I liked Marc Benioff's recent comments particularly around Oracle and TikTok
“Because I’m mostly worried about the companies that aren’t making aggressive moves. I’m calling CEOs who are friends of mine who are in paralysis and who aren’t making moves, and I’m saying, Look, you’ve got to get into participation. You’ve got to get out of paralysis and into participation. Larry Ellison is the master of relevance. This is a move to make him relevant. This is so important.”
I am afraid, though, Marc's definition of "relevance" will mostly be viewed from the lens of M&A and other financial market moves. Marc himself stays relevant at a societal level, is usually responsive to customers (I emphasize the word usually because a number of customers grumble about how SaaS vendors have become as greedy and inflexible as on-premise ones), Salesforce has been regularly showcasing its vertical moves.
He leads by example but I would like to extend his definition - based on what I have heard from my interviews with countless C level executives as they have pulled heroics during this crisis.
If you have a large on-premise customer base, how did you help your customers with their WFH and sustainability moves and their requests for maintenance relief?
It's pretty clear on-prem applications were a pain as they required back flips around VPN provisioning, rapidly scaling up or down as companies moved tens of thousands of employees to WFH. As climate change becomes more of a "burning" issue it is clear that hypercsalers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have far better PUE and other metrics than the data centers most on-prem applications run on today.
So, in Oracle's case while Zoom has helped (and TikTok's workloads will help further) its cloud infrastructure cred, I would ask what it did for its large PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Business Suite and other on-premise customer bases. I have long believed and told have them they should have "lifted and shifted" their application customers to OCI, instead of trying to convince them to move to Fusion or NetSuite. I wrote this back in 2016. Also, was Oracle easy to deal with as CIOs who were in badly hurt sectors or countries asked for maintenance relief?
Not just Oracle, I would like to hear similar from SAP, IBM, Infor, Microsoft and others with large on-prem customer bases.
How did you help your customers with what I call vertical "edge" applications?
We have seen what I call vertical "edge" functionality help companies survive or even thrive as their markets changed literally overnight. I would like to hear examples of how vendors helped with examples like:
- Telemedicine in healthcare
- PPP loan processing capabilities and mobile apps in banking
- Distance learning in higher education
- Drive-thru processing in food service and retail
- eCommerce and robotic warehousing in retail
- Last mile delivery in groceries, restaurants even car buying
- Remote home buying and digital mortgages in real estate
How have your analytics capabilities kept up with massive changes in the last few months?
I wrote this while listening to SAP's Data and Analytics summit last week, but I would like to hear from every vendor how their analytics have responded to
- chaotic, broken down supply chains, massive eCommerce and last-mile logistics spikes and significant opportunities for next-gen supply chain analytics and IoT mining,
- a relentless stream of continuous planning as CFOs updated forecasts and scenarios almost hourly.
- healthcare planning heroics as we opened pop-up clinics, expanded diagnostics and ICU capacity overnight, scrambled for PPE inventory, parachuted medical personnel from wherever, accelerated clinical trials for vaccines.
- citizens who have seen countless public health visualizations on COVID positives, hospitalizations, fatalities etc. from Johns Hopkins and other sources. (btw, the term "single source of truth" that is bandied by analysts is cause for caution these days as media has cherry picked this health data in its reporting. The need for pandemic modeling agencies similar to the National Hurricane Center has become obvious. )
- an explosion in video content from telemedicine, streaming TV, digital real estate, countless Zoom sessions and related emergence of a new generation of video analytics
- WFH productivity, gaming and other metrics
- intense focus on diversity and inclusion HCM metrics
- more precise outage mapping and storm tracking given the spate of forest fires and hurricanes this summer, and sustainability metrics as climate change becomes more of a "burning" issue
- trading data even for a much more Wall Street-savvy cohort of Millennials thanks to sites like Robinhood and due to unprecedented market volatility
- a new wave of polling data and sentiment analysis in the US elections
- data from sports with seasons which will definitely show asterisks - without fans in stadiums, teams in bubbles, shortened playoffs etc.
- a changing competitive landscape as vendors like Snowflake and Palantir are getting a lot more attention given their massive IPO/public listings.
If you are "services-heavy", how have you adjusted to a travel challenged economy and changes to your business model?
Brian Sommer and I discuss in this Burning Platform episode the impact on SIs and outsourcers as travel is increasingly challenged and few customers want outsiders at their facilities.
As a result, many vendors (and customers) are moving to more outcome based and away from headcount and timesheet based contracts. I would like to hear more about that evolution. I am also hearing more buyers express concerns about security and privacy of employees of their service providers as they themselves WFH. How are vendors responding to those concerns?
Not every vendor is talking much about how they have evolved in the last few months. Many are just hoping the bungee snaps right back so they can go back to selling what they had in the bag in January. That could well happen, but for now, it would not meet my definition of "market relevant".
