As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Zoho launched today a new version of Zoho Analytics—Zoho's self-service BI and analytics platform. https://www.zoho.com/analytics/ It packages over 100 enhancements including new AI and ML capabilities, enabling diagnostic insights, predictive analysis, and automated report and dashboard generation.
Zoho Analytics, first launched as Zoho Reports in 2009, has quietly become a major player in the crowded Business Intelligence market. It is the second most used application in the Zoho One suite (which I have written about often over the last few years). That’s particularly impressive when you consider the suite has over 50 applications.
In addition to 17,000 direct customers of the analytics capabilities, several ISV and SI partners have adapted the analytics engine for their platforms and as a result Zoho can claim 70,000 analytics customers. Importantly, that also translates to a wide breadth and depth of data which Zoho’s over 500 connectors have access to. That range also positions it well for the growing Generative AI market, especially as customers look for cross-functional and vertical use cases.
As part of the launch, I had a chance to record Sailas Sundaram, Senior Product Manager of the Zoho BI Platform, as he summarizes some of the new capabilities. He does so crisply across these 4 categories.
He goes through a long list of features across the 4 areas including the pipeline builder which enables data engineers to orchestrate and monitor the data flow from source to destination. He discusses integration with OpenAI, MS Teams and Slack and adding support for more regional languages to Ask Zia, their natural language assistant.
He covers DSML Studio with AutoML, a no-code assistant, to easily build custom ML models. He explains the BI fabric which allows for combing insights from multiple BI platforms, such as Power BI and Tableau, onto one, easily accessible analytics portal.
Lots more in the rapid fire 20 minute video. Very nicely done.
As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Rob Zwiebach, VP Product Management at Worlday presents a rapid overview of their solutions aimed at the CFO
“We are talking about the overall solutions for the office of the CFO, and it's a very broad set of capabilities - everything that a medium to large organization needs to manage its financials across record to report, procure to pay, quote to cash - really the full set of financial processes.
The solutions harness what he calls “intelligent data core”. “It is a fundamental differentiator for Workday built on a common set of platform capabilities, including common security model, common privacy model and with artificial intelligence built right into the platform."
He spends some time explaining first principles they applied to their product suite at its origin over a decade ago. “We don't have this fixed accounting key where users always have to enter these codes with a certain number of characters. Instead, we just focus on capturing what dimensionality is relevant and contextual based on what the user is doing.”
Rapid fire, he talks about transactional functionality, AI use cases, Prism Analytics, Adaptive Planning, consolidations, country specific localizations and more.
I have invited him back to drill further into some of the areas. For now, enjoy this very crisp overview in 25 minutes.
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”. And how expensive and high-risk migrations continue to be because they are so labor intensive.
So, it was nice to host Jens Amail, CEO of SNP Group, which has automated data transformation and migrations across 15,000 projects and claims a 77% market share for that phase. He runs through his presentation in 25 minutes and you should listen to the whole episode, but a few things really stood out.
Their extensive experience is allowing SNP to tackle much more ambitious migrations to RISE versions of SAP S/4HANA. As he says “Customers have to deal with certain carve outs based on regional instabilities - classic examples at the moment are China and Russia. They need to upgrade all their instances to the latest enhancement pack. …We have many customers who need to implement the new GL which is a requirement consolidation of instances, document splitting etc.
When you look at our approach, we can basically collapse all of these individual projects into one phase, and this drives a number of customer benefits… you have faster time to value, because you don't have to do pre projects first, have to finish them at the end of the fiscal year etc.”
They are building two very impressive ecosystems. He says 17 of the 20 largest SAP SIs are using their tools. He proudly compares the “Bluefield” adoption by this wide spectrum to the very successful “Intel Inside” ad campaign of old.
SNP is also building an ecosystem of tools to automate other elements of migrations. They include SmartShift which helps automate migration of SAP custom code (watch their Analyst Cam presentation here) and Tricentis for User Acceptance Testing.
He also talks about their very well attended Transformation World event – he has convinced me to attend the one next June.
Plenty more in the 25 minute conversation. Very well done.
Importantly, it shows we can automate major chunks of enterprise migrations, lower their costs and also their project risks.
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”
So, it was nice to host Jean De Villiers, Chief Customer Officer at Unit4 and have him present on their Succes4U offering which is “a subscription wrapper that provides you with a single access point to the Unit4 Service Portfolio, with expert guidance to enable maximum value realization from your Unit4 investment.”
He says “we looked at all of our red projects over the years, and identified common trends in what drove the projects red?” in developing this offering.
Too many migrations just sell cloud architectures and new features and functions. They don’t focus enough on the change management when your IT is now longer managing the infrastructure, when upgrades are more frequent and many other changes when you move to the cloud. And most don’t focus on business outcomes from the migrations.
22% of Unit4 customers had migrated to the cloud offering by the end of 2023. Since Success4U was announced in Nov 2023, they have had conversations with 87% of the remaining customer base, and 175 are actively migrating.
We talk about why customers resist change, whether they attempt greenfield projects when they do migrate, if Unit4 and partners are automating pieces of the migration, the business outcomes Unit4 helps them achieve as part of the migration and plenty more. As he says they are “revolutionizing the way we take our customers to the cloud and also the way we onboard new customers to our platform”
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”
While many of these customers would like to migrate to newer product versions, the reality is migrations in enterprise world are still too labor intensive and as a consequence expensive and high-risk. Many customers are looking to stay with older releases, but to do so at lower costs. And they are using “ring fence” strategies to modernize components of the application portfolio with newer, more bite-size solutions from other vendors.
I invited Scott Hays and Frank Reneke of Rimini Street to present on what they are seeing in the market. They do a nice job summarizing the vast differences in the choices SAP and Oracle customers are facing. ECC customers are looking at a 2027 wall and increased pressure to migrate to S/4HANA. Oracle has more of a “rolling 10 year window” and gives customers a bit more breathing room but they mostly get support in a portal-led, self-service model even at the premium maintenance prices they are paying. SAP is encouraging moves to its hyperscaler partner clouds, Oracle to its OCI. Both have their own lock-in considerations.
They also do a nice job presenting Rimini’s independent support value proposition and impressive record – over 5,500 clients since inception where they say they have delivered $8 billion in savings. How Rimini has moved from just level 4 Product support to level 2 and 3 application management services. How their support has plenty more automation and AI. How they are better positioned to support interoperability across heterogeneous vendors.
Many more nuances covered in this 45 minute episode. Very nicely done.
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.
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
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 Barbara Dossetter. Managing Director, Delivery at CXO Connect in Singapore.
I have worked with Barbara on a couple of projects and recently connected with her about the Global CIO Certification work they are doing. The initiative is still early in its evolution. However it is commendable, The CIO role is so critical, yet there is little formal education on how to become one and the role evolves faster than most other C level roles.
She starts with “first principles”: CIOs are decisions makers – they make good decisions, with limited information, often in stressful situations. There is no single template for a CIO – they vary from one organization to the next. The role needs several soft skills. Nobody gets certified for just showing up for the course. They constantly revisit modules (they have 16 now) because the tech sector is so dynamic. CIOs need to "speak truth to power". Each of the modules links with others – because the CIO job is not siloed.
She then quickly walks through each of the 16 modules – image of 8 below
Next, she walks the experience of the early delegates, how they are scored by many executives, how they are coached and how they are certified. There are no “participation trophies”.
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 Robert Cummings, Founder and CEO at LeapGreat which focuses on automating migrations from SAP ECC to S/4HANA.
At Deal Architect, we tend to focus on new markets – GenAI, changing verticals, emerging countries etc. This year we have added another area of focus – Application Modernization and Migration. After 25 years of cloud and AI applications, more than 70% of ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications are still stuck in their client/sever or even earlier architectures. One of the major reasons for staying put – the high cost and disruption of migrations, because they are so labor-intensive. So we are looking backwards on legacy applications but pushing a new angle – lets aim for lots more automation, less hand-to-hand combat, in moving them to newer versions.
For nearly two decades now, SAP has run campaigns that it helps the “world run better”. The ads would highlight factoids like “SAP helps produce more than 70% of the world’s chocolate” and similar in other industries. Impressive but increasingly you realize many of these companies run on ECC applications, especially in Tier 2 and 3 of their supply chains, and many were implemented in the 1990s. The expression goes “it is ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The corollary to that is “old is not always gold. Often it has turned to junk” It is difficult to recruit resources to work on ancient applications, they are increasingly security and compliance risks and they do not easily support more recent AI, IoT and other innovations.
So, I am really pleased to have Bob Cummings, a long time veteran of SAP projects at PwC and various executive roles at SAP kick off the series. He also has a patent to his name for work around SAP enhancement packages. With SAP’s announced 2027 deadline for ending ECC support, he points out we “are faced with a tsunami of tens of thousands of S/4HANA transformations in the next few years, where everyone is struggling to scale and find resources, and wondering how we will ever manage all that.”
Here's his Aha
“In our experience (project failures have little) to do with the quality of the software, or the implementer, or the project team or the methodology. Nowadays, the quality of all those are usually very high…But I would say the root cause of the problem can be summarized in the word “late”. Most of the detailed visibility and heavy lifting, and the escalations and problems happened very late in the implementation. …what we found that is in the first phases of the project, the work is very conceptual, where the customer needs to imagine an end state,,,you don't know what you don't know... when you start, you might see some demos, you'll see some proofs of concepts, you'll see lots of explanations and presentations. But it's always about imagining your own real target system, which will actually only begin to appear later during a realization phase, and often a bit late in the realization phase, as well. Only then does the take the project takes on a new dynamic, which is very noticeable. You begin to work in the reality of the real working target system. And the surprises start to appear where you start hearing comments like, Oh, that is not how I thought it worked, or why can't the system do this? Or that? Or did we specify what we wanted this or that to do this, there's no such thing as a perfect specification or a perfect blueprint. The devils are often in the detail. And, and we see them quite late. So this is where we start to see late change requests, scope begins to creep, we have re-planning efforts, we need new budgets…”
The LeapGreat approach is to use its automation and factory concepts to front-load the migration - move ECC data over to S/4HANA in a week (yes) and allow you to play with, train on, re-imagine previous customizations as parameter configurations in S/4’s expanded (and for some features transformed or redacted) functionality – and get to a “clean core” while leaving behind tens of thousands of lines of custom code.
Of course, ERP implementations are never that simple. More coming in this series which will focus on conversion of legacy custom code, data conversion, integration with surround applications, testing, training, change management and other phases of any implementation or migration project. The key in each area is there are automation tools and factory scaling concepts starting to become available.
As I tell him towards the end, automation has allowed many an industry to create “super workers” with unbelievable productivity many of which I profiled in my book “Silicon Collar”. It will be good to see enterprise apps also see that level of productivity. And what we develop for migrations will also help in applying continuous improvements vendors are regularly delivering,
Very nice job in about 25 minutes from a brilliant, very well-traveled and really nice guy.
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 Achyut Jajhoo, SVP and GM, Manufacturing and Automotive (a repeat guest) and Lisa Jacquin, Principal Solution Engineer at Salesforce.
Having analyzed vertical offerings for a while now, I find too many vendors merely spray paint and continue to pitch legacy MRP, CAD, ledgers or acquired functionality. In contrast, most Salesforce verticals groups focus on industry change and edge applications with revenue, product, channel and business model angles. This update on their Automotive Cloud in 3 parts below continues in that vein.
The Opportunity in Automotive
Achyut presents on contemporary trends in automotive and more broadly in the mobility sector. He touches on the increasingly digital consumer experience (which as I comment based on my own new vehicle experience is still pretty analog), direct to consumer approaches that Tesla has pioneered, as-a-service pricing models and software-defined “connected” vehicles. All these trends are leading to a massive increase in generation and consumption of data which allows Salesforce to showcase many of its strengths
Salesforce's Vision for Automotive
Achyut talks through several use cases and how Salesforce’s portfolio of products from Data Cloud to Einstein AI to MuleSoft are all being brought to play. He also discusses collaboration with Qualcomm around its Snapdragon digital chassis
Automotive Solutions & Demos
Lisa demoes three use cases:
The massive telematics data that is being collected via today’s connected vehicles and digital twins. And its impact on predictive maintenance of vehicles and proactive customer service though various channels including direct in-vehicle communications with the driver
The second focuses on scheduling – time and usage based maintenance, test drives etc. and related impact on sales, service, warranty and claims management, inventory management, vehicle transfer logistics among other functions.
The third focuses on leveraging Customer360 with a lens on the driver. The emphasis here is on captive finance operations. It may not appear obvious, but customer touch points for the financial staff around loans, leases, titles etc. are in many cases more frequent than for the service function.
Very nicely done in about 25 minutes across all three videos.
I got the feeling over and over it’s definitely not our parents’ auto industry.
Analyst Cam: CXO Connect – Certifying CIOs
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 Barbara Dossetter. Managing Director, Delivery at CXO Connect in Singapore.
I have worked with Barbara on a couple of projects and recently connected with her about the Global CIO Certification work they are doing. The initiative is still early in its evolution. However it is commendable, The CIO role is so critical, yet there is little formal education on how to become one and the role evolves faster than most other C level roles.
She starts with “first principles”: CIOs are decisions makers – they make good decisions, with limited information, often in stressful situations. There is no single template for a CIO – they vary from one organization to the next. The role needs several soft skills. Nobody gets certified for just showing up for the course. They constantly revisit modules (they have 16 now) because the tech sector is so dynamic. CIOs need to "speak truth to power". Each of the modules links with others – because the CIO job is not siloed.
She then quickly walks through each of the 16 modules – image of 8 below
Next, she walks the experience of the early delegates, how they are scored by many executives, how they are coached and how they are certified. There are no “participation trophies”.
Very nicely done in about 25 minutes
March 12, 2024 in Analyst Cam, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)