deal architect

Tech Marathoners: Rob Enslin

This continues a series of interviews with tech executives who have seen the industry evolve over a minimum of two decades. They have helped analyze, envision, develop and take to market some of the most influential technology the world has seen. And they have done it well mile after mile as elite athletes do. I am honored they spend the time with me reminiscing and star-gazing.

This time it is Rob Enslin, President, Cloud Business Group and member of the Executive Board at SAP. He has had a fascinating global career that spans multiple countries and generations of computing.

In Part 1 below,, he talks about his global experiences. In part 2 tomorrow, he will talk about the pace of change in tech and about his leadership style.

“I was on a fast track program to become a banking executive when I was very young. But I was never excited about what I was doing so I left the banking world and went on to study computer science. I was really engaged in information technology. First in the whole operations function and then writing assembler code in the '80s for loading and balancing ships' logistics vessels.

As time progressed, I became a systems engineer. In those days, it was configuring VM, VSE and MVS systems. I was good at building quadruple VSE systems on one virtual machine and then I became pretty much a specialist in CICS or "kicks," as many people call it, and databases. 

Of the early databases, IMS DB was my forte. In the late '80s, I served as the expert that companies relied on to read dumps. When a computer system crashed, you created dumps. Some of the dumps were important to study because you had to put in patches, fixes and rebuild systems.

As time went on, I decided it was time for me to do something really big. I looked at three companies. One of them was Swiss Re who was looking for someone to run their local IT shop in South Africa. The other two were IBM and SAP. I went through the interview process really, really liking and feeling that there was something that would be exciting at SAP.

The attraction for SAP was my background as an expert in CICS and mainframe operating systems. Especially because the big oil and gas companies and many R/2 systems needed Assembler, CICS, MVS, and even IMS Db systems. Personally, what sold me on selecting SAP was that they were about to take R/3 to market and I would have the opportunity to work in Germany. My career got off to a fantastic start working in the SAP South Africa office with 11 other people. I was two weeks into the job, working in the office pretty much alone (as everyone else was with customers) and a call came in from Dr. Hasso Plattner's office. He said there's a customer who needs an R/2 expert onsite right away. So here I am driving to the customer thinking that this would be the end of my career. I thought, I've never seen an R/2 system and there’s no way on this planet that I would ever be able to fix the system. 

Waiting for me at the front of this manufacturing facility is a big German named Gunter. He was the managing director in South Africa, and he meets me at the door and says, " I was promised that you're the expert that's going to come up, and you'll fix it for us." I was so nervous.

I got into the computer room which at that time had one main terminal, that everything ran off, and a bunch of folks around it who had been working on trying to figure it out. I sat down and was able to restore their system within a couple of minutes as just two months prior, I had the exact same situation at my previous job. So, I got to keep my job and do believe that experience got me my lucky break at SAP. Sometimes you just need a little luck because it could have easily gone the other way. 

 My next path was becoming a Basis consultant, which was mainly for R/2, but I spent the better part of early 1993 in Germany working with Uwe Hummel on R/3 release 1.1D learning UNIX networks and starting to build out the R/3 system. We spent time with people from around the world, coming together to test that system and make certain that it was ready for production. It was a fantastic opportunity to be in Germany and meet all my German colleagues, while at the same time work in South Africa.  

I tell people that the early days (in late ’93, early ’94) were interesting because I still had some R/2 customers and yet here was all this amazing amount of interest in R/3. I always remember thinking to myself, these UNIX systems are really going to run these business systems and those mainframes are really going to struggle. People don't believe it, but I can see this happening again now with the cloud model.

During these years, you had to do everything from consulting to training to presales to even selling. Everybody -  all 11 of us - had to chip in. I would not only do the full implementation, the folding up of these systems on different databases but I also went out in the morning to consult with the customers, do some presales, and then go on to do training. In some cases, I had to learn how to demo financials because we didn't have a financial expert, or the person wasn't arriving in the country until a week later. It was fascinating how quickly we all learned to grow with the full R/3 system. 

Then, in 1994, I came to the U.S. to implement the first Windows NT system in Huntsville, Alabama. A South African boy who'd never been to the United States gets to go to Huntsville, Alabama, to implement R/3 on the first Windows NT system in the world on a Compaq machine. That's how scarce the resources were in the early days. When I came to the U.S., I really enjoyed being here and I waited for the opportunity to come back.

In late '96, I'd moved into sales in South Africa. I started selling simply because my view was if I was going to do presales and training and consulting, I might as well just do sales as well. In January of '97 I was asked to come back to the United States to help in the Coca-Cola account in Atlanta, Georgia.  We helped rebuild the project scope, together with some amazing new leadership that Coca-Cola brought in, and in a very short period, just over a year, we went live.

We went live in a manufacturing facility in Ireland, in a financial region in Europe, and with corporate in Atlanta with over 5,500 users in 12 to 14 months. We descaled the project down from hundreds of people to less than 250 people.  The lesson you learn is, less is more.  You can be much more effective with a smaller, streamlined team. You get more done. You can do it faster. Decisions are quicker, and it makes a huge, enormous difference.

I stayed building out the Coca-Cola team through 1999. With that work, we founded SAP's Platinum accounts program. It was a program focused on the top 50 accounts in the world, how to manage them, what kind of resources you needed for them, how you move past the implementation and continue to manage the account across all aspects of the business. That was the start of a global management program for large accounts. I did that for two years with the top 50 accounts. 

And then, there were changes in the North American markets. I had just been promoted to the executive management team in North America. Leo Apotheker became the acting president of North America, living in Europe, and we ran North America as an office of the CEO committee. With those changes, I ended up taking on all the manufacturing sales organization for North America, which was by far the largest sales organization. The first thing I did was align the right people behind me and made certain people knew I was kind of learning on the job but, at the same time, I was not afraid to take the job on.

At that point in time, they were looking for a president of North America, and that person came from outside. His name was Bill McDermott, and I was the first person to meet him as he was walking in the office, and it was unmistakable that he was the CEO. I remember the third floor of Newtown Square, Friday evening, I think it was about 8 o'clock at night and, for whatever reason, I walked out of my office, and I looked downstairs. 

The place was empty, and I just saw this swashbuckling man walk, and I said, "That's the CEO of SAP North America." You just knew it.  You could feel it. And, he came up, introduced himself exactly like he does today, with just tons of energy. He asked me a couple of questions and we hit it off. I continued to drive and help North America, running the northeast region from a sales perspective.

And then, in 2005, Leo asked me, "Hey, would you go to Japan for me?" I very clearly remember looking at him and saying, "I don't speak Japanese." And, he said to me, "I know that." And, so, yeah, so -- it was a Thursday night, and I was like, "Oh, shit.  How do I tell my wife this?"

So, I called her and said, "You know, Leo has asked me to go to Japan to run Japan."  I ended up buying every book possible at Borders, and every book on Japan and living in Tokyo.  Sunday night, my wife said to me, "Okay, you've read every book possible.  Are you going to say no?" I said, "Um--" and she says, "You're not going to say no."  She said, "We're going to go, so just pick up the phone and tell him we're coming."

We spent three years there. My daughter graduated from high school and my son had a blast there. We turned the Japanese business around in a massive way. I learned a lot about the culture, and together we changed it into a real growth business for SAP - it was very, very successful. After three years, I came back to the U.S. as the chief operating officer, running Latin America and building out a fast growth markets plan. If you remember 2008, all companies had development and fast growth market plans.

And then, February the 1st of 2009, I had the great fortune of becoming the president of North America. The previous president resigned, and it was just after the markets collapsed, so this was an interesting time to become the president of the number one market for SAP in the world, and probably the most important market for SAP as everybody had stopped purchasing software. 

There were a lot of concerns, not only by the people at SAP, but obviously when you read the news or the media or CNN. It was just negative. The banks were in trouble. The markets were in trouble, and so on. It was just a really, tough time.

I had this opportunity to figure out how to change this environment, how to turn it around from being a market that was going negative into a market that would stabilize and then start to grow again. 

With that, we rebuilt our go-to-market strategy and we turned everything into selling to LOBs, building packages that were smaller, and changing the way we went to market. It took another six months before we saw the fruits of that. But, once it turned, it turned strongly, and I don't think SAP has ever looked back after that financial market meltdown. 

We took the North American model and we drove it worldwide. That's why today, you see LOBs and SAP in multiple areas because the model allowed us not only to concentrate on the large, big deals or the big ERP deals, but really to drive a LOB-centric model because it was the only way to ensure that we had a baseline that we could grow the company.

In 2011, I took on global sales for SAP, and then I joined the management board in 2012. We've had a pretty good run in the last seven years, seeing the company grow from a market perspective. I spent a lot of time in those years building things that hopefully will continue to sustain SAP for many years. We built the sales academy, which now has over 2,500 graduates in the last 7 years and generated a whole new generation in the sales organization.

I think one of the things that really helped me was having had the breadth growing up and working in Africa, understanding Europe, living in Japan, running Latin America, being the president and, obviously, living in North America. It really helped me understand how to grow SAP at a global scale for many years. And so, we've always had a great balance between regions in terms of our growth strategies and what markets grow faster than others.

In 2017, I stepped down from the head of global sales and two wonderful candidates who one had run North America for me, one had run Asia, stepped up to the board and are doing a phenomenal job continuing to drive SAP's sales organization and customer focus while I moved to build out our cloud strategy and all of our cloud business efforts.

The past, present and future of Work

I was at a Cognizant event last week where they introduced 21 jobs they are predicting for the next decade. Last year, they had announced their first batch of 21 jobs. See here for details. The day before, Mark Hurd went even further at Oracle OpenWorld – he projected a set of new technology-related job titles would be created and sooner – by 2025. See below for the slide he used.

Laugh at them if you want but I liked the confidence in both projections. As I told a couple of folks at the Cognizant event, it is nice to see people be optimistic about new types of work, not be gloomy that machines will largely take it over. That was the mood when I started to write Silicon Collar just 3 years ago.

But why look into crystal balls? The Bureau of Labor Statistics which keeps a very close eye on skills and titles for over 800 occupations reported many changes in its Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) in just the last 8 years

“Of the 867 occupations in the 2018 structure, 391 remained completely unchanged from the 2010 SOC, 355 had at least a definition change, 131 had at least a title change, and 115 had at least a code change.”

Work continues to evolve before our very eyes. Why are we surprised?

This year I have studied a lot of US history in the 1800s. In doing so, I kept an eye for how occupations appeared and evolved. Consumer tastes, technology impact on work, labor migrations all led to significant ebbs and flows in jobs.

If you have watched the TV show Mountain Men you may think these are modern day studs. Actually their ancestors were fighting the Beaver Wars centuries earlier and their glory days came after mapping improved with the Lewis and Clark western expedition of 1804-6.  Their fortunes subsided as European demand (in particular) for fur changed and technology allowed for development of synthetic clothing materials.   

If you have read Melville’s Moby Dick which was set in 1851, you wonder what happened to whaling, once a lucrative occupation. Improved refining technology and logistics brought kerosene cans to much of the country thanks to Rockefeller (Standard Oil branding was meant to assure consumers the quality was standard everywhere) and that reduced some of the demand for whale oil. Then Edison’s bulb and his and Tesla’s electric currents delivered a fatal blow to whaling. But just as important was that unlike Ishmael who found "nothing particular to interest me on shore," young workers increasingly found new occupations the Industrial Revolution was creating onshore.

I went to school at TCU in Ft. Worth and kept hearing of the Chisholm Trail. Much later in life I learned a technology - the railroad - had helped create the cowboy who did his famous cattle drives on that trail to railheads in Arkansas and Kansas.  From there, the herds would be be shipped by rail to eastern markets. Just as quickly, another technology – barbed wire – affected the occupation by restricting their routes and forced cowboys to turn from nomads to settled ranchers.

These days we marvel about UPS and Fedex logistics. 150 years ago, the supply chain pioneers were Russell, Majors and Waddell. They provided wagons and supplies to countless families who trekked west. Their single most prominent innovation was the Pony Express which could deliver a letter cross-country in 10 days. That was lightning fast in 1860! But the service only lasted about a year. A new technology – the telegraph – made the service look painfully slow and unreliable.

Mark Twain would likely have never become a famous  author. The Civil War interfered with a job he really enjoyed – as a steamboat pilot. His real name was Sam Clemens and his adopted moniker was a river term for 12 feet, a safe depth for boats then navigating the Mississippi. 

The Civil War, horrible as it was, similarly changed the lives of millions of other young workers. It gave a generation of American males on horses and trains their first taste of wanderlust. That along with immigrants created a mobile workforce which has become a hallmark of the US economy.  The war allowed young ladies to become nurses, tailors, farmers, even spies. Technology in the form of sewing machines, typewriters and telephones created millions of jobs over the next few decades for these ladies who had seen life outside their homes.

The railroad also led to all kinds of job related immigration. Chinese workers helped in the construction of the Transcontinental railroad. Scandinavian workers helped with the logging industry as the country’s population spread west. E. European workers helped create our giant wheat and other farms in the Great Plains.

I could go on. The 1800s are a fascinating study of countless occupations which were born, blossomed and transformed in the US.

Just a few generations later we would do well to remember that labor tends to be mobile and that occupations evolve all the time. We can fret about machines, push for regulation, and keep ignoring the signals the labor economy consistently sends out. We have been not paying close attention to those signals and have ended up with a job economy with millions of unfilled blue collar and trade jobs. In contrast, we have way too many white collar graduates with backbreaking student debt. Worse, our immigration has for the last few decades not been aligned with these labor market realities.

Time to go back to listening to the labor economy. It is an amazing ecosystem which supports 800+ occupations and keeps making workers smarter, speedier and safer while absorbing ever new forms of robotics, drones, wearables, sensors, AI and other automation.     

IBM Red Hat: Reading the tea leaves

I have certain core IT values. I like customers to buy versus build systems . Have long been a buy cheerleader. But in return, I expect vendors to build not buy.  So, I have never been a fan of big acquisitions. Certainly not at massive multiples.

So my initial reaction to IBM’s $ 34 billion play for Red Hat is that of distaste.

But the opinions of bankers and investors matter more than mine so not going to comment more on that front.

Reading the tea leaves, though I wonder if this signals

a) The end of another hype cycle for AI?

I saw a recent Fortune issue which was all about AI and I wondered if that is a signal of the peak of the current AI hype cycle. BTW, we are going through the 4th or 5th hype cycle around AI. They appear and disappear every decade or so. As I wrote in Silicon Collar

“Since the 1950s! That is when Alan Turing defined his famous test to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. In 1959, we got excited when Allen Newell and his colleagues coded the General Problem Solver. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick sent our minds into overdrive with HAL in his movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We applauded when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. We were impressed in 2011 when IBM’s Watson beat human champions at Jeopardy! and again in 2016 when Google's AlphaGo showed it had mastered Go, the ancient board game. Currently, we are so excited about Amazon's Echo digital assistant/home automation hub and its ability to recognize the human voice, that we are saying a machine has finally passed the Turing Test. Almost.”

Is IBM’s pivot from the attention it has given Watson the last several years more of a confirmation of the peak?

b) A great disturbance in the Force?

I wrote earlier about The End of Cloud History I concluded

“Yes, we are approaching a pivot in the cloud apps market. This is where the geopolitics were in 1989. The next decade and beyond will be tumultuous – exciting for some, disrupting to others.

It is the end of cloud apps 1.0.”

Last week, Larry Ellison announced a more secure Gen 2 cloud. IBM’s play for Red Hat is about “multi-clouds” and given its traditional hardware and hosting strengths, I read more of a pivot towards private clouds.  

My fellow analysts who watch hawk-like for multi-tenant, public cloud architectural purity will be having conniptions with the cloud washing we will see in the next few years. 

I have a feeling J.J. Abrams could make a next career cataloging the cloud pure and evil that are about to unfold.   

Oracle OpenWorld: Thoughts from afar

I was not at OOW this week, but glad I got a sneak preview from Steve Miranda. I also got to watch several of the keynotes on my iPad – from the home office, from a café in NYC, from my hotel room in NYC and from LaGuardia airport. So, I was productive on other matters while getting most of the executive messages from the conference.

Here’s what I liked

• Larry Ellison introducing the Gen 2 cloud platform. He acknowledged Oracle was late to the cloud infrastructure game but that this had given it a chance to design a more secure architecture with a separate ring of cloud control computers.
• Mark Hurd interviewing Ian Bremmer about global trends and even better his security panel with General Mike Hayden, Jeh Johnson and Lord John Scarlett with their considerable experiences at the DoD, NSA, Homeland Security and the British Secret Intelligence Service. I especially enjoyed General Hayden’s comments and wanted to stand and applaud when he talked about balancing privacy, security, freedom and liberty.
• Mark’s humor in his “analyst” predictions and Larry making fun of Oracle’s T&E policy as he demoed the new T&E bot and the "violations" (see image below) it found in his restaurant line item. Larry joked – “this would never have happened when I was CEO!”
• Steve had promised customers on stage and he delivered and so did Mark. Even Larry mentioned a few customers in his slides.
• I am glad Steve and Larry touched on the SOAR  on-prem to cloud application migration offering.

What I would have liked to have seen in addition

More Differentiated customers: Most of the customers on stage talked about HCM, finance or CRM implementations . 3 years ago that would have been unique.  Now, you hear similar from SAP, Workday, Infor, Microsoft and Salesforce. I would have loved to hear from Rob Carter, CIO at Fedex if Oracle has helped them with their highly automated distribution centers and the telematics and route planning for their delivery trucks. Or if Sherry Aaholm, CIO of Cummins had described if Oracle manufacturing has helped them with MES in the modern shop floor of sensors and robotics. Rather than just announcements of SOAR and the Gen 2.0 cloud, it would have been nice to hear from customers about their experiences with each. We likely will in a few years but I suspect by then the competition will likely have caught up.

More on vertical apps: I have been asking this of all the vendors. After two decades of cloud applications, we have lots of choices in horizontal apps, very little in industry books of record. As a result, by my estimate, only 20% of enterprise apps have moved to the cloud. That’s in the US, the ratio is even lower in Europe and Asia. Unless Oracle and other vendors start investing in cloud versions of industry apps, Mark’s prediction that 80% will be in the cloud by 2025 looks very ambitious.

More on conversions to OCI: Mark similarly projected the number of corporate data centers would be down 80% by 2025. Data center consolidations and moves to the cloud have been accelerating since Mark was CEO at HP and his-then CIO Randy Mott had tried an ambitious consolidation project. It would have been nice to see what percent of customers with a sizable Oracle footprint like EBS, PeopleSoft, JDE applications etc has moved from corporate data centers or hosting partners to Oracle infrastructure. That is a relatively “captive” customer base to showcase the progress towards the 2025 prediction.

More on remedies: With so much focus on security and privacy during the event, Oracle should have shared more on remedies it offers customers when there are breaches and other malicious intrusions. Just talking remedies that come with traditional SLAs is not going to be sufficient going forward

More on Gen 2 and impact on Machine learning : One of the statements I heard (and read) was “Oracle cannot see customer data” with the new architecture. That will be assuring to many customers but it made me wonder how it will impact machine learning. ML works well when we have gobs of data and scenarios to train machines. Not having data across customers will dramatically lower the number of scenarios you can train machines with. I would like to understand how Oracle will overcome this hurdle, a customer opt-in process to allow access to their data etc. 

Less focus on Amazon: Larry spent most of his first keynote benchmarking OCI against AWS. He spent some of the second using Alexa for a demo and baiting Jeff Bezos. He has done this now, two OOWs in a row. This opens up Oracle to other benchmarking against Amazon – capex investment comparisons, frequent price cuts which matches AWS’s run (or at least market perception). I am not sure it wants that scrutiny.

In balance, I liked several of the things Oracle showcased. The quality of the live streams was excellent. I may continue to watch OOW from afar in future years. I better batten the hatches - Mark seems to covet an analyst job with his annual stream of predictions :)

Applications at Oracle Open World: a conversation with Steve Miranda

Oracle OpenWorld kicks off this morning. I am not going this year but I checked in last week with Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development about what we can expect to hear about applications.

I did not go this year because applications often get very little play in a conference where infrastructure and database dominate. After talking to him, I think I should have gone.

Steve:  There will be three main themes. The first, we're going to try to showcase and highlight just a ton of customer success in our cloud. In every keynote, apps keynote/general session--mine, Chris Leone, Rondy Ngs, Rick Jewell, Rob Tarkoff--we have at least two customers on stage with us, live customers, talking about their business benefits.

When we say customers, I've tried the best we could to actually mix it up with big customers, small customers, global customers, domestic, etc., different industries. Frankly, this time, we've got a lot of name brand customers. On stage with me will be Cummins talking about their HR cloud implementation and the business benefits they have achieved. We have Juniper Networks using our marketing and configure-price-quote talking about their benefits and transformations there. I have Federal Express on stage with me talking about their financials conversion to cloud and, now that they've done some acquisitions, talking about expanding that to their newly acquired product and really moving to a single instance cloud financials. Hopefully, the biggest part that you'll get is name brand, very successful customers running all parts of the suite in the cloud.

What we're going to make a particular point to emphasize is the readiness for really the vast majority of our installed base in a couple different dimensions. Number one is, we're at the stage now where, with few exceptions, but just about anybody you are, were we have a customer who has gone live from the cloud, so that's whether you're global or domestic, whether you're HR, CRM, or ERP, whether you're a back office Siebel, PeopleSoft, or E-Business Suite, whether you're a telco, a bank, or a manufacturer. Then you put that matrix together so it's almost impossible to have everything but, just about every matrix, we have a referenceable customer who has already done it, part one.

Part two, over the summer, as you know, we introduced our Soar program together with Oracle Consulting, which is an automated set of utilities, which help customers take the risk and cost away from the conversion and the move to our cloud.

Then the final part. This has been a long effort of not just introducing financials, but then adding supply chain, adding manufacturing, adding globalization, adding HR, payroll, adding globalizations, etc. But, at this stage, again, for the vast, vast, vast majority of our customers, we think that the completeness of our suite is there.

Part one is going to be all about customer success and how we think more customers are taking advantage of the success. Part two is going to be about brand-new products that further expand the suite. We're introducing a new public sector product around permitting and licensing to supplement public sector, state and local, in their traditional finance area. We also introduced a brand new customer data platform in CRM, so a centralized customer data store and repository to sit right in the middle of our CX product suite.

Then, of course, we've expanded our higher education offering. Earlier in the year, we did an acquisition of a company called Vocado, which is a student financial aid system. Added that to brand new offerings we have in our student system that we've built organically here, which tightly integrates with financials and other parts.

Then in financials, we added another product called Subscription Management. More and more customers are offering services, so we added subscription management for the billing, collections, AR part, which is supports organizations across industries.

The third area we're focused on is the technology innovation and that's all going to spiral around machine learning. Machine learning, you'll see it take part in three different flavors.

The first is kind is brand new apps, if you will, or mini-apps or features. Next best offer, we have customers live on, next best action and service, things you would expect, but also things we've talked about in the past: auditing capability in finance, payment optimization for payments, suppliers, kind of a cash management, machine learning application, and then HR candidate matching, so better candidate matching, candidate sorting for candidate ranking, not candidate selection because the potential with bias there, but using machine learning towards that as well. That's one area, again, across all three pillars.

The second area that you're going to see improvements in is what I'll call our traditional HCM UI. Using machine learning to improve defaulting of parameters, to improve general usability and predictiveness of how the UI works. Think of it as your phone. You do text messaging, and it uses machine learning to do autocorrect and suggest next words. That machine learning gets better and better over time.

Probably the final part, and this is where you're going to see most of the demonstrations, is we've added a number of bots that take advantage of our bot platform, machine learning, which are front-end agnostic.

The key here is not just the voice to text, the bot capability to process transactions, but it's the machine learning to allow you to have some intelligence with the transactions. In other words, when you're submitting the expense reports, you can take a picture and send it. Of course, there is character recognition, the machine learning on the character recognition but, also, it's things like policy enforcement or policy suggestions, so not just a bot that processes a transaction, but actually gives you suggestions either on the approval side, what you should approve or not approve, warning signs to say, "Hey, you're submitting this expense report, but it's out of policy." A little bit more using configuration and algorithms of the machine learning to do more than just process a transaction but, actually, give input to the end user.

In summary, it’s all about customer success, new traditional apps coming out, and then machine learning across the board and across channels via bots.

Let me pause there until I get into some commentary to see if that makes sense, but that's the 9 minutes and 42 seconds version of OpenWorld.

Steve, that's excellent. A couple of questions. You mentioned a few verticals. Is there another forum where utilities and telecoms, all the other industries that you guys have strength in, not necessarily in apps, is that going to be covered at Oracle OpenWorld, or is that a different event?

Steve: No, we have different sections within OpenWorld that focus on the GBU apps. Like you said, it's more of a broader look than just ERP apps because that wouldn't be enough to cover a vertical.

Steve, one final comment. You have so much in the apps area. You should think about an apps focused event. You have so much that is not known to the world.

Steve: Historically, we've had HCM World, Modern CX, the Supply Chain Summit here, and Modern Finance In 2019, we will be bringing finance, HR, and supply chain management together under one roof in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay on March 19-21 in a conference called Limitless, Presented by Oracle. At the same time and in the same place we will co-locate our Modern CX conference. We are making things very easy and very convenient for our applications customers and prospects.

Great. Send me that information closer to the time.

Steve: Hey, Vinnie. One more thing, if I may. You have been covering us for a long, long time, on this path to the cloud. I think what gets lost in the individual conferences and what we're extremely proud of is this has not been an overnight journey, but the maturity and the time cycle and the readiness of the solution is all now there, I just hope it doesn't get lost because of one conference. This is not an overnight thing.

As much as people get hung up on things Oracle did, said in the past, we've been at this for a long time. Hopefully, that credibility gets recognized because it certainly seems to be coming through with our customers and we're quite happy with it.

Steve, I'm extremely pleased to see you say application customers are going to be on stage. With Oracle, often the messages come through in different ways. I'm glad you're bringing varied customers on stage. It makes your point "Look. We're not Johnny Come Lately. We've been at this for a long time, and we have broad coverage."

You can watch here Steve’s keynote today at 9 am and Larry Ellison’s at 145 pm and his second one on Wednesday 2 pm, all times Pacific.

The 90s called–they want their ERP back

Eric Kimberling shared with me his post Top ERP Systems for 2019. His top 5 are Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP S/4HANA, NetSuite, Workday and Salesforce (more its partners like FinancialForce).

The post made me wonder what my application analyst colleagues at Gartner in the 90s would say about the state of ERP today. These were studs like Erik Keller, Chris Jones, Art Mesher, Bruce Bond and others. You can credit us or blame us for a large percent of ERP decisions in the runup to Y2K. Without sounding too boastful, we helped tens of thousands of enterprises with their ERP selections, many of which are still running.

In turn, we were also demanding on vendors. Yes we argued architecture – thin v fat client, 2 v 3 tier deployments, but we also demanded functional depth. We challenged their claim of “best practices” and reengineering platforms.  We saw vendors were not doing enough on the shop floor, in logistics, customer facing areas and created new categories of markets like MES, SCM and CRM. We pointed out that ERP vendors had little in way of books of record for insurance, oil and gas, retail, utilities and many other sectors. As a result, vendors like SAP introduced their Industry Solutions, most after the Y2K deadline had passed.

We also pointed out that the payback from ERP was showing low because customers were implementing financials, hr and other back office modules but not operational or customer facing ones. Many were so guided by SIs, especially those with accounting heritages who had never set foot in a factory or warehouse or R&D lab.

Since then, there has been plenty of moronic talk about how manufacturing is dead and supply chains were optimized long ago. The US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world and the modern shop floor is dotted with wearables, 3D printers and robots. Supply chains are being redefined with modern distribution centers and last mile delivery options. Utilities are into net metering and predictive maintenance. Insurance companies are being challenged to rethink business models. Banking is being reshaped by a swarm of fintech vendors. Every process in every industry is being reimagined with automation – drones, AI, autonomous vehicles, kiosks, RPA. There is no industry whose books of records have not been reshaped. It’s time for ERP vendors to wake up from their Rip Van Winkle 20-year slumber and show they have customer citations with these modern capabilities.

Looking at Eric’s list I get deja vu. Most on his list are fine in the back office but not do not have robust capabilities (as yet) in operational areas. They certainly do not have industry functionality (most do around services and PSA, but not in other big chunks of the economy) . Those are the areas that need modernization. Instead we risk making the same mistakes we did in the 90s, helped by a younger generation of the same SIs.

Don’t get me wrong – I was trained as a CPA. I understand the need for robust financials and analytics

But let’s call them that – accounting and hcm in the cloud. Let’s not call them ERP. And like my colleagues did in the 90s let’s push vendors to deliver contemporary and deep functionality, not just talk “cloud” architectures.

And let’s challenge SIs when they talk digital transformation around these narrow footprints. That is today’s codeword for reengineering. The biggest bang comes from smart products, omni-channel commerce and related logistics, modern shop floors not just from modernizing the back office as we did the last time.

AI in the enterprise: a reality check with John Sumser

John Sumser, aka HR Examiner, has been focusing on "intelligent technology" including AI and machine learning as it morphs the HCM function. Trends in that function are a forerunner of what we will see across the enterprise. I recently caught with him on his latest report and what he learned at the recent HR Tech event in Las Vegas

John, what are you excited about when you look at "intelligent technology"?

In the HCM world, it's pretty clear to me that data is becoming infrastructure rather than the stuff that passes through the software. Everybody I have talked to said, in one way or another, that first you have the data and then you have the software, so the software sits on top of the data . Getting the data right is the key to allowing the software to do its thing.

The second thing that was pretty uniform, although I had to prompt it sometimes, is that what now comes out of a machine is an opinion. It used to be what came out of a machine was the facts that you put into it. But, it is decreasingly the case that what the machine gives you is the facts that you gave it. It is almost always, at some level, providing an improvement on those facts, some benchmarking, forecast, context or some insight.

Rather than software being a re-packager of the data that you give it, it's now an interpreter of the data that you give it. That's a big change. That's a really big change. And so, people are starting to talk about that. People are starting to try to figure out how you deal with that.

I ran a session a called "How to Evaluate an AI Vendor," The gist of it was how do you understand data quality and what does it mean? Does the vendor understand their data models at scale? If you've got 5,000 people in your company, you're going to have a million data models.

How do you monitor their health? And, how do you make sense out of the variable quality of the overall data farm when you're making decisions?

When you say it's more opinion and less fact, is that surprising to the audiences? How did they react to that?

It was a lightbulb. It was actually a surprise. Nobody -- I've worked a long time to get that idea that simple, and the notion that machines are now not as reliable from a pure fact perspective causes lots of heads to bounce up and down. "Oh, that's what intelligence means."

One of the things that I've been probing a lot of the bigger enterprise vendors is, you don't have enough enterprise class data. Most of your data is locked up in customer, on-premise systems. You don't have permissions to access that. A lot of what they're talking about is stuff that consumer tech is doing, the image recognition, the voice recognition, and so on. There's very little enterprise data that is really being used for AI use cases.

You're right. The notion that enterprise technology is going to resemble consumer technology is one of the most damaging ideas that we've entertained in enterprise technology. I was looking the other day. I made a reservation on OpenTable for some restaurant in Las Vegas. OpenTable has handled 820 million reservations. With 820 million reservations in your database, you could do things like predict what the menu ought to be and where you ought to locate the restaurant if you want to have a successful restaurant in Western Sonoma County, California. It's a huge database of consumer interest and preference.

If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, you're never going to have that. You can't get to a trillion data points like OpenTable can in a 10,000-person organization.

What happens in those smaller settings is latency becomes a primary problem. Fidelity becomes a primary problem. You don't have those when you have a ton of data points.

We're about to see some expectations being reset in the enterprise space. That doesn't mean that there isn't cool stuff being done. It just means that you will not see what Cornerstone is busy suggesting that they're going to have a recommendation engine for learning videos. You can't do that with little tiny clients.

If you took all the clients in the world, you wouldn't have enough data to make sense out of it. If you had all of the employee data, employees don't handle their interactions with the company in the same way that they do with a consumer product. They don't have daily interactions in their learning system.

I don't have a clear picture of how it shakes out. But, the difference between consumer technology and enterprise technology is going to become increasingly apparent.

Well, tell me where it is promising in HCM AI

First of all, if you wanted to find where a technology rooted in statistics was going to take hold, you'd look at insurance and banking, maybe pharma

So, Allstate Insurance is a really good example. At Allstate, they have built by integrating - it is a patchwork quilt of vendors integrated into a single system that can go from identifying names of people who might be good employees all the way out through the entire acquisition and development process to identifying the kinds of skills that you'll need in the future and the sorts of places where you're going to need to open offices. And, if you get to the place where you're opening offices up, it can help you navigate all the way through the staff problem. That's pretty interesting.

What's even more interesting there is that team is run by librarians. The team that built that structure are the librarians they hired. There are five librarians, five Masters of Library Science on the team.

The reason that's interesting is because, in order to use the next technology, you have to be better at asking questions than having answers. This is what it means when you say that the machine gives you an opinion. But, if you have a boss or a very upset spouse, these are the times when you only need one opinion to make a decision. Every other time, you need multiple opinions when you make a decision.

The worker of the future is going to be better at gathering opinions in order to make decisions. Places where it's easier to have ambiguity be the center of the equation are the places where this stuff is going to tick.

There is a vendor called Bridge that has an integrated LMS and performance management system. The idea of performance management stops being, "Here's how you screwed up and missed your objectives last year," and starts being, "Here's how we're developing you." The manager gets coached through the available material in order to bring the employee along as a developing expert in something.

There's a great one that's for interview scheduling - Ascendify. Their interviewing system identifies the interviewing team by expertise, gives that interviewing team a set of questions to ask individually, and evaluates the results of the interview to see if the information that was asked for was obtained and then revises the question set for the people down the road. It does this while doing all of the coordination necessary to keep hiring interviews scheduled.

Ascendify only works in the Fortune 100. If you're a big company, that process is cumbersome and expensive and often has ten interviews as a part of the overall process. It takes all the administrative load out of that. That's significant. The estimate for Microsoft's interview coordination budget, so just scheduling and rescheduling the interviews, is $20 million. They can zero that out and give you a faster process.

The first wave of things look like those sorts of incremental improvements to existing processes. Over time, what's going to happen is the silos, which look to me like things that are held in place by existing enterprise technology, will start to collapse. It doesn't take very long, if you stand far enough away, to see that employment branding, recruitment marketing, onboarding and orientation training- are all the same task. Because they are understood to take a different point in a workflow or done by a different expert, you have the same task performed multiple times by five different people for different reasons. You can consolidate that under a goal that looks like, how do we shorten the time to productivity for a new employee?

If that's the goal of the entire talent acquisition process, including the training and admin functions that wrap around it, then what you do in the initial moments of contact with somebody who might come to work for you are different than what people are doing today. That becomes easier and more intelligible when you've got data as infrastructure underneath it all

I heard you say some customers are doing interesting stuff. Some startups are doing some cool stuff. Where do the mainstream vendors fit in?

The emerging battle is for the replacement generation for enterprise software. The people who are in that battle are IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and -- maybe Facebook.

In that group, the name of the game is selling commodity processing and storage. And so, they all -- IBM and Google being the first into the market, they all have an idea of an overlay of technology that expresses as functionality. They all already have applicant tracking systems. They all, for the most part, believe that the world is better if you have a taxonomy as the fundamental structure for HCM.

IBM and Google are very quietly duking it out over which is the better taxonomy, but it's pretty clear that, in this particular game, taxonomy is going to be the key because you can organize everything around the taxonomy. If you go taxonomy plus competencies in the places where people want to use competencies, you start to have a magic formula. That's the initial data structure.

If you start with the initial data structure, then you can lay workflow on top of that pretty easily. The next generation of large-scale enterprise providers looks like it's coming out of that area, and they all have recognizable teams.

If you look at what they're doing, it's really interesting. The Microsoft people analytics team, which is both in HR and product development, has 140 people in it. People analytics, the HR analytics team, 140 people at Microsoft. At Facebook, it's 60, and that's 60 people doing HR analytics for 30,000 employees. These are environments where budget doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the customers you and I understand, but partly because both companies are using their internal processes as a way to accelerate product development. There's real interesting stuff up there in the sort of serious cloud providers area.

The next tier down, if you look at Workday, even Kronos -- Workday, Kronos, or Ultimate Software, the ones that pop up on my radar as the best of the bunch, it looks to me like one of those situations where you lift the house up and install a new foundation underneath it. At Workday, it's a planning and data management system. And, at Kronos, it's a layer of intelligence that uses 40 years' worth of time clock data to predict some interesting stuff.

I don't expect to see anything resembling innovation out of Oracle or SAP. They won't go out of business because of it. They have a long, long, long tail on their cash cow, but people are going to have to innovate around them in order to get real intelligence in their enterprises.

Then the rest of it is small point solutions and data manicuring plays.

That's another fairly prophetic statement that it is the infrastructure-oriented Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM that are leading the way on big machine learning. Are HR executives willing to accept them as their HCM providers?

Well, I think it's interesting. If you look at Google and IBM's strategy, and they're really out in the market right now, they are largely going for a sort of a Trojan horse play. IBM is inside of Workday and inside of Cornerstone. Google gets their foot in the door by being the frontend of employment websites for 3,000 companies.

I don't think that the way that it happens is these companies come out of the gate on day one selling a comprehensive enterprise solution. They come out of the gate on day one solving actual, significant problems with a meaty difference so that they have the relationships in place that they can build on. They will ankle bite their way into taking accounts. It's not going to be an RFP level competition for a long time but, by the time it becomes an RFP level competition, the game will be over.

SAP CX Live – better afternoons than mornings

I was asked about the couple of days I spent at the SAP CX event in Barcelona this week, and my response was “afternoons were better than mornings”. True enough, given the body was jet lagged.

But even in content, the morning keynotes and press conferences were subdued. In contrast, the small group analyst meetings with execs and customers in the afternoons were much more animated and informative.

Subdued? Well, SAP did raise expectations for this event by giving C/4HANA plenty of attention at Sapphire this summer. It raised expectations even more when CEO Bill McDermott stood shoulder to shoulder with Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft to announce the Open Data Initiative last month. Salesforce raised expectations for SAP with its blowout Dreamforce event a couple of weeks ago. When you use the same venue as the Mobile World Congress, you beg comparisons to the over 100,000 that event attracts – CX attendees, only 4,000 strong were in comparison rattling around in the giant setting. 

There were few customers on stage compared to many SAP executives. In fairness, Christian Klein, COO of SAP  joined Alex Atzberger, President of SAP’s CX unit and described SAP’s own impressive digital transformation. And there was Robotech, a fictional company which reminded me of the Adidas Speedfactory. It was used to describe a company which is moving to agile development and outcome based business models. Both were relevant but would have been so much more powerful if SAP had used live, external customers.

Two overriding themes pervaded the event. The consistent ethos at SAP is “the suite always wins” so there was lot of conversation about the 5 clouds it is bundling in C/4 and the 7 common attributes like common UX and extensibility it is striving to deliver across these clouds. And of course, this led it to the mandatory comparison to competing CRM suites. The second theme was about trust. In the privacy backlash against social media (and what SAP calls “digital natives”) and in the GDPR influenced world, SAP believes customer-centric activities will have to behave far differently than they have in the past. Indeed a guest speaker, Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, went about discussing how modern technology can be used to influence consumer behavior, and ended with a plea for using the power to design healthy habits.

To me, the second theme may have some marketing legs – though there is always tension between the compliance and creative side of an enterprise, and in a revenue and growth hungry world, I would personally bet more on the creative side.  But SAP is not going to easily convince customers to buy the complete C/4 suite, or even many of the components just because it has incumbent ERP relationships. It has tried in the past and not sure why it will do so this time.

On the other hand, it has lots of new features, especially through its acquisitions of CallidusCloud, CoreSystems, Gigya and hybris.  And this is where the afternoon sessions really helped in the drill down.

Moritz Zimmermann, Chief Technology Officer (and co-founder of hybris) described how SAP is re-invigorating the sales function with revenue recognition and sales commission functionality. How CPQ functionality is much more relevant for newer outcome-based business models and a world where digital and physical are merging. How marketing is evolving beyond a traditional world of too many emails and cookies. Volker Hildebrand, GVP, Strategy & Solution Management, SAP Service Cloud described how SAP is redefining field service. The CoreSystems acquisition offers customers an Uber-like platform to find available field service technicians in real-time.  So, a customer like Siemens can use SAP functionality on a per user bases for its own techs and this marketplace for crowdsourced techs and pay on an occurrence basis. Leonardo IOT capabilities allow for a new service  models as industrial assets get smarter and allow for more predictive versus scheduled maintenance.   Jackie Palmer, Global VP Strategy described SAP capabilities in a world of consent based marketing including the role of Gigya, with its customer identity and access management capabilities and in the world of open data that SAP is pushing with Microsoft and Adobe.

It was nice to spend some time with Lorenz Gan, CIO of New Era who uses hybris and Concur functionality, and is still on the on-prem Apparel Footwear version of R/3. It was a refreshing conversation about how he makes decisions on individual applications in his portfolio. He is not a “suite” buyer (he uses PLM software from Centric and may have his outsourcing partner, EPAM custom develop revenue recognition functionality). He does not automatically plan to upgrade to S/4HANA till he is comfortable with quality (the AFS version has had a checkered history) and economics. (BTW, Gen was also on stage but just did a cameo, and went into very little detail compared to what he shared in our breakout) Similarly, it was good to spend some time with Hans Lui of the US sub of Bandai Namco, the Japanese gaming company. They use RevSym from CallidusCloud for revenue recognition and ASC 605, ASC 606, and IFRS 15 compliance. The Japanese parent uses plenty of other SAP software the US sub has not been required to adopt. 

The elephant in the room was the market leader, Salesforce. SAP wisely chose to not publicly take potshots but clearly would like that market leadership. I think it needs to follow a different path. Before it pushes extensibility too hard, it should take a hard look at what the platform around Salesforce has delivered. The reality after a decade is lots of features, very little vertical functionality. Salesforce is also being cavalier hyping up its Trailblazer and services ecosystem forgetting that adds to customer costs. It is pushing values that many of its customers wish it would low-key. Those values play better with younger consumers and workers, less so with corporate executives who buy enterprise software.  SAP runs the same risk if it pushes trust and other value statements too hard. Also, SAP itself is under pressure to change its own customer facing posture. It said the right words like “It’s our customer’s data, we don’t own it. It’s not ours” but it needs to become much more comfortable answering questions about Indirect Access and why customers will allow it to come close to even more of their data.

SAP will continue to talk about how the “suite always wins”, but to me it is specific, differentiating features which will allow it to win in the trenches, bottoms up, cloud by cloud. And there it is building a formidable portfolio of features. My hope is it continues to invest heavily at that layer not just in bringing consistency across the clouds. And that it starts to mine its vast customer base for digital transformation stories, particularly across industries it has dominant presence in.

Circling back - now that I have returned to the US, mornings should be better or certainly more productive than afternoons, especially with my new found recipe from Barcelona. I was impressed at the many fruit markets that dot the city. And the plentiful sangria!

SAP’s Rainbow Coalition

I spent a day at SAP TechEd this week. I was there primarily to meet some customers and execs for interviews for SAP Nation. I knew the theme of “open” would be prominent during the event, but I was not prepared for the extremely wide range of tools and technologies that now define SAP Nation.

SAP had a series of bins with pins for developers to vote for their language of choice. I walked around the show floor with Brian Dennett, a SAP Mentor and now co-founder of Enable.ai. He proudly showed off his Python pin. I expected most at the event would similarly be showing off their machine learning chops or Java pins. I was blown away the ABAP bin was empty. As ABAP migrates to SAP’s Cloud Platform, the 35 year old language continues to flourish. 

We had a meeting with Maricel Cabahug, Chief Design Officer at SAP. The world of UX is mind-blowingly complex. Mobile trends on iOS and Android. Social/collaboration trends driven by Facebook Workplace, Slack and others. Digital assistants like SAP’s CoPilot and many others.  Listening to her, you see expectations change dramatically as you move within an enterprise. Customer facing marketers are far more UX savvy and demanding than workers on the shop floor. As you move around the world, you have to reflect expectations of chat and emojis common in China. And yet, you step back and many customers migrating to S/4 are asking for the old keyboard and mouse driven SAP GUI interface that SAP has been maligned for! It makes the user transition easier they say.

AWS, Azure and Google had big booths at TechEd. In Asia, the Alibaba cloud is gaining steam. Many customers are choosing to deploy on SAP’s own data centers. Many of SAP’s outsourcing partners deliver private cloud proposals with their own hosting partners. The matrix of on-prem/private/public single/multi tenant deployments continues to morph. 

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HANA was front and center at TechEd, as it has been for several years. Yet, SAP’s own cloud acquisitions like SuccessFactors have been slow to move to HANA. S/4HANA today only covers a small part of the enterprise -  most SAP customers continue to live with Oracle, SQLServer, Sybase and DB2 in surround applications. It is an open database world in that sense.

There are two ways to look at this variety. You can cringe at the complexity of so much heterogeneity. Or you can admire SAP’s multiculturalism and its “wide open tent” philosophy. The tapestry of different shapes and colors does make for a striking piece of art.

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A different Vegas. A very different Workday.

This was my sixth trip to Vegas this year. Coming from humid Florida, I have a routine for that city. Gallons of water and lotion to compensate for the heat and dryness. Gear to protect against the excess of artificial light and sound. But this time in town for Workday Rising, Vegas felt a bit different. The remnants of Hurricane Rosa cooled it down to pleasant levels. The ceremonies honoring the anniversary of last year's mass shooting gave the city a bit of humility.

Rising also felt different. CEO Aneel Bhusri justifiably missed the event due to a family emergency. While his executives made up in energy, I missed the annual comedy routine he and co-founder Dave Duffield put on. In many other ways, Rising was different.

Analytics as the third “pillar”

There was palpable excitement about Prism Analytics launched in the last year. Many customers see it as democratizing complex analytics and bringing the wizardry of teams of expensive data scientists and complex platforms like Hadoop to the average user.

Prism was spawned from the Workday acquisition of Platfora. Its collaborative Worksheets grew from the acquisition of Gridcraft. Many other small acquisitions other the last few years have helped built Workday's machine learning chops. It is safe to say Workday has been building a third pillar of intelligent apps beyond its first two transactional ones in HCM and Finance.

The Adaptive Insights acquisition, Workday’s largest so far, was an resounding endorsement of that third pillar and got plenty of play at Rising. Releases 32 and 33 due next year will heavily feature planning functionality, improve Adaptive look and feel, and importantly expand it significantly beyond its financial planning roots.

For a few years now, I have felt HCM world has been out of touch with the realities of the labor economy. As a result, we have ended up with gross mismatches where 6m blue collar and trade jobs are unfilled, and on the other hand we have too many white collar graduates with $ 1.5 trillion in student debt.  Less than 10% of the civilian workforce is on the payroll of F500 companies. The rest are not in the so called gig economy. They are in Tier 1 and 2 suppliers. They are in accounting, advertising, attorney and other service providers. They are on platforms of companies like amazon, eBay and Apple. They are in franchises of companies like UPS and Ace Hardware. Talent management software has missed this transition to a clover-leaf  labor model . You have an economy with rapidly changing occupations and skills (the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently expanded their list of occupations). Every occupation is being re shaped by a wide range of automation like robotics, drones, wearables. HR seems vaguely interested in automation trends. Given all this, I was pleased to see Workday announce their Skills cloud - a taxonomy of 55,000 skills based of winnowing down using ML from over a million user defined skills. That is a start to bring rigor to HCM, and hopefully to start to correlate it better to the macro job economy. 

The relative de-emphasis of industry verticals

If Analytics is getting plenty of attention at Workday, something else may have to give. In my view, that is investment in vertical functionality.

As I wrote recently I have been disappointed with the pace of verticalization in cloud solutions. Way too many vendors spray paint an industry specific feature or two on top of their horizontal financial, HCM or CRM modules and call that verticalization. My expectations for verticalization are more demanding from two angles

- I want to see a significant industry “book of record” offering. If you say you are committed to retail, I want to see a robust offering and a sizable customer base in the merchandising area. If it is insurance, show me similar around claims processing. If it is utilities, I want to see a billing engine, and one for complex asset management and maintenance.  If it is healthcare, show me electronic patient records. If it is oil and gas, show me functionality their geologists consider critical.

- I also want to see contemporary functionality. Show me something customers can plan a serious digital transformation around. So, for example, if you say you are committed to manufacturing markets show me execution support for a modern shop floor with robotics, sensors and wearables.  For utilities, show me support for net metering and for plants fired by renewable fuel.

From my more demanding definition, Workday has truly verticalized only in higher education. While it has features which are aimed at specific industries, it does not have books of record. It is increasingly clear it sees a much better path to keep investing in its three pillars. I cannot fault Workday for that focus, just worry its horizontal sandbox is attracting too many other players even as much of the white space in industry functionality gets little attention.

The emergence of Workday Ventures and the Workday platform

At Rising, I was invited to a breakout with 12 portfolio companies in the new $250M Workday Ventures fund. The billing was “The companies in our portfolio solve problems that we don't solve natively in our Workday applications. Our portfolio companies leverage the latest technologies and have proven that they are ready to serve our enterprise customer. All Workday Ventures portfolio companies are now official Cloud Connect Partners and are using our APIs to build integrations.”

I meet with 3 portfolio companies.  Voicera offers Eva, an in-meeting AI assistant. Eva will take notes for you in meetings, or conference calls, or interviews. Indeed as I was taking notes, I noticed Eva was live-transcribing our conversation. I quit writing and asked Omar Takawol, CEO to send me a transcript. I had previously met Omar when he sold BlueKai to Oracle. I have a feeling Eva may play a big role when I write my next book.

Next up was Pymetrics which develops  neuroscience games to help companies rethink their talent management strategies. I had previously profiled CEO Frida Polli on New Florence. Suplari provides unified insight into indirect expense spend - contracts, spend across AP, P-card, T&E, POs, and invoices, as well as usage and consumption data. CEO Nikesh Parekh joked the company name has roots in consigliore from the Godfather books and movies.  Each of the portfolio companies I met was impressive and I wish I could have spent time with the other 9.

Leighanne Levensaler, SVP of corporate strategy and co-head of Ventures explained their investment philosophy. Their biggest KPIs, beyond a fund’s expectation of investment returns, are Workday customer adoption and embrace of emerging Workday platform technologies. On the first point, she said they had arranged for over 150 meetings between existing customers and portfolio companies at Rising.

I went over to SAP’ TechEd a mile away in Vegas after the Rising event. It gave me a glimpse to a parallel universe we may similarly see emerge around Workday as its own platform evolves. A world of Mentors and geeks who are way more comfortable talking Kubernetes than about building blocks of organization hierarchies in Workday. 

Workday organized an analyst dinner at a restaurant with a large balcony. The temperature was pleasant but the noise and neon signs of Vegas bombarded your senses. I looked up and saw the desert sky. It took me to many pleasant memories of shooting stars and the haunting silence my wife and I have enjoyed a short distance from Vegas in Death Valley in CA, Antelope Canyon in AZ and Zion National Park in UT. It reminded me Vegas is a gateway to a whole different world.

Workday is becoming a similar gateway to the rest of the enterprise. While they are moving away from a transaction focus, their analytical and ML chops will open up new insights, and their platform will introduce a new set of developers and startups to the rest of the enterprise. It's their way of transitioning from a system of record to a system of insight.