deal architect

Retire at 75. Start planning to retire from age 35.

I recently interviewed Chip Conley, author of “Learning to love Midlife”. He defines midlife as ages “35 to 75”. Watch the episode – he explains his own experience as a “modern elder” around much younger Airbnb founders and execs. Overall he has a very positive view on life and the interaction between various generations in the workplace.

HR executives are starting to realize they need to “Redefine retirement” as I wrote here. Margaret and I been interviewing what I call multi-dimensional financial advisers who broadly help you with investment, multi-year tax, estate, insurance and other planning as you age. Ideally these are advisers who can handle multi-year tax scenarios, not just file annual returns. They call themselves “retirement advisers” and many of them are fiduciaries.

I think you should start that evaluation process at 35 and rinse and repeat the process through Chip’s broad definition of mid-life.  

Our evaluation of potential advisers been a humbling process (we are about 75% done). It’s like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube. There are more than 43 quintillion possible combinations for that cube.

In some ways Retirement planning is even more complex like solving an ever-changing, multi-dimensional hypercube. Markets swing wildly as does your portfolio. Politicians keep changing social security and private retirement rules. Wall Street keeps taking an ever bigger bite out of your investments. Insurance companies get you one way or another.

No wonder you get wildly divergent recommendations:

• Some will tell you to apply for social security at 62. Get as much as you can before (if) the fund runs out or you pass away early. Others tell you each year you delay your benefit increases by 5% to 8% but it maxes out at the age of 70. So start then, but they don’t always factor that increases your income tax exposure by pushing you into a higher tax bracket since the IRS requires you to take Requirement Minimum Distributions starting at age 73. Uncle Sam wants the deferred taxes along with their accrued gains.
• Most will tell you to convert your tax-deferred funds to Roth IRAs and take the tax bite now before marginal tax rates go up in 2026. They did not know of the work around we applied. We refinanced the house on a 10 year mortgage and took out immediate tax-free cash and are paying the mortgage from annual withdrawals and paying taxes on those tax deferred amounts.
• No surprise, one of the advisers told us to pay off the mortgage. I asked him why? It is at a ridiculously attractive rate of 2.4%. He said their numbers say otherwise. “When you become a client, we will show you the calcs.” 😊
• Our investments are currently fragmented across several managers. I did not realize how fragmented till an adviser ran our portfolio through their algorithms and pointed out we own Alphabet stock in 17 funds, Apple in 11 and so on. I thought we were diversified but fund managers move in tandem with their colleagues and negate the diversification.
• Couple of advisers told us stocks rarely fall in a Presidential election year. Couple on the other hand showed us we had too much exposure to equities. That was timely, we sold a bunch before the recent decline.  
• Most advisers pointed out all the hidden fees and conflict of interests at most funds. As one adviser said, try and avoid anything that “comes with a prospectus”.
• The other problem with institutions which hold most of our retirement funds is their limitations on diversification across asset classes. Try to find many which will allow you to invest in real estate, gold, Bitcoin etc. Unless it is with one of their own or partner funds which come with the dreaded “prospectus”
• Most of the advisers told us to sell our life insurance policies. They were so right. We asked the insurance company for a rate card till age 99. Such a deal! Wish we had cut them off a decade ago. There is an arbitrage market for selling your coverage, but apparently those buyers like policies of terminally ill insured so they only have to pay premiums for a couple of years and collect the coverage. Apparently, we are too healthy to qualify! We plan to let our policies lapse.
• I mentioned insurance companies don’t lose. Save on the life insurance policies, but pay for umbrella insurance. We asked our auto insurance company – after asking us 10 questions they still would not disclose the max umbrella coverage they offer. They wanted to know about our daughter’s car even though the umbrella policy did not apply. We went with another provider.
• One of the main reasons I keep working is we want to leave behind a chunk for the kids. Our estate planning is not complex, multi-generational. Even there we have got conflicting advice. We have heard about “Ladybird”, "pour-over" and other deeds.

I could go on. Like I said it was a humbling but timely exercise. Now multiply that over the rest of the US.

The numbers at stake across all of us ginormous. You hear in the media all the time that inequality keeps getting worse. It is if you compare King Charles or Elon Musk to the average Joe. What they don’t tell you is some research I have done for an unfinished book. The retirement assets of Americans (most in the middle class) – IRAs, 401ks, etc. were valued at $38 trillion at the end of 2023. There is even more in pension funds and other retirement vehicles.

Our real estate is worth $47.5 trillion. That does not include jewelry, heirlooms and other personal assets

In 2022, 92% of US households had at least 1 car.  22% had 3. Most of our real estate and vehicles are financed, but the net value of the assets are still significant

We are talking real money! No wonder politicians and Wall Street salivate at our pool of money.

There is a third group which also cannot wait to get its hand on these funds. They are export addicted countries like China, India, Germany and others. For decades they have run trade surpluses with the US and we have been chumps to dent our middle class that way. Unfortunately we have too many academics, economists and policy makers who cling to the notion of “free trade”. Hello it’s free trade when it is bi-directional,  not when we keep running trade deficits year after year.  We have a strong middle class – use access to that demographic as a bargaining tool.

Wish we had started the process at 35 and gone through a detailed review every few years.  

We all have unique portfolios and goals. Too many people just park their savings. You should be actively managing it. Start early in life, be willing to move fiduciaries. Keep them honest. And work with them to keep the politicians and Wall Street (to include banks and insurance) companies and our trade policy makers honest.

Burning Platform: Reframing the Concept of Aging

For the 118th episode of Burning Platform, we host Chip Conley,  author of “Learning to love Midlife” and a founder of MEA (Modern Elder Academy). He defines midlife broadly as “from 35 to 75”. The common word association for midlife is “crisis” and he says that is a shame because life actually gets better with age.  

He was an owner/operator of a chain of boutique hotels. After selling them he joined the much younger founders and execs at Airbnb in the formative stages of its explosive growth. They called him a ‘modern elder” – “as curious as he is wise”.

Building on those experiences, he started MEA – Modern Elder Academy which is dedicated to “reframing the concept of aging” and helps professionals get ‘unstuck” in their careers.  “We have been around now for over six years, we've had 5000 People from 48 countries come to our Baja campus to go through our week long programs, and we now have a new campus in Santa Fe”

He walks through 12 nuggets from his book including the one below

“If you're a 63 year old man like me, and you hear that the average man in the United States dies at age 74, you might think I have 11 years left. But the truth is the average age of 74 includes everybody who might have died at age 10, 20, 30 or 50. So if you've gotten to 63, number one, you're in good shape, you will live longer than 74 as a man. Number two, depending on your socio economic background, the more educated you are, the more prosperous you are, the healthier you are, the longer you will live.”

It is a very optimistic perspective on the core of our workforce which falls into his definition of midlife “from 35 to 75”

We then talk about the bookends of the range. The aging or recently retired worker and how they are a relatively untapped talent resource. Next, we discuss the other end and the perception that they are entitled, disloyal workers

Lots of great thoughts about all 5 generations of employees in today’s workplace. HR folks in particular will benefit from what his thoughts on “reframing the concept of aging”

Workday: “Unleash the Beast”

The Workday Innovation Summit last week ended with a very nice sit-down dinner. I was intrigued by the Synchronicity Strings Trio playing the violin, viola and cello. Trio?  I checked their site, and they offer quartets, duos and solos as well to fit in with the size of the venue and the subtlety you want for the music to not drown out table conversation. I thought it was a fitting recap to a couple of days where it was all about exploring new verticals, new AI use cases, new channels and new geographies – a new sense of flexibility to react to a rapidly changing world. As Doug Robinson, Co-President, (and superb MC for the Summit) put it in a side conversation with me, Workday has been “opening our aperture”. He was too polite to say it, but the goal of the Summit was also to widen the horizons of the analysts in the audience.

Matt Brandt, SVP Global Partners expressed the broader focus in his own poignant way. His military training has disciplined him to present 3 and only 3 bullets on any topic. But he broke with tradition and presented 4 pillars for his vision of the next-gen ecosystem– Connect, Compose, Built on Workday and Embed. I am interviewing him for a Burning Platform episode this week and you will hear more about these definitions.

However, the most change was evident from the commentary by Carl Eschenbach, the new CEO (Aneel Bhusri has moved to the Executive Chairman role). While being respectful of the culture and momentum he has inherited, he talked about how in his 16 months, they have brought in a new CMO, CFO and CIO. They also have new go to market leaders in Europe and APJ and new execs around services, revenue and sales operations. They have also promoted plenty from within including the new Chief Product Officer, Dave Somers. Many CEOs use their first year to do a “world tour” and learn the organization. It is impressive to see how Carl, helped by his years on the Workday board, has hit the ground running.

I was especially impressed by how many young execs led sessions including Athena Karp, CEO of HiredScore, recently acquired by Workday, Shane Luke who presented on their version of LLMs and other AI technology and by Ryan Basilio on outbound integration via its Extend Platform. Not just young, all incredibly smart and articulate.

I heard about countries and verticals I have not heard about in previous Summits – Japan, Federal Government, CPQ and Subscription billing for the services sector and more.

Aneel Bhusri made a cameo appearance and in a q&a contrasted “We had this advantage with the emergence of cloud (computing) and we could wipe the slate clean in terms of starting a company. I think it is different with AI. I think the incumbents, whether its Google or Microsoft or Amazon or Workday, or Salesforce, we have that huge data advantage”

He is absolutely right, even machines at large vendors like SAP and Oracle cannot be trained by the majority of their customer data since it is locked up in their on-prem applications in data centers they cannot access. However, most of the data of the cloud vendors applies to the SG&A portion of a customer’s P&L – accounting, hcm, procurement, call center data. There is a much bigger and higher payback opportunity with COGS and Revenue line items but that operational and customer data is unique to industries and countries. The best way to access that data is to build  transaction processing capabilities which generate that data.

Which is why I hope Workday continues to recruit unique domain expertise and build applications which reflect vertical depth and unique localizations for countries. There was talk during the Summit about becoming a “Platform company”. A platform is essential for customer and partner extensions but Workday’s key differentiators are that it is respected as an application vendor (you won’t believe how many customers over the years have told me they wished Workday would extend applications to their industry or country). And one which is culturally fun and easy to work with. It would be a shame to lose those unique advantages.

Fortuitously, the application competition is currently weak or distracted by the AI noise and not building modern transaction capability. SAP has formidable vertical and global strengths but the majority of their management focus in on preserving their ERP franchise - moving the ECC customer base to S/4HANA. Oracle is fixated on moving up the hyperscaler ladder away from its distant positioning behind AWS, Azure, Alibaba and Google. Besides, it spent tens of billions on Retek, Primavera and many other vertical plays earlier in the century and more recently with Cerner but those reflect business processes from a different generation of corporations. It had an opportunity to localize NetSuite for so many emerging countries and has not done so. Infor verticals still position Baan, Lawson and Intentia functionality it acquired  – again decades-old processes. Salesforce has plenty of application assets but they compete for management attention needed to yield better from the nearly $50 billion it spent on tools like Slack, Tableau and Mulesoft. Lots of vendors talk about being focused on the services economy but when you ask them about the exciting trend of “servitization” – post-sales monitoring, maintenance and outcome based subscription contracts in aviation, mining, shipping and many other asset intensive sectors – they will beg off “ we are not into manufacturing”. Manufacturing? They would have to invest in digital twins, IoT, field service, more sophisticated CPQ and other functionality but that would additionally make them more competitive in their incumbent markets.

Workday has a massive opportunity to bring contemporary functionality and architecture to so many markets. A couple of times, Carl hedged and said their biggest challenge is prioritization. He is right, of course, but many of these markets are attracting new players like Zoho which could end up with a huge headstart. The risk is Workday will continue with its core finance and HCM focus in primarily English-speaking counties and try and merely “spray paint” vertical and country localizations.

Which brings me to us analysts also widening our horizons. We have to accept part of the blame that after 25 years of cloud applications, 75% of the country/industry grid is blank when it comes to cloud application choice (and as a result we have shockingly limited AI trainable data in the enterprise compared to the consumer web). Paul Greenberg recently interviewed me about how analysts should also be evolving with changing markets. Watch our conversation here. Unfortunately, we are still imprisoned in market categories like ERP and CRM we helped define at Gartner in the 90s and ossified tools like Magic Quadrants and Waves. We should be leading vendors and customers into edge applications, high-growth economies and high-impact AI use cases.

Rapidly and dramatically.

Talking of analysts, he is not considered one, but I want to call out “Silent James” who calls himself a “visual notetaker”. He created 8 session illustrations during the Summit. It is fascinating how he listens, synthesizes, then colorfully and real-time summarizes key themes from each session – “your ideas become productive art”.  As Paul and I had discussed, modern analysts create plenty of video and social media content, we advise, we write blogs and books. We are a far cry from how my content was delivered as a Gartner analyst. Yet, few of us have James’ unique skills. We need to keep evolving, not just in the markets we define but also in how we present our perspectives to the market.   

Net-net – the time is opportune for Workday to spread its wings. It has an enviable choice of new markets to develop. It is truly an exciting time for Carl and the Workday family.

Time to “unleash the beast”

Burning Platform: Workday Verticals – The Evolution of Service Based Organizations

For the 117th episode of Burning Platform, we host Patrice Cappello, Managing Director of the Professional and Business Services vertical at Workday.

She has been focused on deploying technology to drive business outcomes in this sector for 25 years. She is a true student of the industry, having seen it evolve over time.

We start with a discussion on our wide service-based economy and Workday’s target markets in that sector. This includes organizations where people are driving the revenue: management & IT consulting, accounting, marketing services, business process outsourcing, and staffing firms among others.

We discuss the Workday feature set for this vertical. The professional services automation (PSA) category is well-trodden and covers project management and accounting, resource management, time sheet analysis among other functionality. Their services-focused configure price quote (CPQ) capabilities increasingly differentiate Workday from other PSA vendors.

She talks about how her customers are using Workday Extend to solve for unique business challenges. One company enhanced their “proposal engines” by facilitating inclusion of CVs of proposed staffing. It is common in the sector to shuffle proposed staff rather than keep them on the bench and that often takes plenty of manual effort to revise proposals.

She covers the launch of their Professional and Business Services Innovation Awards (last year the awards were announced at their Rising user conference), and discusses one of the winners, CrossVue, which created individual dashboards for billable workers.   

We discuss, of course, AI and how Workday is developing use cases specific to her vertical, especially those related to resource management. As she says they are bringing “all the dimensions of data that they have to factor in to put together a perfect team for delivery for a customer.”

Very nicely done in 25 minutes by a seasoned veteran of the sector.

Analyst Cam: CDF Corp – A well-managed IFS upgrade path

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

One of our major research focus areas is Applications Modernization and Migrations. As I wrote here “After 25 years of cloud applications, it is shocking how many customers are stuck with client/server and even mainframe applications. We look at why this is so, and the massive opportunity to automate and streamline migrations.”

I have been especially focused on a series of tools which can help automate various steps – code conversion, data conversion etc. – that are common in SAP migrations from the on-prem ECC to the more modern S/4HANA product.

To get a 360 degree view on the topic I am inviting customers and partners across various vendors to describe their upgrade and migration experiences

I was pleased to host Alex Ivkocik,  CIO at CDF Corp to discuss his recent experience moving to the IFS Cloud 23R1 version.

He sets the stage describing CDF’s industrial and consumer goods packaging products and his surround third-party applications around the core IFS functionality. He then describes IFS’s legacy versions and planned future path including a promise to keep the application “evergreen” with more frequent, smaller updates instead of typically more traumatic major releases.

I particularly enjoyed his broader commentary on his upgrade philosophy and approach – how he negotiated with his management and broader organization a 3 year upgrade cycle, how he minimizes functional scope changes during such upgrades (he does praise the fact that IFS is expanding the core to incorporate country localizations, AI, IoT etc) and why he likes the “one throat to choke” project management approach around upgrades. He discusses several other upgrade “best practices” he has developed through his career.

We also spend some time on the hype around “moving to the cloud” and how he nets it out to “show me the money”.

A goldmine of upgrade guidance in around 25 minutes. As a bonus, he also spends time around assyst and Poka, two products IFS has acquired and is in the process of integrating.

Two decades of Deal Architect

‘Tis the season for all kinds of corporate and personal, federal and state, annual and quarterly tax returns, and in the midst of all the paperwork I came across the seal on the left and realized Deal Architect is no longer a teenager😊

It gave me a chance to reflect on an amazing 20 years as an analyst, adviser and author. The industry has been very kind to us, and in turn as my accountant never fails to remind me, we have been fairly generous back to plenty of folks. I have had a front row seat to momentous events which have shaped our industry – most of them positively. As I told Paul Greenberg recently on his video channel, he and I are the new generation analyst constantly experimenting with new ways to comment on the industry.

As part of the anniversary, I will be reminiscing about 9 things (in no particular order) I am especially proud of and represent our wide body of work

New Florence. New Renaissance. innovation blog.

This has been a poor cousin to my Deal Architect blog, which lots more people follow. But as an early blogger on enterprise technology, I saw nobody had established any rules and that I could write about everything which made me go “aha’ around how we work, live and play. Someone once complimented me “you can make even a brown paper bag sound interesting”. That made me look up how the humble item has evolved since Margaret Knight won a patent for her bag machine in 1871. Nearly 7,000 posts have covered cleantech, nanotech, space and innovation from Estonia. Kenya and countless places you don’t often associate with innovation. It has also allowed me to run a guest column where over 200 colleagues have written about their hobbies and passions. Importantly, it has made me intensely curious about anyone, anything or anywhere doing something unique.

Enterprise Buyer Guidance

Short-burst, high-impact projects – that I don’t talk much about publicly to protect client details. They have evolved every few years – from due diligence projects and visits of offshore campuses of Indian, E. European and other vendors to early SaaS evaluations and negotiations to automation strategies. Most of our assistance helps raise innovation expectations and reduces risk in projects

Analyst Cam and Burning platform videos

We have recorded and shared on our YouTube channel over 500 video episodes since the COVID lockdowns began in early 2020. Most have been in the Analyst Cam series which allow vendors to present on their verticals, geographies, new product releases in 20-25 minutes and Burning Platform which allows for strategy conversations with tech executives, banter with fellow analysts, new book conversations with authors in a slightly longer format.

9 Books and counting

2 books with the large NYC publisher, John Wiley, 4 under the Deal Architect imprint and 3 developed and marketed for C level tech executives have allowed us to cover a wide range of topics and establish a signature case study-heavy style. Across the 9 books, we have showcased over 200 case studies. As I like to say “if a book has more than 10% of my voice, I have failed”. It is a chance to get to know and showcase incredibly innovative people, products and places - and give them a megaphone.

West Coast on the East Coast and other Instagram galleries

This is another offshoot of COVID. During the (light) lockdowns in Florida, Margaret and I started to do plenty of day trips up and down the West Coast of Florida. Each location was captured in a 10 photo Instagram gallery. As travel has opened up, the galleries have captured photos from international trips, vendor events, book launches. Over 360 galleries of 10 images each.  Lots of memories and exposure to much more innovation

Deal Architect blog

Over 6,000 posts, this blog has mapped major trends in information technology. It is my analyst voice – hard hitting at times, entertaining at others. Every year our research agenda evolves. Here is this year’s.  I have shared my front row perspectives on how offshoring, then cloud computing, then automation broadly took off and matured and am now cataloging the Gen AI excitement.  The blog has highlighted the ascent of China and India and many other rapidly growing economies. Increasingly it has allowed me to embed the videos above with some commentary. You will be amazed how many people continue to consume short form written content.

Blog sponsors

Our blogs have vendor sponsors. For that they get a menu of services – regular market updates, coverage of their events, presentations at Sales Kick offs and other internal events, and more. As I tell them – our door is always open for conversation, so long as the topic is not unethical or illegal😊 One of my proudest deliverables from this has been to help shape the vendor Analyst Summit format. Workday set the tone for the industry in 2010. Since then, vendors like Zoho have raised the bar for such gatherings to a whole new level. To be clear, our role in shaping the formats has been tiny compared to that of creative vendor AR folks like Angela Barbato at Workday and Sandy Lo at Zoho.

Global network

I already had a large network from my global assignments at PwC, from over thousands of client calls and meetings at Gartner and VC world from my startup, IQ4hire. Through our regular posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Amazon Author page, Enterprise Irregulars and other channels our social networks have exploded. I will be honest I try to limit time on social networks to an hour a day. I would rather make time for an in-person cup of sweet iced tea anytime.  

New Frontiers   

Over the last few months I have started a few new projects I hope to announce later this year. My Jiminy Cricket is always haranguing me to narrow focus to high margin projects. I don’t think he has ever read my book, The New Polymath. I do listen to him every so often and especially to my wife who is always reminding me to be grateful.

So, let me end with a note of gratitude to

• So many clients, so many followers
• So many executives, analysts, authors and friends I can turn to for advice
• The helicopter crew which flew me down to safer altitude when I had a stroke while presenting in Vail, CO in 2010 and to the many doctors and my FitBit who have helped me recover and keep me going
• Southwest, Marriott, Apple, T-Mobile, Zoom and others who have made staying connected so much easier
• So many who keep inspiring me. As I like to say “This is the best time to be alive”
• And especially my family – for putting up with my relentless travel and for my constant laptop or tablet companion even when we are on vacation

Here’s to the next chapter of Deal Architect!

Analyst Cam: Integrity Resource Management – “Phase 0” in an SAP ECC to S/4HANA Migration

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

One of our major research focus areas is Applications Modernization and Migrations. As I wrote here “After 25 years of cloud applications, it is shocking how many customers are stuck with client/server and even mainframe applications. We look at why this is so, and the massive opportunity to automate and streamline migrations."

I have been cataloging a series of tools which can help automate various steps – code conversion, data conversion etc – that are common in any SAP migration from the on-prem ECC to the more modern S/4HANA product.

I was introduced to Sana Asher who represents Integrity Resource Management. She walked me through a 12-week advisory project she calls “Phase 0” which helps answer a number of licensing, level of effort, payback questions that most SAP ECC customers struggle with about a migration to S/4HANA even as they face a 2027 SAP de-support possibility.

She says it works best for a relatively straightforward ECC implementation for a company with revenues between $500 million and $3 billion. Of course, there are few “straightforward” ERP implementations, but I like the fact that they are not being overly ambitious and have lined up a series of partners and tools to better define the licensing issues and the likely level of migration effort.

Listen to her crisp presentation made in under 20 minutes.   

"Being an Analyst (and Vendor AR) in a Chaotic Time"

Paul Greenberg invited me to one of his video channels to “analyze the industry analyst market” especially in a time of so much change.

Watch the whole conversation below. We cover a lot of ground:

• The history and evolution of industry analysts
• Where analysts have done well
• Where analysts are not leading the market: I share examples around 3 areas – vertical edge applications that have become viable in the last few years, localization in a dramatically changing global landscape, high payback Gen AI use cases
• How IT analysts compare to geopolitical advisers and energy and other vertical analysts who are handling even more volatile landscapes
• How vendor AR needs to itself evolve – get a balance between influence and intelligence they should expect from analysts
• Why vendor AR needs to evolve beyond 30 year old market categories and the “institutional” analysts  

As Paul mentions we could have gone much longer. If we had, I would have worked in a few more comments

• I talk about the massive impact Gartner had in the 90s, and I should have also mentioned how influential they were in highlighting the Y2K challenge, including doing briefings for the US Congress.
• People say Gartner is $6 bn in revenue - 7X as large as when I was there in the late 90s, ergo it is even more of the 800 lb gorilla in the sector. Not really. It has consolidated the market – made 25+ acquisitions since. As we have seen with vendors like IBM and Oracle, past acquisitions are not a good indicator of contemporary relevance unless you invest heavily in changing markets and new products
• I should have mentioned a fourth dimension where analysts need to step up - accelerating customer migration to new architectures and covering automation in such migrations. It is shocking after 25 years of cloud computing how many customers are stuck with on-prem and custom developed applications.
• I highlighted some of the strategy firms in the 80s like Nolan Norton and Index and the Big 8 accounting firms which were influential in technology decisions. I should have pointed out today’s influencers include strategy firms like McKinsey, Bain and BCG, VC firms which are funding new market categories and many more new players
• In the section about globalization, he mentions how NetSuite was a leader in localizing for several countries. That momentum has slowed down just when it needs to accelerate. Localization covers the UX to include scripts (right to left, double byte characters), tax, sustainability and other compliance, local support and partners etc. SAP towers over other application vendors with its slate of countries supported, regional user groups and on many other metrics.
• Paul asked me somewhat rhetorically how analysts can change and lead. I say that was rhetorical because no one told him, me and others to start writing blogs or books, generate tons of video and social media content over the last two decades. But we did, and we should not need reminders to lean into new areas given the massive changes and turmoil we live in. No industry or geography is unchanged. There are plenty of market signals that analysts and vendor AR need to evolve – rapidly and dramatically.

Analyst Cam: smartShift: All about SAP custom code

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

One of our major research focus areas is Applications Modernization and Migrations. As I wrote here “After 25 years of cloud applications, it is shocking how many customers are stuck with client/server and even mainframe applications. We look at why this is so, and the massive opportunity to automate and streamline migrations.”

Derek Oats, CEO of smartShift, presents below on the challenge of the massive amount of custom code in the SAP ECC world and how they help customers analyze the code and automate conversion to S/4HANA.

“Our claim to fame is we really are the only Intelligent Automation Engine for SAP custom code. So we take the ECC custom code, feed it through our engine, and it spits out high quality working code for the S/4 environment. Plain and simple.”

They have 14 patents to their name. That did not happen overnight. They have been in business for two decades. And have delivered over 3 billion lines of remediated code “going all the way back to Unicode conversions way back in the day.”

I particularly liked the other use cases they help with, Code analysis is critical to decide what custom code can be safely retired (he says they often see 40 to 45% decommissioning) and which can be parameterized (manually) in ECC. It also gets customers closer to the goal of “clean core” that SAP has been emphasizing,

Next is dual maintenance – they work with several large, multi-national companies and their projects have roadmaps where they continue to long depend on the old, while migrating to the new. As he says “the freeze period” where users cannot access needed functionality is lethal to companies, so it is critical to facilitate, as they do, daily, weekly or other regular retrofits between the two worlds.

We discuss their business model and partnerships with other tool vendors like SNP and Tricentis which are automating data conversion, testing and other phases of a migration.

We also discuss how SIs are adjusting to this world of much more automation. It challenges their traditional business model of hand to hand combat. As he says “we're able to help the partner potentially re-allocate some of those manual resources to higher margin for them and higher innovation deliverables for the customer. Also the partners are starting to see us directly involved in the circle of advisory with the customers.”  

It's impressive to see the scale and level of accuracy at which they can deliver at least one critical part of a migration to S/4HANA. As we discuss after thousands of these projects, and now with LLMs, RPA and other tools, there is finally optimism we can automate and similarly de-risk many more phases of the migration.

BTW SAP is leading the enterprise world in such complex migrations, and the automation companies like smartShift can deliver are also urgently needed around other vendors

High-octane half an hour conversation!