We ran yesterday Part 1 of the interview with Brad Keywell. Part 2 below continues with his fascinating focus on verticals when most tech vendors play it safe around horizontal markets. He also talks about how he believes the current enterprise technology model is broken and what needs to change
More on verticals, including the recent focus on Uptake
I suppose you could say that twenty years of building businesses is what led to our awareness of an opportunity greater than nearly all others we’d ever seen. It led to a mental model of how enterprise technology can create the most extraordinary impact – and how legacy enterprise technology was the silent inhibitor of progress for most industries. It led to an appreciation of sensors and connectivity and cloud computing and edge computing, and the impact that can come from creating outcomes (not tools).
In 2012, I developed a thesis that only strengthened as I tested it with leaders and operators on the front lines of industry. This thesis led to the founding of Uptake.
We observe and question, and in that we find inefficiencies and industry ‘blind spots’. Some are more troubling than others – some rise to the level where you say ‘someone needs to make this happen, now!’ We then look at the addressable market, and our likelihood of success. We look at what happens if we're right versus what happens if we're wrong. We also look at what we're good at and what we're not good at and how much of the idea calls on us at our best (versus asks us to overcome our worst).
That's part of why I say that Uptake is laser-focused on the most extraordinary opportunity I’ve ever seen for technology to impact how industries work and how they operate. For the first time, technology can deliver precise outcomes – with certainty, Uptake delivers outcomes that makes our customers more productive, more reliable, safer and more cybersecure. We deliver these outcomes to the largest industries in the world.
If you multiply impact delivered through technology by the size of the industry where the impact is delivered, the magnitude of the value creation is beyond anything every addressed by enterprise technology. Uptake delivers ‘better’ to its customers, and the monetary magnitude of the ‘better’ that we deliver (more profit, more productivity, more uptime, to name a few) is extraordinary.
My assertion is that nothing has ever been seen in enterprise technology with the potential for impact as great as the outcomes which can be delivered through applications under the ‘industrial Internet’ banner. I believe that.
How have we built Uptake? Why is it so unique? From minute one we’ve focused on creating a platform with a single code base, which can then be leveraged across multiple industries. From minute one we’ve oriented industrial AI and machine learning at the core of our platform, optimizing all functionality and architecture to optimize the efficacy of the actionable insight we deliver. From minute one we’ve oriented our activity to build everything that's needed (in our platform, application, and content layers), so that all that’s needed from our customers is the inputs (data feeds, sensor connectivity, etc) and then we deliver them actionable insight through our industry-specific applications. By doing that, we’ve created a true outcomes, not tools or small features. By building applications that deliver outcomes, we necessarily have built all of the tooling and mechanics required to optimize our industry-specific efficacy and insight.
One of the secondary benefits of the Uptake approach to vertical-specific outcomes is that it actually empowers the CTO and the CIO in a way that lets them be more closely aligned to the CEO and operational leadership. By deploying Uptake’s applications, the CTO and CIO become more aligned with operational leaders in pursuit of profit, efficiency, and reliability. These outcomes can be delivered more certainly whereas, in the old days, the CTO and CIO were asked to “keep the lights on” and maintain network reliability. Now these technology leaders can enable operational outcomes with impact-creating efficacy.
Through learning how (and why) the enterprise software world got to where it is today, I very clearly see the foundational flaws that have led to incredibly low customer satisfaction scores for the legacy enterprise software leaders. There is a lack of accountability, given that there's been a divorcing of software from system integration, which is then decoupled from implementation. And, often, that's decoupled from optimization over time.
Most troubling, the customer is left taking all of the risk, outlaying all of the money, and then holding the bag if the implementation is a failure – the legacy risk-reward model is out of whack. Legacy software vendors ask for money but then avoid accountability for outcomes. The customer takes all of the risk, and too often is forced to write off huge investment.
Uptake believes in delivering applications that produce impactful outcomes. We deliver much more certain efficacy, therefore reducing the customer’s risk and greatly enhancing our customers’ return. We deliver impact, and that’s really what operators are thirsting for.
When I started Uptake, I posed some simple questions: "Why shouldn't enterprise software customers expect a reliable outcome? Why shouldn’t enterprise software customers expect applications that work – why would they be satisfied anything less? Why shouldn't software delivered to the enterprise look just as good as consumer software?” The answer came back loud and clear, and just as simple. Enterprise software needs to deliver outcomes, needs to work on a self-contained basis in delivery of outcomes, and needs to be beautiful and designed with empathy towards users. As simple and clear as that proposition is, too few legacy enterprise software vendors are capable of delivering on that simplicity.
Uptake breaks the mold – Uptake starts where legacy vendors have stopped. Uptake delivers. By delivering outcomes, our growth has been extraordinary.
My sense of purpose comes from my knowledge that Uptake can deliver applications that provide actionable insights with reliability-creating, productivity-creating, safety-creating outcomes – this is why our best customers are those (CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, and boards of directors) in search of better outcomes. Uptake has delivered a depth of quality and precision and efficacy that is unparalleled by any other company that I've seen in the industrial Internet space. Why? Uptake was created with obsessive focus on vertical-specific outcomes. We're not retrofitting ourselves to try to do this – we were built for this.
Our entire enterprise exists in service of outcomes that make our customers better, more profitable, more efficient, more reliable, and more. This explains why we made a number of decisions to invest so heavily in quality, scalability, cloud-neutrality, insight efficacy, AI and machine learning optimization, and outcome-delivering applications. What do these decisions look like?
· Number one: A single code base.
· Number two: A true multi-tenant platform natively deployable across both public clouds and virtual private clouds, a true application layer supporting a developer ecosystem, and deep proprietary content as a key asset to augment the precision of our insights.
· Number three: Vertical-specific applications tailored to create value and solve industry-specific opportunities, so that we can walk into our customers with a vertical-specific answer and industry-specific outcomes (rather than the legacy software formula of offering a neutral, vanilla platform).
· Number four: Applications that deliver better results than the current state of operations for our customers. That’s how we’ve grown – by delivering results.
The future of enterprise tech
I think enterprise software is extraordinarily ripe to be aligned with outcomes, be aligned with operators, be aligned with those in an enterprise who are interested in being a better business and making more money and being more efficient and safer.
AI and machine learning are at the core of our future. Today’s business leaders have newfound responsibility to deploy AI and machine learning to optimize their operations. We are entering a ‘new normal’ in which deploying and harnessing data science engines, primarily oriented towards AI and machine learning, across the enterprise and in every function is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Not too long ago, ‘state of the art’ was dashboarding. Now, state of the art is predictive insight.
The legacy enterprise software landscape is littered with advertising slogans suggesting that they’ve taken something dumb and made it ‘smart’. My response? Not so fast. Stop pretending you’re something that you’re not. If analytics are on the fringe and not at the core, your ‘smart-ness’ is severely limited. A more appropriate slogan? ‘Buyer beware!’
My challenge to those at operating companies who deploy capital towards technology: Fresh capital should be invested in optimization of data integrity, data science, and prediction-and-data-enriched-insight that leads to an action. Capital spent on legacy software will likely be money wasted. Proactive and predictive operational insight delivered by technology is the future – applications that say ‘Do this; don't do that’, ‘Fix this, don't fix that’, ‘Run the machine faster here and slower there’. That’s what the future sounds like.
Choosing to get better (rather than ‘be right’), choosing to prioritize learning and adjusting over defensiveness and ego, choosing brutal truth over posturing or sugar-coating -- these are the choices I make. I choose to focus on purpose and impact. And I choose to act in all ways as a team, not a confederation of bureaucratic individuals. Uptake is defined by the choices we make, and we choose to work as a team and win as a team. We choose to define ‘winning’ as impact and outcomes delivered to customers – our customer obsession has the customers bottom line as its scorecard. The cumulative effect of these choices we’ve made at Uptake is a very special enterprise consisting of people who love to learn (versus people who love to prove that they're right). It sounds like this, "Please, tell me how I can be better. Provide me with more facts, tell me what I might be missing, and let’s all get better."
