In the 91st episode of Burning Platform, we host Tim Crawford, founder of the research and advisory firm, AVOA. Tim has served as CIO and in senior IT roles with many organizations and brings that pragmatism to his market research.
The conversation broadly covers 4 areas – macro business and IT trends, the buzz around Generative AI, feedback about SAP Sapphire in Orlando that we both attended and round it off with what Tim calls “modernization of the enterprise”.
Tim covers macro-economic trends and impact on IT budgets and which projects are getting greenlighted. I talk about vertical edge opportunities and emerging global opportunities I am seeing.
On Gen AI, we have a spirited discussion. Tim thinks we have sufficient enterprise data, and actually will do better with targeted data. I say vendor data is often stuck in customer data centers, and that which is in their public clouds, they don’t have enough customer permissions to use to train their machines. We discuss use cases we have seen and “guard-rails” we will need as usage increases. The technology is evolving at warp speed and it will be nice to bring him back in a few weeks to do another gut check.
We then discuss Sapphire. Again, we saw very different things. Not surprisingly there was a lot to unpack with so many product announcements. BTW, I wrote a long note about Sapphire here. https://bit.ly/3Wwlgzb
We finish off with “modernizing the enterprise” and we discuss the role of ERP in that.
It is a longer than the usual episode, but you will find it moves along rapidly and Tim and I bring out a number of varied perspectives on economic and technological fronts.
