long on the indirect access? After a decade, it’s not empathy”. On the pricing by orders another pointed out how many SAP product prices would need to be rationalized on the procure to pay cycle– in ECC, Ariba (for indirect supplies), Concur (for t&e), Fieldglass (for contractors). I like the sentiment behind the word empathy, but having raised the stakes this year, now McDermott and SAP have to deliver.

I would also like to see them lean on partners to adopt the sentiment. Sapphire is still dominated by massive partner booths, a very visible sign of the expensive ecosystem around SAP. Way overpriced MPLS circuits and storage, way too many bodies implementing and supporting SAP systems – time for empathy there too in the form of relief to customers. 

S/4HANA update

In volume 2 of SAP Nation, I presented the industry track record on next-gen products – at Oracle, J.D. Edwards, Infor, Microsoft and even at SAP with NetWeaver and I concluded:

a next-gen product takes years of development and maturation. Migrating a legacy customer base takes even longer. Those are just the laws of physics. SAP may be able to bend these laws slightly with S/4, but will likely not be able to break them.

So, personally, I have had modest expectations of S/4. SAP , or at least its marketing, does not agree and they claim it is “the fastest adopted product in SAP history (and) is available for all industries”

What I have seen and what was confirmed at Sapphire is there are plenty of small to midsized “net-new” customers which are adopting S/4. Nothing wrong with that, and the larger customers which are adopting it in small bites (given the functionality is growing gradually)  are doing interesting things. A Caterpillar executive told me they are ruthlessly making sure ECC customizations are not ported over. I saw a Walmart presentation where they described Near Zero Downtime (NZDT) techniques to migrate 3TB of data into S/4, and plans to scale that to 100TB. Whoa! That’s the kind of big thinking the whole industry can benefit from.

What I would have liked to have seen is more public cloud use cases of S/4. Lots of on-premise/private cloud deployments which could potentially continue the bad habits from ECC world. With lots of exposure at the event to what they called the Big 3 “cloud infrastructure” vendors – Google, Microsoft and Amazon, we will see more interest in public cloud deployments of S/4.

I also did not like Plattner announcing in his keynote S/4 is “basically done” or the fact that he said some bloggers had confirmed to him he was correct. Not this blogger - to me S/4 is where R/3 was in 1995. As we saw over the next decade, SAP (and other ERP) vendors had to expand functionality in CRM, SCM, EAM, BI and many other categories. SAP also had to launch a wide range of IS, industry solutions.

Dr. Plattner pointed out he was shocked to hear every single screen and report in S/4 had to expand the material id code from 18 to 40 characters. Changes in the auto industry demanded it. As a customer told me “the world has changed so much in the last 30 years since R/3 was designed many similar change requests will come from other industries.”

At this event, SAP launched a tool called Transformation Navigator. It allows customers to see a “from-to” – existing functionality to that in SAP’s portfolio of contemporary products. “It features the full set of SAP products and a comprehensive business capability model across all industries and lines of business. And it features 1,000 value drivers compiled over years of working with leading enterprises on creating the next business practices.”

In the demo I saw (see image below - click to enlarge), even in the finance area where S/4 has been maturing over the last couple of years, there is a need for many other surround applications. If S/4 is SAP’s future, it will need to keep expanding in functionality and absorb these “satellites”.

Dr. Plattner also acknowledged to a question I asked, there are many “humongous” industry applications like utility billing which should be candidates for updating with new architectures to see if they can get 10X performance improvements. There are countless similar applications like retail merchandising, healthcare EMR, hospitality/airline reservation systems which are decades old and need to be brought into cloud/in-memory/micro services world. I wrote recently after the Workday analyst summit, these are opportunities nobody is tackling and SAP, the world’s largest application vendor could certainly step up.

Intelligent apps and Leonardo

Over the last few months, Brian Sommer (my sparring partner for three decades) and i have been comparing the state of application software today to that in the 90s when he was at Accenture and I was at Gartner. Never before has technology been so ubiquitous and affordable (a theme Michael Dell emphasized on stage), and that this is a great time to re-imagine every process, product and place with a wide variety of SMAC (social, mobile,analytical, cloud) and sensory and AI and other automation technologies. Never before have CEOs been so excited about technology to create smart products and services and rethink business models. Technology is influencing the top line – it’s unprecedented. The re-engineering efforts of the 90s would have drooled to get some of the technologies we have today. The problem is today they have to be sourced and integrated by enterprises on their own.

So, I was excited to hear SAP expand Leonardo beyond just IOT to a toolkit for machine learning, Blockchain, its Digital Boardroom, design thinking, digital assistants and its multi-cloud environment. Analysts said it sounded like buzzword bingo. I  say they should add mobile and social apps and other automation like drones in distribution, robotics in shop floors etc (and many more I showcase across 50+ industries in my new book, Silicon Collar).

It was exciting to hear Dr. Plattner describe his vision of “intelligent apps” which leverage many of those technologies.

Watching a demo of SAP’s digital assistant, CoPilot analyze a maintenance issue with a wind turbine I was taken back to GE CEO, Jeff Immelt’s pitch when he launched his Industrial Internet vision. His prop on stage was a giant GEnx aircraft engine which generates a terabyte of data a day. That was 5 years ago and Immelt has been relentlessly turning GE from an industrial to a digital company. That is the complex world SAP has to catch up to and create intelligent apps for. 

I had an epiphany during the event. I had finished listening to Rudi Hois present the S/4HANA roadmap. He had crisply summarized a decade of decisions and development in 30 minutes. I marveled to Mike Prosceno of SAP how much detail he had covered without breaking a sweat. Mike responded you should see his boss, Wieland Schreiner present that. Or even his boss, Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board. Mike’s answer took me back to trips we used to make as Gartner analysts to Walldorf in the 90s. At every level of the organization, we could count on articulate, intense staff. That SAP appears to be back. I heard from several customers they had dealt with an innovative group within SAP - something they would not have expected just a few years ago.

It’s that SAP turnaround I hope to catalog in Volume 3, along with the efforts customers are continuing as they try to protect themselves in case SAP does not deliver. It’s those counteracting forces and the global crosscurrents McDermott’s team are navigating which will make the book interesting.    

On a personal note, I want to thank Nick Tzitzon for inviting me to Sapphire and to Stacey Fish for making my couple of days there very productive. I was not sure what to expect after an absence of a few years and every one was warm and welcoming.

Workday’s relentless focus

Many a company has tried to cajole and bribe Workday to develop “books of record” in the cloud for their industries, and I must admit I have been guilty of encouraging them to consider such requests before the market opportunity closes. But other than for Higher Education, it has demurred.  It keeps adding vertical features like average daily balancing for banking and revenue recognition for the software industry in its HR and financial modules, but stays away from utility billing, retail merchandising or electronic medical records for healthcare.

As Aneel Bhusri, CEO told the analyst summit this week

“We have a lot of HR in front of us, we have a lot of finance in front of us……in our previous company (PeopleSoft) at our size, the market was beginning to slow down and consolidate. In this case,  it feels like the market is actually accelerating…” 

Instead, Workday keeps extending the core of its horizontal cloud and scaling it to new heights. Its investments are showing up in several areas. Here are some we covered during the day:

a) Analytics

Like most vendors are investing in business intelligence, visualization and other analytical capabilities around their data, Workday has over 50 dashboards like the one below.

More importantly it is extending its reach into vertical data with its Prism analytics, which builds on the Big Data discovery tools its acquired via Platfora . They discussed use cases like tying TripAdvisor ratings to HR data in hospitality, integrating patient accounting data in HR data in healthcare and eTrade unvested stock data. In the past, that has required investment in ETL and other data manipulation tools – Workday is simplifying the effort to allow end users to handle it themselves.

Soon after its GridCraft acquisition in 2015, Workday introduced “collaborative analytics” in its Worksheets – some called that its “Hyperion killer”. The team in Boulder has been busy and will be releasing additional offerings which could be even more useful as authoring tools to create docs with dynamic inputs from Worksheets.

While many legacy vendors talk about data-as-a-service, much of their customer data is locked up in on-premise settings. Workday’s customer data is all in the cloud, and Workday has long talked about offering a DaaS service to allow customers to benchmark against their peers. That thinking continues to evolve as privacy, collusion and other concerns require plenty of legal scrutiny.

The slide below shows Workday’s vision for Prism, Worksheets and DaaS. As they say, the analytical environment is frightfully fragmented today and part of their value is helping customers decommission many of the tools. 

b) Machine Learning

Of course, no vendor presentation these days is without some conversation around AI. Workday has been working with machine learning since it acquired Identified in 2014. The SYMAN technology influenced its Talent Insight applications, predictive capabilities around AR collections and elastic searches in recruiting and learning areas. The pace will accelerate with time series forecasting and Workday’s growing collaboration with Amazon with its services like Lex, Polly to allow for conversational interfaces.

c) Opening up its Platform

Workday makes the point it has long allowed users to personalize the system with custom validations, custom fields and more. But competitive barbs have long led to speculation when it will open up its platform more fully. It plans to start exposing  over the next few releases the building blocks of its applications like security and organizational models via programmable APIs. Workday expects much of the initial use to come from customers and SIs, not ISVs to build, say the vertical engines described above

d) Scaling its cloud

Under NDA, Workday shared eye-popping transaction volumes at large customers like Bank of America. UTC is consolidating over 100 payroll systems across 80 countries on its cloud. And the crazy thing is these giants will look puny compared to the volumes at customers like Amazon and Walmart that Workday has recently signed.

e) Industrializing its cloud

Several application vendors are turning to IaaS from Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Oracle for economic reasons. Workday looked at that angle a few years but wanted SLAs to mirror those they were themselves promising to customers, such as less than 2 hours of planned downtime (primarily for weekly updates). With Amazon’s help it is aiming for zero downtime. The day was refreshingly clean of competitive potshots, but Workday could not resist presenting a chart on SAP’s confusing HANA cloud SLAs by world region.

Interestingly, the market opportunity for vertical “books of record” continues to remain wide open. Few of the big vendors have moved their on-premise industry applications to the cloud.

Bhusri told us several customer CEOs had called the CEO of Walmart to vouch for Workday during their evaluation. I suspect some of these very CEOs will bribe and cajole Workday to develop industry apps. I think they will be more persuasive than I am

I am not going to keep pushing Workday into verticals till they are ready. They are doing fine with their HR and finance applications and will continue to do so with their expanded analytics and PaaS capabilities. Their focus is commendable. 

PowerPlex – celebrating the American Mittelstand

I leave every visit with Plex invigorated. Last week their user conference, PowerPlex in Atlanta was no different. Each time they showcase a growing number of customers – the majority are mid-sized US manufacturers. Plex now supports 566 customers, with 1816 plants in over 20 countries and $35+ billion in combined revenue.

And every time I wonder why we in the US don’t celebrate our “Mittelstand”,  like the Germans, Austrians, Poles and others recognize theirs as a vital part of their economies.

I have 3 explanations:

- There has been a meme going around for the last couple of decades that US manufacturing is dead. That we have offshored all manufacturing. Reality check – we are still the second largest manufacturing economy in the world, after China. The value added by U.S. factories is more than $2 trillion a year, equal to the next three countries (Japan, Germany and South Korea) combined. We make world-class planes, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronic and medical devices, even cars – most of BMW’s SUVs are made in Greenville, SC where it has invested nearly $ 8 billion over the last two decades. 95% + of our manufacturing economy is made up of firms with fewer than 500 employees. Our mid-sized, tier 2 and 3 manufacturers are the backbone of this thriving economy, even if many have forgotten about them

- As a society, as Mike Rowe, creator of the Dirty Jobs show, powerfully showed in a keynote during PowerPlex, we have emphasized white collar college education over hands-on, trade skills. We have ended up with 5 million unfilled jobs most of which need those blue collar skills and at the same time burdened our young with over a $ trillion in student debt for white collar skills they cannot monetize.

- As a software industry we have neglected to point out the majority of ERP vendors (especially those in the cloud) or their consulting partners do not come within miles of manufacturing plants. Plex analytics focus on gritty metrics like scrap rates and first pass yield. They associate with operational consulting firms like Plante Moran. Over 50% of data in the Plex cloud originates at the shop floor. I would say is is less than 10% for much larger vendors, but because they have much larger revenues than Plex (which has annual subscription revenues north of $ 100 million), we give them way more credit. And in doing so we deemphasize the customer satisfaction that shows in 95+ % renewing their Plex subscriptions.

Here are just some of the things that made my time at the event so invigorating:

• Plex organized a visit for analysts to a plant of Trojan Battery. Trojan powers most of the golf and other utility vehicles you encounter. As renewable energy takes off , Trojan ships backup batteries to store that energy around the world. During the tour, we could have handled the lead pigs and we came tantalizingly close to the sulfuric acid being poured into the batteries – not something most analysts get to see on a daily basis.
• Plex organized plenty of time for me with execs like Kevin Jablonski of Sanders Candy (whose plant we had visited a couple of years ago), Chris DiNeno of Polamer Precision, Matt Irey of Trojan, and with several prospects. Each in their own way is experiencing rapid growth which Plex is accommodating with its uptime of 99.995 percent, or just 26 minutes of unplanned downtime in 2016. There was plenty of time to meet and greet CIOs like Paul Wright at Accuride and Ben Stewart at API Heat Transfer or indeed several of the over thousand attendees at the event and hear anecdotes like that of EG (Ernie Green) Industries 4 week implementation at a medical devices acquisition in the Dominican Republic. How many vendors put on stage humble props like bun warmers from Wisco Industries? I tweeted in admiration “Midsize manufacturing co execs are salt of the earth. So pragmatic, so results oriented.”
• While they may be pragmatic and hard nosed it was good to see these customers deploying “advanced manufacturing” concepts. CEO Jason Blessing highlighted three customers – Polamer and their augmented reality project using the Microsoft Hololens, EG and their use of commodity Android and other hardware to bring affordable scanning and other technology to their shop floor and digital design at Genze (en electric scooter) by Mahindra. Karl Ederle, who heads product management, highlighted “connected manufacturing” concepts in his keynote as robotics and sensors – the Internet of Things - proliferate on the shop floor. Jim Shepherd, who heads strategy, discussed how their DemandCaster acquisition is allowing for much more sophisticated and more comprehensive planning at customers.
• Opportunity to spend some time with Mike Rowe. What a down to earth guy -  he reverently calls himself an “apprentice” to the workers he profiles in his episodes, not a hot shot TV host.

The US has its own vibrant Mittelstand. Kudos to Plex for continuing to highlight it and ably support it.

Going to SapphireNow

After sitting out SAP’s event the last few years I am going to the event next week for a couple of days.

Here’s why:

I have been getting requests to update SAP Nation. I have to been reluctant to do so without SAP’s involvement. While I get plenty of customer and competitor input about SAP from my advisory work, I would like to present a much more balanced perspective.

So I approached SAP with some ideas, including attending some sessions in Orlando and hearing directly from Bill McDermott, other executives and customers. They have kindly agreed.

SapphireNow is usually a superb production. So, I also hope to also pick up on event innovations like I did at the show a few years ago – see this post and I recently did with SuiteWorld

Look forward to running into several readers there. It’s been a while!

Oracle Media Day: another view into the hurricane

Oracle does a good job keeping us informed on the growing breadth of its SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and DaaS offerings throughout the year – see my post on Hurricane Oracle in January. So, I wondered if I would learn much new on its Media Day on Thursday. Quite a bit actually given the interesting format they adopted.

CEO Mark Hurd made himself available in three separate sessions, including a live taping of a Recode podcast with Kara Swisher, who asked him a series of uncomfortable questions, which he handled well, and with a sense of humor. CMO Judy Sim gave the group a tour of the Oracle campus. There was Star Wars paraphernalia in the room to celebrate May the 4th. The lunch was served outside and celebrated Cinco the Mayo (minus the adult beverages). So, the day was relaxed and the executives fairly open.

Every body in the room got a slightly different update on Oracle’s cloud portfolio. We learned it is streamlining its cloud contracting process to allow startups like Lyft to make it easier to do business with. Made us wonder, in contrast, how many attorneys were involved with AT&T which announced a broad ranging cloud relationship that day around its exabyte of data sets.

Several international journalists benefited from having Jason Maynard, CMO of NetSuite on a panel as they looked to understand its global expansion plans. I benefited from listening to Andrew Mendelsohn discuss why Oracle is so intensely focused on Amazon. I enjoyed Dave Donatelli’s session on six paths customers are taking to move their infrastructure to the Oracle cloud. I would love to see other Oracle units and other cloud vendors spend more time talking about migration paths to the cloud. As Hurd told Swisher  we are still in early innings in the cloud game” with may be 5% of the on-premise enterprise annual spend of trillion dollars in the cloud.

It is always a breathtaking to hear Thomas Kurian march through in an hour the hundreds of SKUs that make up Oracle’s cloud .

A day is not enough to get in to too much detail on the portfolio, but I thought it was a useful refresher on a wide range of topics.

The hurricane continues to strengthen and meander.

Of small hands and enterprise “suites”

Ever since I was a baby, I have heard arguments about whether you should buy best-of-breed packaged software or suites. Suites had the appeal of common look and feel, integration across modules, shared data models and other advantages, but often could not match the feature/function depth of best of breed solutions. Additionally, they came with the risk of overdependence on the vendors or the curse of “lock-in”.

But what exactly is a suite?  Something with 10+ modules? something with at least 2 modules? Something like Microsoft Office with Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook? Wait, Microsoft Office Professional to include Project and a few other components?

In the 1990s, at Gartner (and at AMR and others) we tried to come up with a broad definition of an enterprise suite. It was called ERP – a much broader definition of a previous generation of MRP. But the definition was not clearly broad enough because we had to coin CRM, SCM, EAM and a whole bunch of other 3 letter acronyms a few years later. We also found ERP was too manufacturing centric. It did not address major “engines” in other industries – claims processing in insurance, merchandising in retail, reservation systems in travel, billing in utilities and telecom and on an on.  

Gartner and others have tried to come up with broader definitions – Extended Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0 etc but none of them have stuck.

So, we have a situation where vendors with 3—4 accounting modules call themselves ERP and banking customers snicker when even fuller fledged ERP vendors offer to sell them suites – in their world fintech startups in London are redefining “suites” as they target wealth management, payment processing, currency trading and other aspects of their operations.  

In politics, there have been a hilarious focus on size of human hands. I guess, we are entering a phase where we will be making similar jokes about the width of enterprise suites. About time – I for one was getting tired of the ancient arguments of best of breed versus suite