deal architect

Analyst Cam: SAP – Enable Now

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 Eva Zauke, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Enterprise Adoption at SAP.

She presented earlier about localizations. Customers need software which reflects unique business practices in multiple countries and also have trust and confidence that they can comply with unique government regulations in each of the countries. This time she presents on another role she plays which is focused on enablement of users and facilitating software adoption in the customer workforce.

Think back to the days we used classroom training to learn about features in enterprise software. Often that required spending weeks at a vendor’s facility.  When you hear Eva talk about SAP’s Enable Now you realize how far we have come when the training is delivered as employees are on-boarded, when it is available as in-application help and it utilizes much more friendly e-learning concepts. And as partners train their own employees through a similar regimen, how much better the knowledge transfer.

She goes through several uses cases and describes deployment at 8 customers across industries and countries.

Very nicely done in about 25 minutes.\

 

Analyst Cam: SAP – Think global, act local

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 Eva Zauke  Executive Vice President, Global Head of Enterprise Adoption at SAP and discusses the massive localization effort as the vendor has 585 local versions (including support for payroll processing in 104 countries) as it supports 200+ million users at 440k customers worldwide.

The pace of legislation their software has to help their customers stay in compliance with keeps growing with COVID, and now sustainability regulations around a growing number of plastic taxes and ESG reporting. In 2022, these were 1300 legal changes across the countries. And this is a growth of 10% year over year.


click on the image to enlarge

 She also says governments are becoming more “creative” and digitalizing compliance a lot more. They are also adjusting to business model changes as companies move to more subscription billings. As governments turn over in most democracies, they invariably bring new legislation and override previous legislation. In turn, customers are constantly evaluating new locations as they try to avoid high-inflation, supply chain bottlenecks and high-tax regimes and jurisdictions with what they consider onerous requirements. So beyond compliance, there is also a planning angle for the CFO. She covers a handful of real world customer scenarios.

She ends with a reminder that SAP was born global 50 years ago. In fact, I have heard, Hasso Plattner, one of the co-founders talk about their work with one of their first customers, ICI, the global chemical company. This video takes you down that memory lane.

Very nicely done in about 25 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Visier – Workforce Analytics

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 Jake Sorofman, CMO at Visier, a Vancouver, BC based vendor focused on people and broader workplace analytics. The management team traces its lineage to Business Objects and Crystal Reports with ties to the city, both now part of SAP

Jake does a nice job describing their niche in the market and positioning against analytical capabilities of bigger HCM vendors and specialists like Tableau. A telling comment from him is “Only about 15% of employee data lives inside of your HR”

He adds “On average, our customers are integrating data from seven to 12 different systems, where people data lives. We normalize it, we standardize it. And we deliver it as a set of insights to anyone who needs it to make better decisions, whether that's the HR team, HR, business partners, people managers, executive teams.  A key differentiator of Visier is that we've prebuilt 2000+ questions and corresponding analytic models to answer these questions.

So this is not a custom build platform, It is very different from what you'd expect from a general purpose, Business Intelligence platform. We are an analytic application that is built around understanding people with 80 to 90% of the questions you'd ever need to ask available out of the box.”

Another use case is customers benchmarking against peers using their database of metrics. They go to market direct and also embedded in the solutions of a few partners.

The slide below shows how SapientInsights rates them against the competition (BTW Stacey Harris, author of the slide, has summarized her annual results in this series – see here

As a CMO (and former marketing analyst at Gartner), he thinks we have been overly focused on the customer and on operations for the last couple of decades. It’s time for focus on human resources. Vinnie Vertical happens to think it is time for industry functionality but he does make an important point.

Very nicely done in about 20 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Salesforce Verticals – Media and Entertainment

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 Christopher Dean, GM and SVP, Communications and Media for Salesforce.

He provides sweeping coverage of evolving media world. Contrary to popular belief print, radio, and store advertising are not exactly dead. Similarly, not everyone has cut their cable cords.

He points out that “retail media networks at both ecommerce vendors, as well as brick and mortar and clicks and mortar vendors, have about a $100 billion market opportunity to add an advertising business on top of their traditional e commerce business. And it's extremely high margin as well.” A subset of that is healthcare media with chains like Walgreens growing nicely in that segment.  

He spends a fair amount of time going through Salesforce capabilities supporting the lifecycle from development of content to revenue generation. Not surprisingly, Salesforce is strong in the revenue generating end and supports various business models - subscriptions, commerce, advertising and IP licensing and royalties.

He runs through several of their global customers – Multichoice which is Africa’s leading entertainment company with presence in over 50 countries, Sony Pictures, NBC, NY Times, Forbes Australia and several others

Very nicely done in 25 minutes.

 

Analyst Cam: Workday Verticals Planning and Analytics: Part 3 – Healthcare

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

We are running a series of posts on Workday’s Industries.  Tom Peff in Product Marketing kicked it off with their Planning and Analytics across the Service Sector where they focus. Yesterday, Greg Volpe, Solution Marketing Director, drilled down into analytical applications in Higher Education. Today, William Bercik, Sr. Director, Healthcare Strategy will do the same for Healthcare. In the New Year, we will have a focus on Workday’s transactional capabilities in some of these sectors.

William addresses the organizational areas Workday covers for healthcare customers even though they don’t have clinical functionality (but do have impressive administrative capabilities) in the graph below

He covers several use cases and solution sets – Advanced Analytics, Planning Model Toolkit and Cost & Profitability Management.

He also provides a synopsis of implementations at Fairview Health which operates 10 hospitals and 48 primary care clinics, and Christiana Care with 50,000 patient admissions a year.

Nicely done in 17 minutes   

 

Analyst Cam: Workday Verticals Planning and Analytics: Part 2 – Higher Education

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

We are running a series of posts on Workday’s Industries. Yesterday, Tom Peff in Product Marketing kicked it off with their Planning and Analytics across the Service Sector where they focus. Today, Greg Volpe, Solution Marketing Director, drills down into analytical applications in Higher Education. Tomorrow, William Bercik will do the same for Healthcare. In the New Year, we will have a focus on Workday’s transactional capabilities in some of these sectors.

Workday has over 350 customers in this vertical. Greg defines them as ranging from “small community colleges up to large research institutions and institutions with medical facilities”. He identifies some of the challenges the industry faces. Even before COVID, there was a secular decline in student enrollments, especially with foreign students. Most educational institutions also persist with dated technologies. With growing cost pressures, there are moves to shared service models across multiple entities. And the clear need for better profitability analysis.

He does a nice job walking through 9 planning trends in the graph below:

He runs through a case study around faculty and other staff insights and planning at Wake Forest U and Financial Planning at U of Virginia.

Nice overview of the state of the sector and Workday’s coverage in  22 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Workday Verticals Planning and Analytics: Part 1 – Across Service Sectors

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

Over the next few days, we will profile a series of posts on Workday’s Industries. Kicking it off today is Tom Peff in Product Marketing. He covers Workday’s Planning and Analytics across the Service Sector where they focus. Tomorrow, Greg Volpe will drill down into the analytical applications in Higher Education, and day after William Bercik will do the same for Healthcare. In the New Year, we will have a focus on Workday’s transactional capabilities in some of these sectors.

Tom starts off acknowledging that planning and analytics applications tend to be horizontal and apply across industries. However, Workday development has also focused on areas  “that benefit certain industries disproportionately.” He discusses each of the unique functionalities below.

He next talks about Industry Models mapped to key Use Cases in 13 industries. As he says, each has micro-verticals – so under banking, you also have credit unions, regional banks and asset management. You can filter using a vertical lens. If you are a nonprofit, what are the critical models that you need to render and operate your business? Grant planning, program expense, budgeting, personnel planning, membership and events etc.

He then presents on a library of 70 Common templates that partners have developed around use cases in different industries. That is part of a marketplace that Workday is evolving which will not just focus on Planning apps. It will also include apps build on their development platform, Extend and packaged applications that partners have built.

Finally, he provides a glimpse at how Workday is organizing for more of a vertical push.   

Nice kickoff to the series in about 25 minutes

Analyst Cam: Blended Conversations in Zoho’s Service Desk

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 Dilip Nagarajan, CRM Product Manager at Zoho. He demoes Blended Conversations introduced in their Desk product in the Fall 2022 release announced today.

That’s ‘blend’ as in human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences. In effect, it allows customer service agents to delegate tactical tasks to bots, while retaining control of the overall service experience.

Desk is one of the most utilized applications in the Zoho family of products. While Dilip demoes with a WhatsApp interface, Zoho’s Instant Messaging (IM) Framework also supports Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeChat and other services and allows for mixing them in customer conversations.   Impressive how easy the low-code tools Zoho delivers makes leveraging of such automation. The productivity impact across 100K customers who use Desk should be dramatic.

Dilip also walked me through the enhancements to the UI delivered in this release. They deliver speed and accessibility improvements for users with cognitive and other shortcomings. That deserves its own episode at a later time

Analyst Cam: SAP Utilities and Sustainable Transitions

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 Daniela Sellmann, Global VP & Head of the Utilities IBU at SAP and Kim Maren Ekrutt, Head of Innovation & Sustainability at the IBU.

Daniela, who I interviewed for the upcoming SAP book Business as Unusual, provides a nice update on trends affecting the sector – Ukraine, extreme weather, the maturing of decentralized grids and the “Flexsumers” who are generating their own power with renewables. She also provides an update of the updated SAP core offering for Utilities and startups like Exnaton and others founded to take advantage of the changing utilities sector.

Kim focuses more on sustainability – especially the water element of utilities. She also describes how sustainability is “moving up the stack” – beyond just compliance and reporting to creating sustainable products, services and business models.

Very nicely done in under 20 minutes.

Analyst Cam: SAP S/4HANA as “next-gen” ERP

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 Jan Gilg, President of S/4HANA Development at SAP.

I invited him to provide an update on S/4HANA. He spends most of the presentation discussing how this is a very different iteration of ERP beyond just the cloud-driven architecture which too many vendors emphasize even after 25 years of SaaS.

There is a lot more focus on new business models and industry networks, on the changing mix of  products and services at most customers, the need to be much responsive to climate change urgency, and the transition to very different UX with the impact of AI and collaboration products like Teams.

As I mention to him, I was part of the Gartner team which popularized the ERP term in the 90s. This is definitely not that vision of ERP. It has come a long way.

I have invited him to come back and present on how customers are seeing different value points in justifying their moves to S/4HANA and also on how SAP is delivering vertical industry functionality in and around S/4.

Very nicely done in about 25 minutes.