Most people I know cannot wait to say good riddance to 2020. Very understandable - so many have lost friends and family to COVID, others have lost friends to ugly politics, it was financially devastating to so many of us.
But 2020 also saw unbelievable business heroics, innovation, digital acceleration and so much else which will define this decade. My personal hope is continue with all that goodness.
In an episode I recorded with Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica last week, I presented some of my personal positives from 2020 - it is about 2 minutes long. In there I mentioned I have uploaded 3,000 minutes of video across the various series I launched during the pandemic - Acrobatics during the Crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform. That was from 20 gb of raw video.
Over the next few days, I will run an even tinier excerpt on the New Florence blog. About a hundred minutes of highlights - unbelievable scaling up/down, rapid innovations, business pivots, leadership. And also basic decency - humor and humanity. That is the side of 2020 I hope we continue in 2021 and beyond.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here Last few weeks, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy and Sandra Lo of Zoho
This has been the year of the cloud - unbelievable scaling of ecommerce, wfh etc - so nice that I can wrap up the year with an episode with Bob Evans who authors the Cloud Wars site. As you can see, both of us are basking in the sun - helps the mood at the end of this crazy year.
We cover a lot of ground - how the hyperscalers have picked up momentum as companies look at lifting and shifting on-premise, legacy apps to their clouds. Google, Oracle, Microsoft and AWS in particular get a fair amount of time during the session.
We discuss the increasing focus of both the infrastructure and application vendors on the platform layer and the likely turf wars there.
We cover recent public offerings from Snowflake, C3, Palantir and momentum of vertical players like Teladoc, Shopify, nCino and what that means for the incumbent players.
Bob also talks about every company in every vertical becoming more of a software company and what that means to the industry as a whole. The SaaS, IaaS etc definitions of the last few years look increasingly dated.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs 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 the growing list of interviews.
This executives profiled in this series (and those in Analyst Cam and Burning Platform series) have talked about all kinds of human heroics - in healthcare, vaccine development, diversity moves; in IT, in HR, supply chains and more during the crisis. They have talked about massive scaling up/down, rapid innovations, pivots etc. In the huge ecommerce volumes of the last few months, the unsung heroes are, in addition to humans, warehouse robots.
Guy Courtin of 6 River Systems had demoed here their Chuck collaborative robots and how they can be deployed in smaller locations, closer to customers, without needing to invest much in traditional conveyors or large warehouse infrastructure. While Amazon and its Kiva robots get much of the attention, 6 River (now part of Shopify) and Chuck robots also deserve plenty of kudos.
So, I was really pleased to have Jerome Dubois and Rylan Hamilton, co-founders and co-CEOs of 6 River join this series - they were pioneers with Kiva, and now with the smaller, more agile Chuck robots. We talk about changes coming as more companies move to "micro-fulfillment" (as compared to very large Amazon fulfillment centers - see my tour report here) to accommodate new models like flash sales, order on-line, pick-up in stores, regionalized inventories, last-mile delivery expectations and constraints while keeping warehouse workers safely distanced, quickly trained and incredibly productive. We have a wide ranging conversation around how supply chains and the cold chain have stepped up during the pandemic and why we will need more automation to keep supply chains sustainable. We also have a philosophical segment about accelerated automation in every sector and the likely impact on society. As I described in Silicon Collar, automation has historically taken over "dull, dirty and dangerous" tasks and they describe how Chuck helps both employers and workers.
It is a fascinating conversation. Watch it and the demo of the Chuck bots. Acrobatics for sure. It's a nice way to wrap up this series on business heroics we have seen so much of this year!
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.
Yesterday, in Part 1, I ran a presentation by Mark Brewer of IFS on their Service Management offering for complex, asset-intensive industries and trends in those industries, especially during the pandemic.
Below is a 30 minute demo by Jonathan Hyden and Paul White which covers 4 segments:
Workforce Forecasting (across real-time and longer time horizons)
Remote Assistance (which has been especially handy during the pandemic)
Lots going on in this demo - road maps, heat maps, GANTT charts, merged reality (using a iPhone 8 cam, not an elaborate AR headset), simulations and dashboards
I have invited them back to demo some of their asset management/predictive maintenance capabilities.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere and Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.
This time it is Sandy Lo of Zoho. Not an analyst but an amazing musician and a wonderful AR executive - read here how talented she is
She sent me a beautiful holiday gift - a video of her playing carols on the piano. I asked her if I could share with the world. She kindly agreed.
Last week I shared the Curmudgeon Christmas Card with Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett. That was a lot of fun.
This one is pure joy - certainly has been the easiest episode for me to edit:)
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests -Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Bob Ferarri of Supply Chain Matters
This time it is Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy Consulting. She has been a tech industry pioneer - I called her a "marathoner" in this 2018 interview.
We cover a lot of ground in the video below about what she has seen in tech marketing during the pandemic.
She talks about the initial wave of empathy that guided vendors to focus on customer problem-solving and not come across as "ambulance chasers". We discuss how some vendors still want to pitch what they had in their bag in January, not reflective of how dramatically most markets have changed. We talk about "influence v intelligence" when it comes to industry analysts in changed markets, and whether AR would be better positioned in product development v marketing. We also talk about changed messaging as the whole world has moved to video communication and a much more digital world.
She shares a few details about her upcoming book with a working title of "Make it, Don't fake it". It is part autobiography about her leadership style, and part philosophy about her integrity and "getting to the truth and sticking to it". Should be a fascinating read and timely given some of the crazy expectations we are seeing on Wall Street. I look forward to bringing her back to present on the book in much more detail.
In the meantime, enjoy this really invigorating session.
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.
When I interviewed Darren Roos, CEO of IFS in September (see here), he provided examples from several complex, asset intensive businesses like aerospace and engineering/construction. He also pointed out how important field service is to them, and how complex that has become during the pandemic.
IFS is better known as an ERP vendor but its asset management and service capabilities are increasingly a differentiator. So, I invited them to present in this Analyst Cam series on their Service Management offering.
Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director for the Service Management product line presents below for about 15 minutes. He says Service Management accounted for over half of IFS's revenues in the first half of 2020.
He covers several industry trends including a shift in business models - he showcases Rolls Royce, Tomra and Kyocera and their outcome-based contracts in aviation, recycling (reverse vending) and copiers. He also discusses how aging field workers are being moved during the pandemic to remote, often from home, service guidance roles.
Tomorrow I will run Part 2 with a demo of the functionality.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere.
This time it is Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.
We talk about how the pandemic severely stressed so many supply chains – PPE, toilet paper, anything China sourced, the cold chain for food and now vaccine distribution among others. Yet, we somehow coped and moved so much of the flow from brick and mortar to ecommerce. Bob describes the war rooms many companies set up to cope.
We discuss how many companies have reacted to both the demand and supply shocks - rethinking historical demand forecasts, simplification and reduction of product choice with rationalization of multiple product SKUs and BOMs. How companies are rethinking global supply chains (with strategies like China+1 or 2 or 3) and re-location of manufacturing to increase resilience.
We next talk about the cold chain which has been challenged all year - first with food distribution challenges now with the daunting COVID vaccine logistics, while simultaneously coping with the holiday shipping load.
Bob describes several of the supply chain planning and execution technologies he has been impressed with, that have helped enterprises cope with the unprecedented stress.
It truly is a riveting conversation about the acrobatics it has taken the supply chain community to keep us hundreds of millions of us fed, sheltered, entertained during 2020 and the many changes we are likely to see in 2021.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research and Holger Mueller of Constellation Research.
This time it is Tamas Hevizi, Global Head of Private Equity at Automation Anywhere. I had interviewed him in May about acrobatics he was seeing early in the pandemic. In June, he had invited me to his show to summarize some of the acrobatics I had seen. He also wrote a guest column for me in July describing his unbelievably disciplined digital work habits.
So I invited him to update me on more of the Digital Acceleration he has seen in the last few months. He also talks about the 7 C's of excitement he is seeing in the private equity world he lives in - commerce, cloud, collaboration, cybersecurity etc. Finally he provides many examples of acceleration in "citizen developers", especially in small businesses.
We may never become as digitally disciplined as he is, but the examples he shares shows that as millions of us have moved to WFH, as small businesses have moved to digital commerce, we are individually feeding the digital acceleration of the last few months.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here . Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras and Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research
This time it is Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. He follows architectural, platform and other technological underpinnings of application vendors like SAP and Workday and of hyperscalers like Amazon and Google.
He talks about how the public cloud has scaled amazingly during the pandemic. He also says first-generation SaaS players will have to adjust to the growing strength of the hyperscalers. SAP has been talking about its 4+1 strategy and Salesforce has announced Hyperforce. He sees an opportunity for application vendors to not emphasize their platforms but to re-imagine business processes. Traditionally, they have relied on customers and SIs to help them codify business process logic - now they can lead using new technologies like ML that their traditional sources of guidance are not that familiar with as yet.
We talk about AWS, Azure and Google and why Europe still does not have a player like Alibaba. We discuss the prospect for Oracle in this segment.
We talk about how it has been an amazing year for new data streams - COVID-19, election polling, census, shortened sports seasons, all kinds of planning/forecasting scenarios, video streams and new players like Snowflake and Palantir. In the enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth" Yet the citizen on the street is actually cynical of much of the data because definitions are inconsistent and the media has been cherry picking data to suit its narrative. It's the Mark Twain's quote updated for today - Lies, Big Lies and Big Data. We talk about how to build trust in data.
We discuss developer communities - Salesforce Trailblazers, SAP breathing new life into ABAP, Apple, Microsoft and Google expanding their developer communities and what that means in the meta context of building v. buying enterprise applications.
Finally, we have some fun. You can see his playful side and how he convinced a Starbucks barista to brand my cup as "Sugar Daddy". I was the only one on the Southwest plane who did not realize it, even though they were laughing at me. He finally showed me a photo of my cup. No more freebies for him:)
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