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:)
Really invigorating session.
