deal architect

The Analyst Cam: Model N Revenue Execution

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

In June, I had interviewed Jason Blessing, CEO of Model N. He had described how 24 out of 25 of his largest customers have worked on some life-saving COVID-19 related products or services. 

Suresh Kannan, Chief Product Officer and Dave Michaud, Chief Marketing Officer presented to me about revenue "leakage" which comes from poor pricing and regulatory compliance especially in pharma and high-tech markets - excerpts in the video below.

5 months since the Jason interview has been a lifetime in the COVID-19 race. You can see in the recent presentation how influential Model N customers have become - in diagnostics (like Abbott), therapeutics (like Gilead) and vaccines (like Pfizer).

Even without the COVID-19 growth spurt, pharma and high-tech companies have complex customer pricing scenarios. In pharma, President Trump has announced plans for a "Most Favored Nation" paradigm and removal of rebates which will have a significant ripple effect on global pricing (see Model N's blog describing some of the complexities.)

While they have their hands full with their two verticals, I imagine their pricing algorithms, CPQ and other functionality will continue to attract customers from other industries. No CEO or CFO will turn down tighter revenue execution.

Fascinating presentation.

The Analyst Cam: Workday Talent Marketplace

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

David Somers, GM, Talent Optimization at Workday (and co-founder of Rallyteam that Workday acquired) presented and demoed to me about their Talent Marketplace. It connects jobs and job seekers—giving you a place where can you mix project and gig employees into your talent strategy, and put the right skills on the right projects.

He kicks it off with their skills ontology - the Skills Cloud which they launched in 2018 has clearly come a long way. I had expected an explosion in skills as more customers added their own definitions but the ontology and machine learning is allowing for crisper definitions, and a focus on more relevant ones as skills rapidly evolve.

The initial use case for the marketplace is internal to Workday customers. To me, the real excitement would be to allow cross-customer sharing of talent. During the pandemic, we are seeing a bifurcated economy where some employers cannot find enough talent to hire alongside significant unemployment.

Even more ambitious would be something I had written about in one of my books. Singapore's Workforce Development Agency had an initiative over a decade ago called "Individual Learning Portfolio". It allowed citizens career planning tools and resources and in turn benefitted employers by providing visibility to talent sources and skills preferences workers were showcasing.

I have no doubt Workday customers will use its Talent Marketplace for innovative, even more challenging scenarios.

David covers a lot a ground in under 20 minutes. Very nicely done.

New Normal: A conversation with Brett Hurt of data.world

I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level executives about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.

This time it is Brett Hurt, who is the CEO and co-founder of data.world, a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation) focused on building the world's largest collaborative public data catalog. He has always been a data guy - prior to this he founded Bazaarvoice (which went public) and Coremetrics (which was acquired by IBM)  

Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. They are involved in 93 startups and counting and 29 VC funds, mostly based in Austin, TX

It has been an amazing year for new data streams - COVID-19 related, the census, the election polling, shortened sports seasons - see others I had identified here. So, it was nice to have someone who has been a lifelong data guy. 

He says "data is one of the least networked resources". At one extreme, online advertising data has been highly optimized to help companies market and sell. He hopes vast troves of cancer, climate change, nutrition, poverty and other data which are highly siloed can evolve on that trajectory. His mission is help those data silos, make cost of accessing that data much lower and to democratize the traditional world of analytical tools which were designed by "IT people for use by IT people". He talks in terms of "data philanthropists"  - bringing open source concepts to data world.

He talks about data as facilitating "story telling" and also has advice for young data scientists. We spend some time on the Certified B entity format which prioritizes purpose alongside profit. We also spend time talking about the phenomenon which is Austin, TX where he was born and raised and where he is obviously very well connected.

Bit of trivia - he missed explaining the Owl icon on his swag. Owl is acronym for Web Ontology Language, which helps with knowledge representation. 

Wide ranging, very optimistic conversation. Ontology, Knowledge Graph - data geeks will especially enjoy listening to him. 

The Analyst Cam: Constellation Research CIO Priorities for 2021

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

The weekly Burning Platform with Brian Sommer is taking a break, so it was timely that I invited Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research to walk me through results of his CIO 2021 survey.

We have a lot of back and forth around his wide ranging survey which includes impact on IT budgets, WFH trends, a significant spike in interest in automation, trends in security and data privacy, digital transformation with a major shift - much quicker projects and a focus on workplaces and customer experiences and thoughts on coming organizational changes.

A fuller report is available for download here courtesy of WalkMe, which offers a Digital Adoption Platform.

The Analyst Cam: ASUG interview of SAP CEO Christian Klein

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, interviewed Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, on a wide range of topics for an hour. While the entire interview is only available to ASUG members, he kindly allowed me to excerpt a few sections. I selected roughly a fifth of the interview— you really should beg, borrow or pay for access to the full hour. (You can go to ASUG.com to see if you’re company’s a member—if you run any SAP software, chances are you already might be. For those interested in becoming a member, please go to ASUG.com/membership to find out more information.)

First of all, I was impressed how relaxed Christian comes across given the stress of recent announcements and the stock market reaction. At 12.08 in video below you can see how playful he is. 

Right off the bat, Geoff asks Christian to explain the announcements in his own words. 

At 4.22, Christian nicely summarizes SAP's commitments and details executive and other employee presence in N. America.

At 6.55, Christian tackles the thorny issue of slow S/4HANA adoption - makes couple of interesting observations.

At 8.44, Vinnie Vertical, as some call me, likes the discussion around industry applications

Finally, as I mentioned at 12.08, a bit of fun.

BTW, Christian's comments align with my pov when I interviewed Greg Tomb of SAP here

Like I said, get your hands on the full interview. Nicely done.

 

A turning point for Oracle?

I must admit I did a double take when I read this from Bob Evans

"On top of that, Ellison mapped out Oracle’s desire to offer a massive portfolio of industry-specific solutions that fuse (no pun intended) the broad capabilities of his Fusion enterprise apps with unique industry-specific capabilities for vertical markets."

So I checked out the video where Rob Tarkoff, EVP Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud banters with Larry about the future of CX. From 22.06 to 29.55 they do talk about verticals, particularly around telecom. Larry adds "more to come" as he paints a vision of a "closed loop" enterprise connecting the front and back office and everything in-between.

Since the early 2000s, when Oracle went on its acquisition binge I have waited for them to start to dominate with industry applications. Retek, Portal, Primavera, I-Flex, Opower, ClearTrial, JD Edwards and many others gave Oracle a nice foothold in many large sectors of the economy.

At a personal level, Larry knows so much about oceanography, architecture, aviation and so much more - he is a Polymath. He helped Steve Jobs launch Apple's retail foray and look how well it has blossomed.

While they sell plenty of database and horizontal financial, hcm and CX applications to every sector, industry specific applications have been not been as prominent in Oracle marketing.

In April 2018, I wrote about Netsuite's industry approach

The reality is the verticals NetSuite and its cloud ERP and CRM peers have developed “books of record” for leave massive sectors such as utilities, insurance, hospitality and healthcare mostly untouched. That’s a lot of white space for new entrants to target. 

In March 2019 I wrote about Oracle verticals

I would love to see details - to me vertical applications do operational stuff - merchandising in retail, claims processing in insurance, net metering in utilities, support robotics and wearables on the shop floor etc. If it has those, why is Oracle not aggressively showcasing these capabilities?

I hope they are much more serious this time. During the pandemic, in all the C level interviews I have been conducting (see index here ), I have heard how vertical applications have helped some companies survive and others to thrive. They mention applications 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

Should Vinnie Vertical (as some call me for constantly asking about industry functionality) be excited about Oracle Industries this time around? I would like to catalog their progress like I did with 3 posts on Salesforce Industries in the Analyst Cam series couple of weeks ago. 

I owe my soul to the YouTube store

"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt"

I love Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 hit -   the horn section and his colorful description of a coal miner's life. The amazing work ethic (to which the straw boss says "Well, a-bless my soul") has inspired mine during the pandemic.

Since March, I have recorded, spliced, edited almost 16 gigabytes of video. It's been heavy lifting - the prep, editing, propagation takes 10X each video's elapsed time - but it has kept me immensely positive. The videos have ended up in 4 series:

Acrobatics during the crisis

I have been interviewing C-level execs across industries about business acrobatics during the crisis. They have talked about heroics in healthcare, moving thousands to work from home, diversity initiatives, pivots, rapid innovation, massively scaling up or down. Has kept my spirits - and that of my audience - positive in the midst of the doom and gloom. It has also given me an amazing number of data points on changing markets to share with my advisory clients. Index here of 75 executives/practitioners interviewed so far. 

The Analyst Cam

I have been excerpting videos from events, briefings, demos, presentations I have been invited to in my industry analyst role. As most of these have moved to virtual format, it has allowed to embed a shortened version with my commentary. Gives readers a bit of a "being right there" feel. These have been the largest files I have worked with. Salesforce, for example, allowed me to download 2.5 gb of video from its Industries summit last month. I excerpted about 10%.  Index of those posts is here. 

Burning Platform

Weekly commentary with my colleague, Brian Sommer on trends we have been seeing in enterprise world such as: Are we finally seeing a end of life for on-premise applications? How will work from home formats evolve? These are a roughly 10 minute video format - meant to be both entertaining and educational. Index here. 

My interviews on other platforms

As with Tamas Hevizi, Paul Greenberg, Ton Dobbe, ASUG and many others.

On my New Florence blog, I have mined YouTube for years to embed thousands of videos. When I hear of something innovative, I write it up, embed an article and a video. I am following a similar format on Deal Architect. I take notes as I am editing the video and use that for my commentary. Lots of my readers still prefer written words.

My videos have been recorded across Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, ON24, BlueJeans, StreamYard, Skype, Wonder and other platforms, but they all end up on the Deal Architect channel on YouTube.

And I have a feeling the volume is about to grow even larger. I just got an iPhone 12 Pro. Cannot wait to try out its amazing camera. Have talked to some clients about using a GoPro to record processes at their shop floors and other physical sites. On my Christmas wish list is a drone. Lots of confidential, NDA stuff and blips and bloopers will be left out but there should be plenty of share. It feels good to give back to YouTube.

To twist Tennessee's lyrics

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the YouTube store

Burning Platform: Career advice for new Tech World

In episode 12 of the Burning Platform series, Brian Sommer and I talk about career advice we would give to the younger Brian and Vinnie if we were starting our careers today. We also discuss changes employers should be making to attract younger recruits.

New Normal: A conversation with Emily McEvilly of Workday

I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to all the interviews in this series. 

This time it is Emily McEvilly, Chief Customer Officer at Workday. Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO of Workday has been one of the early guests in this series so it was good to get Emily back to provide an update. 

Emily talks about more customer heroics and also those at partners. Every project implementation, training etc. has been virtual during the last few months. Not just small projects - she mentions payroll/HCM projects tackling up to half a million employees.

She talks about how the CHRO's world has turned upside down during the pandemic and how Workday has helped them - work from home, remote training, social justice, physical site protocols, employee mental health issues among other demands. As I have written here there have been at least 12 major disruptions to the world of analytics and we discuss how Workday and its CFO customers have similarly coped. She describes "record number of plans", external auditor remote access of records etc. 

I had interviewed Emily in January about her SI partner ecosystem, so it was good to hear her compliment how they have since adjusted to a world of restricted travel. She describes that but goes on to say virtual deployments are increasingly "table stakes". She is as impressed with the "tooling" and automation they have invested in and passing labor savings on to customers.

I did not expect her to talk much about Workday internally but I am glad she does about how they have "led with transparency and authenticity" and how they have been inspired by customer creativity, while continuing to themselves inspire customers.

Very symbiotic how Workday, customers and partners have coped together during the crisis. Emily does a nice job describing multiple dimensions of those relationships.

 

New Normal: A conversation with Dr. Patti Fletcher and Grant Beckett of Workhuman

I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to all the interviews in this series. 

This time it is Dr. Patti Fletcher, VP Brand Marketing and Grant Beckett, VP Product Strategy at Workhuman whose platform "connects teams and strengthens global workforces through gratitude, feedback, and celebration."

They provide plenty of examples of leadership, collaboration and workplace dynamics during the last few months, particularly in the pharma, healthcare and banking sectors. They mention Maslow's hierarchy a couple of times - during the crisis, gratitude and rewards have to aim much lower given fear, grief, loneliness so many of us have encountered. Also, reach low in the organization - Grant provides a great example of a senior doctor complimenting a gardener for the impact of his work on the well-being of patients, while healthcare workers rightly get much of the credit.

Patti also provides some sobering input on how ladies, especially minorities, have slipped significantly in their diversity and equity progress during the last few months. She quotes a BCG study that women are putting in 15 more hours a week than men on "unpaid labor" as they work from home. She says 1 in 4 are thinking of leaving their jobs. I had reviewed her book Disrupters, and Michelle Turman's Jumping the Queue a couple of years ago. Both had described the struggles and the progress and were optimistic in their tone - clearly this year has stalled the progress. So it was good to have Barbry McGann of Workday present on tools like VIBE which help quantify how much further we have to go - see my post here.

Overall, a very interesting perspective on how organizations are dealing with a new set of challenges when it comes to traumatized and yet heroic human beings in the workforce.