deal architect

Burning Platform: A 360 degree perspective on the Truly Zoho event

Earlier in the week, Sandy Lo and Pooja Mittal of Zoho discussed the elaborate planning and intricate logistics of the week long Truly Zoho event in Chennai and Tenkasi in South India. 

In this, the 84th episode of Burning Platform, we host David Fauser, a Zoho customer at Cimco Refrigeration in Canada and Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Valoir. Both were part of the entire week and provide a very entertaining recap.

In a world which become virtual during COVID, we review the additional payback accrued from making the physical trip (over 15,000 miles round trip) and the investment in time. We discuss the huge investment Zoho makes in its people – schools, hospitals, cafeterias and whether that mindset can be adopted in the West. We discuss how other vendors will be benchmarked based on our visit – most Zoho customers have ERP and other applications from other vendors. The trip was made with the backdrop of a series of layoffs in Silicon Valley. It was striking to see the loyalty of Zoho employees and the wide berth their executives give their staff – each was extremely articulate and unfettered in every discussion.  

David and Rebecca came back with very different perspectives given their customer and analyst personas, but both are extremely positive about the week. Lots of entertaining anecdotes from from the trip. Well worth your spending about 25 minutes with them below.

Analyst Cam: SAP Industries – Partner Ecosystem

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

This time it is Frank Ruland, Global Head of Industry Ecosystem at SAP. As we know, SAP has a massive ecosystem with 23,000+ partners employing over a million people around the world. While many of them implement and support SAP’s ERP, CRM and other products, a growing number are helping SAP innovate industry specific applications. Besides traditional SIs and outsourcers, he discusses ISVs, strategy firms, SAP.iO Foundry startups, Industry 4.0 robotics providers and provides examples of several emerging vertical applications the ecosystem helps innovate and support.

I had a chance to profile this wide variety of industry partners in the book by SAP executives, Business as Unusual.  You can see 6 of the partner interview cameos in this post.

Industries are increasingly morphing and encroaching on each other. Frank provides an example of what today’s EV charging applications require – utility asset management capabilities. the investment planning capabilities of a utility, public sector features when it comes to infrastructure permits and licenses to operate, subscription billing and managing roaming charges among other capabilities. So, partners need to be broad enough to support this new breed of applications.  

A striking figure in his presentation is 80% of new customers come from partner introductions – obviously many of those are small to mid-sized enterprises but it brings home that today’s partners don’t just implement, they also help SAP innovate and sell.

Not your Dad’s ecosystem. Very nicely done in under 25 minutes  

Burning Platform: Raising the Bar for Analyst Summits with Truly Zoho

In the 83nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sandy Lo and Pooja Mittal in the marketing team of Zoho and they talk about the elaborate planning and logistics it took to host the Truly Zoho analyst event in Chennai and Tenkasi in India.

You have likely read perspectives from several analysts including Brian Sommer, Jeremy Cox, Ankita Singh, Thomas Wieberneit and seen videos from Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary and others. It is not an overstatement to say it was one of the most talked about events in the industry, especially considering only 15 analysts participated.

However, the positive outcomes and experiences took months of planning, which as they say had backups to backup plans and extremely complicated logistics many of which changed on an hourly basis

Here they are summarizing many of the gory details in about half and hour and sharing some of the photos and social media from the event.

Raising the bar for analyst summits does not give it enough credit – they blew the roof off!!

 

 

Will Workday lead us out of the Enterprise “AI Winter”?

I smiled when Sayan Chakraborty, Co-President mentioned “AI Winter” in his presentation at the Workday AI and ML Innovation Summit last week. I smiled for two reasons:

He expressed eloquently in two words what took me much longer to describe in my 2016 book, 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 AiphaGo 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.”

Also, a few days prior, Margaret and I had returned to the US via New York JFK. I have done so countless times especially in the 80s when I did multiple overseas assignments for PwC. Each entry required long lines, paperwork and interaction with human bureaucrats. Even my signing up for Global Entry a decade ago had not changed things much. Broken kiosks, clumsy fingerprint scans – the UX was not pleasant. This time, Margaret went to a manned line (she does not have Global Entry), while I walked into a completely empty room with my choice of twenty kiosks. While I fumbled for my passport, the associate guided me “Just take off your glasses”. A bit cynically I did and facial recognition took over and a few seconds later I was through. Wow!

It took Margaret another 20 minutes to go through her more analog process and while I waited for her, I reminisced about the hundred times (not kidding) our passports had been touched during our trip to India. With a ten-year visa which the Indian government would not transfer from expired US passports, we were each required to travel with two passports. Several times at each airport, at every hotel, every currency conversion, even entry to monuments like the Taj Mahal our 4 passports were eyeballed by a human and a scanner and likely printed and filed. Think of all the wasted time and paper, not to mention the constant worry of losing our passports.  This when the Indian government already has digital records of our passports and visas. Talk about a stark contrast to my JFK experience – the term “AI winter” definitely struck a chord.

But I am an enterprise technology analyst. Most AI innovation we have seen in the last decade has come from the consumer world – speech to text, machine vision, etc. I have been excited about enterprise AI countless times and it always appears to deliver less than promised. Like when I interviewed Zach Nelson, then CEO of NetSuite in 2009 for my book, The New Polymath.

He had told me:

“We have some of the best leading indicators on the economy. We can aggregate order value, cash flow, and several other metrics instantly in our base of over 6,000 customers and watch trends.”

And I had written:

“Soon, those customers will be able to benchmark themselves against aggregated data of their peers. That would obviate the need for mailed–in surveys. That capability has been the domain of benchmarking firms like Hackett, not of the software industry, so that is another innovation NetSuite is working to deliver. Nelson explains: “Take those benchmarks and some of the creative BPO [business process outsourcing] partnerships we are exploring (such as one announced in April 2010 with Genpact, the spinoff from GE described in Chapter 3), and the industry could see SLAs [service - level agreements] that don’t just monitor technical metrics like systems availability but business process metrics that have been elusive to codify.”

The reality nearly 15 years later, is that much of enterprise data is still locked up in on-premise systems and private clouds/proprietary data centers that few vendors are allowed to access. Corporations love to see benchmark data from their peers – but have been (overly) cautious in sharing their own data. Bureaucrats around the world have complicated data gathering with their privacy and data residence regulations. The amount of enterprise data available to train computers is minuscule compared to the billions of images, voicemail messages and other data that Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others were able to collect without the data gathering restrictions they have used to train their machines.

Workday Co-Founder, Co-CEO, and Chair Aneel Bhusri had got me excited about enterprise vs. consumer AI when at an investor conference the week prior, he commented:

“With ChatGPT, you can ask good questions but you get some wacky answers at times, because the Internet is the Wild West... But our data is absolutely constrained, normalized, it's clean. And as a result, we can produce pretty powerful results.”

The point about caution about the consumer web as a data source for ML data was reinforced several times during the Workday event. Adobe’s event this week also focused on protection against the coming misuse of Generative AI and had coincided with deep-fake photos of President Trump being arrested.  

Sayan had also elaborated in a blog post:

“Workday was an early adopter of large language models (LLMs), the technology that has enabled Generative AI, and we use them in production today. We have started adopting Generative AI at Workday to solve a host of additional customer challenges. A canonical case for LLMs is content creation, and we can see how drafting performance reviews, job descriptions, and a host of other documents will be transformed by this approach. We’re going to continue to identify key use cases where Generative AI can add value to our customers and develop unique models that leverage both Workday data and external data sets.”    

Thankfully, the AI/ML Innovation Summit was not just about ChatGPT. Workday provided several optimistic cues about the broader evolution of Enterprise AI and their own role in shaping the journey.

Here are some:

Large enterprise databases to train machines and related customer permissions

Workday today services 60 million users. Skills Cloud was launched 5 years ago. Half of Workday’s HR customers have participated and shared their continually evolving employee skills with their peers. At its scale it would be impossible to maintain without machine support. And it gives Workday a template to build similar clouds around other enterprise data attributes.

Now, you may say, 60 million users is not that large. These users generate plenty of data - over 400 billion transactions a year. Very few enterprise vendors can show that scale – at least in their clouds.

Side note - CMO and Executive Vice President, Corporate Growth Pete Schlampp’s comments on Workday’s Rock Star commercial during this year’s Super Bowl brought home another significant impact of these 60 million users. Enterprise tech companies have had a patchy record advertising on that widely watched show, but, Workday’s brand is much stronger and their logo is more recognized in the consumer world because of this user base. Aneel’s comments about conversations with CEOs and politicians suggest we may also see Workday active on policy matters.

Analytics and ML

Since Workday acquired Platfora in 2016 and branded it as Prism, it has become a vital tool for its users to analyze cross-functional data especially that from vertical feeder applications. As a result, we heard plenty from Workday and from several customers on panels that Workday’s datasets are growing beyond its traditional Finance and HR focus. But the vertical perspectives are still skin-deep. From a process design perspective you want to ensure quality and accuracy at the source. Anomalies and variances should be presented to operational users like clinical professionals, not wait for a Financial or HR user to notice them.  A big reason, I believe, why Workday will grow a solid core of vertical processes (in what it defines as service industries) and its base of operational users, employees and partners. I am a broken record when it comes to verticals but think their expanded ML focus will accelerate the demand for industry specific operational data. However, Workday is not likely to acquire a legacy vertical application. As Aneel said during the event “We are always looking for next generation players - cloud native using AI and ML for industry applications. We would never take something that is outdated technology because the first thing we have to do is throw it all away and rewrite it from scratch.”

Planning and ML

Since Workday acquired Adaptive Insights in 2018 it has become a planning powerhouse. The pandemic and the chaotic maneuvering at most enterprises the last few years have led to more continuous planning, and increased the need for more machine-driven planning. I also heard at the summit about an expanded range of planning in areas such as demand forecasting. All the more reason to mine external weather and vertical data. I wrote a case study in 2019 about Costco and demand forecasting at its Food Courts. Besides factoring weather and nearby events, their algorithms were also starting to factor gas prices and related impact on pump traffic. If a customer comes for gas, he/she is likely to also be a prospect for prepared food.

No scary job loss forecasts

Many vendors will use an event focused on AI and ML to talk about doom and gloom around job losses. Frankly, that complicates enterprise adoption even more. Sayan took a contrarian step. He presented a slide which shows that at least in developing nations, we face shrinking workforces. Machines will be needed to make up this shortfall.

In Silicon Collar, I had highlighted how even the smart folks at Oxford U. and Gartner had fallen prey to wild doomsday models of job losses from automation. I had presented several examples of slow adoption of automation technologies over the last century – UPC scanners, ATM machines, autonomous cars and others. I had summarized the examples in this Strategy+Business article. Job losses from automation tend to be gradual – and in many scenarios there are job gains. I also made the point that automation helps eliminate what are 3D - dull, dirty and dangerous - tasks. Automation reshapes jobs, not eliminates them.

Enterprise AI will do similar – think of the drudgery I described above that India will be able to reduce as tourism booms over the next decade. Air India just placed a massive order of 500 new planes in anticipation of this boom.

Of course, from the questions during the Summit, today’s smart folks appear to want to focus more on bias in AI, Federated ML and other contemporary topics that will keep Workday engaged from other angles.

Aneel’s comments

Aneel’s prepared and casual comments showed his belief we are at yet another inflection point in the industry. Having upended the client/server market with Workday’s cloud offering, he is acutely aware of architectural disruptions in our industry. The arrival of new Co-CEO Carl Eschenbach has clearly energized him and he wants to get back to more of a product and platform focus. He said he is looking for a condo in Boulder, Colorado to spend more time with Sayan and the ML team.

One of his comments summarized his sentiments “I am not afraid of Oracle or SAP. I am more afraid of a disruptive new enterprise player built on ML and AI.”

Bottom Line

I walked away feeling more optimistic that enterprise tech may finally be poised to exit its “AI winter” – and that Workday will play a key role in this transition.

Time for the tech sector to think about “Business as Unusual”

I have seen it repeatedly, 4 years in a row. In 2020, I saw it in the pandemic stress in many execs I captured in the New Normal video series. In 2021, the Moment of Service book I helped IFS with showed me the massive changes in the industrial world as it servitizes.  In 2022, the book I helped SAP with showed me hundreds of new business applications that have emerged in auto, consumer industries financial services, healthcare and many other sectors. 2023 is still early but the month I have spent in India has exposed me a group of humans who are hustling like crazy to make up for 3 lost years.

And yet, I see too many technology vendors who are not evolving quick enough. The last couple of decades have been generous to most of us. So we hope the current slowdown is a temporary recession. We try to keep selling what we have in the bag. We hire for the same roles which brought us here.

It’s time to reinvent technology vendors. Obviously there are plenty of new addressable markets - but they call for new products, not spray painting old products or hyping up ChatGPT. There are many new networks to explore as we think of ecosystems. Economics to revisit as mature markets are getting commoditized. Analyst relations to be re-examined and organizationally re-positioned.

Let me just spend a minute on the last point. Some of you have heard me talk about using analysts for intelligence v influence. With most AR groups being organizationally part of marketing they mostly want praise from analysts. They spend way too much time striving for the top right in the Magic quadrant of a mature product. They would add much more value if they would help their company explore new markets and help with competitive analysis for that unfamiliar turf.

Cannot say I blame them. Many of them report to execs who clearly love the adulation. You can see the narcissism in these exec's social media postings. It’s delusion - if they looked at their own win-loss analysis they would see they are far from perfect. Very far. 

Personally I would love to see AR groups with a dotted line to marketing and also report to R&D and to corporate strategy.

That’s just one thought around reinventing technology vendors. In the next few months you will hear more from me about other recommendations. Technology is a very wide industry so I will nuance my thoughts for software vendors v outsourcers v hyperscalers.

Let me repeat what I have said a few times recently. Business as usual - circa 2019 - is a recipe for mediocrity. The tech sector is especially vulnerable. Time to shake up every aspect of the business.

Truly Zoho recap

I wrote last Monday that the Truly Zoho event in Chennai promised to raise the bar for analyst summits. I grossly miscalculated. It blew the roof off!!

I posted recaps and lots of photos each night on LinkedIn. The 3 days in Chennai focused on Operations, People and Growth. The visit to Tenkasi focused on CEO Sridhar Vembu’s passion for rural revival. Here are excerpts from the Growth day and Tenkasi

Growth Day

We heard about business in places like Nigeria, Middle East and Brazil we hardly hear other vendors mention

We visited with couple of their startup investments in autonomous, electric utility vehicles (couple of us test drove one) and med tech.

We heard from customers who are using their platform in creative ways.

We heard from senior product executives how they prioritize a massively growing product feature set.

All invited analysts were peppered with questions from a Zoho in-person and from a virtual audience on how they can continue to do better. It is so rare to have vendors ask analysts for input. It’s what I call the difference between using analysts for intelligence v influence

Tenkasi

I have heard Sridhar talk about his passion for rural renewal. We got to experience it first hand.

We flew in an Indigo commuter flight to tiny Tuticorin airport and drove past miles and miles of wind farms. Sridhar gave a few of us a ride in his electric tuktuk. But this was not about rural India turning green. There is about a more urgent, desperate need which drives him

Farming is a critical occupation which unfortunately generates fickle income. In India and elsewhere farming is afflicted by alcoholism and suicides with the despair of a career which is so dependent on weather and government policies. And frankly a lack of respect from so many of us in white collar world.

With his organic farms, his schools, his investment in telco and physical infrastructure, the healthcare and tourism Sridhar has an expansive vision for rural renewal

We saw it in the gratitude of young girls who did traditional dances for the audience and talked about going to Zoho computer science and other schools being set up in Tenkasi. We saw it in the passion of young boys who are already writing code and creating new games and apps. We saw it in the teachers, architects and others who are changing careers and helping Sridhar full time away from the big city. We saw it in the gratitude of random village folk who stopped to thank Sridhar. Many analysts got into the spirit and donned saris and muthus.

Lots of tech companies virtue signal about a number of societal initiatives. Very few put in as much effort as Sridhar is doing.

My wife Margaret was honored to be allowed to join us for the day. One of the more intense experiences from so many we have had over the last couple of weeks Margaret and I have been in India.

So, how was this different?

Vendors have become creative with analyst get-togethers since Workday pioneered the analyst summit in 2010. Plex used to combine them with customer plant visits. Workfront combined one with a customer advisory board.

Zoho brought so many things together: A visit to their growing Chennai campus which will provide workspace, meals, relaxation and easy to access healthcare (critical in a clogged city like Chennai) to 15,000 professionals. A prototype of how future growth will be handled in secondary and tertiary locations like Tenkasi. A glimpse into their computer science, design and others schools. Introduction to some of their startup investments.

What was different? Very few slides. Lots of conversations, walkabouts. live demos, open q&a and unfettered access to execs and customers. Clearly, I don’t expect they will repeat this every year but they have provided a template for other vendors for a periodic “mega event”

I am planning a series of video episodes involving Zoho folks talking about the unbelievably complex planning for the event. one with customer execs who were part of the event, and one with a couple of the analysts.

You will get a 360 degree perspective. Believe me it will not come remotely close to the full immersion experience we have just been through.