deal architect

Analyst Cam: Zoho Marketing Plus

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 announced today its Marketing Plus platform and in prep I had Prashanth “PVK” Krishnaswami, CX Futurist present the “problem definition” and Dilip Nagarajan who heads CX product management do a “light demo”.

The product’s focus is both B2B and B2C mid-market enterprises ideally with less than 200 marketing employees

PVK presents what he calls 4 “existential challenges” CMOs face and Dilip presents features to tackle each of them.

• Visibility in team projects and initiatives
• Shared view of customers
• Collaboration across projects internally and outside agencies and resources
• Accelerating revenues – pipeline visibility, support for campaigns etc.

Sundeep MV, CMO for Techademy, an early adopter, has said this about the platform

"We embraced Zoho Marketing Plus, integrated Zoho CRM, and now we have a full-stack, unified sales and marketing solution wherein every relevant stakeholder in the organization is armed with the data and tools to increase engagement and drive customer experience. Our evangelism, marketing, pre-sales, and sales teams collaborate within a single dashboard on the platform, which houses all of the content and data we use to derive actionable insights and grow the business."

There's more in the press release announcing the solution, but PVK and Dilip cover a lot more group in roughly 40 minutes

Workday’s Relentless Discipline and the Power to Adapt

Some of us are old enough to remember Workday’s pioneering analyst summit in August 2010. I wrote back then

“Few vendors have the guts to be open to such a smart and opinionated bunch as Workday was during its Technology Day yesterday. Like a marathon tennis match with plenty of volleys and lobs and aces, the back and forth was something to watch.  As you can see from the Twitterstream and blog posts from the day a wide set of angles were covered - object models, user interface design, change management processes, analytics and integration tools (in a SaaS market where both are still weak), stuff from the labs - tablet and voice interfaces, mobile applications - and more.”

So, when we were invited to the latest iteration of their Innovation Summit for analysts last week, I had two questions:

• How many of my peers would show up given continued pandemic travel restrictions and worries?
• What would count for innovation at a company which is now almost 80 times as large and for an event whose theme was a confident “Made for this Moment”?

The first question was relatively easy to answer. I ran an informal survey when I arrived and tweeted to a colleague

“…talking to a few analysts here, we have become more selective about attending in-person events. Travel experience is still not that business friendly. Puts more pressure on vendors to rethink events. Well-crafted analyst summits like #wdaysummit are ideal format.”

It helped that this was their first in-person summit in 3 years and they took elaborate COVID testing precautions. They shipped a Lucira kit for PCR quality testing at home. We ran a test 24 hours before our flight to Silicon Valley and repeated that test upon arrival at the event hotel. About 20 analysts showed up.

The second question turned out to be far more complex. Ray Wang of Constellation Research would have liked to have heard about the metaverse, DeFi and more contemporary tech trends. Other analysts had other questions like “what about treasury management?” I myself would have liked a bit more about how Workday is reacting given the "made for the moment" theme to current events in Ukraine and the energy transition focus it has created in every country and industry.

I have been lucky to feature in my Analyst Cam and Burning Platform video episodes several Workday executives and products in the last 2 years.  So, I expected a nice recap during the event.

What we did hear a lot about is Workday's architectural journey, their distinct M&A strategy and how their solutions enable what Workday calls the “Power to Adapt”.

I particularly liked the presentation by Sayan Chakraborty, EVP, Product & Technology where he said “We believe great applications can only exist alongside a great platform and from this combination - you get the 'power to adapt’”. Rather than try to just absorb acquisitions, Workday tries to benefit from the contemporary thinking at startups they acquire. More on how Workday’s architecture has evolved over 15 years in this episode of Analyst Cam with Sayan Chakraborty.

Pete Schlampp, Workday’s Chief Strategic Officer, told us about their growth in packaged solutions.  “Since starting this program last year, Workday and our partners have published 15 Packaged Solutions supporting the oCFO and oCHRO, with another 20 slated for FY23.” Packaged solutions are small bundles of contemporary features like VIBE they had presented to me here .

I have been pushing Workday to get more into operational areas in industries where they have plenty of presence – most in the services sector. For now, I am not worried about Workday’s disciplined approach and  continued focus on the financial, hcm and planning/analytical areas. Workday has been delivering plenty of innovation in these areas. They also have miles to go with their current focus. During the session, they talked about their global growth – there is so much more of the world to grow into. By my estimate only 5% of its employee base is in the APJ region. Same thing with the SME market – there are plenty of opportunities in subsidiaries of large companies and the higher end of the SME spectrum.

In my analyst role, I get to hear competition bashing on a regular basis. Workday is a frequent target. My question to the haters is “Why are you letting Workday so dramatically narrow your definition of addressable market? There is so much white space around them for you to exploit”.

Frankly, I wish they would speak like C0-CEO Aneel Bhusri did at the event. He generously complimented his peers and said he was proud of the software industry for how it had responded to the pandemic.

Analyst Cam: Limeade – all about employee well-being

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 Dr. Patti Fletcher, CMO and Larry Colagiovanni, Chief Product and Technology officer at Bellevue, WA based Limeade.

There is a lot of talk about “employee experience”. Of course, everyone wants happy, productive employees but a better UX in a transactional system may make them a bit more productive, but by itself does not contribute much to employee happiness.  

Employers face a daunting set of challenges – coping with the “mass resignation” trend, employee burnout, trying to get the right mix of work-from-home and in physical office. They are responding with a variety of perks – Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office, many offer mental health aids in addition to many traditional benefits. Limeade helps employees navigate this menu of myriad benefits. Just as important via its "immersion" in ERP systems, employees have a personal reason to interact more often with the system.   

As Limeade founder and CEO, Henry Albrecht commented in Forbes “Why can’t there be a great company that does for human well-being what Intuit software does for financial health, aligning what's good for people and what's good for business toward a common mission?”

Patti and Larry go through how Limeade aims to deliver both – what's good for people and what's good for business

Analyst Cam: CaptivateIQ – Demystifying Sales Commissions

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 Mark Schopmeyer, co-founder and co-CEO of CaptivateIQ which has a no-code SaaS solution to manage the thorny area of sales compensation.

As with many “junction points” in the enterprise – in this case between sales operations, finance and HR compensation management - you find many spreadsheet applications and convoluted legacy/custom developed and user-unfriendly applications. CaptivateIQ has thrived in this niche. It is barely 5 years old. and says it has crunched $2.5 billion in sales commissions. Importantly it allows for transparency to the calcs so salespeople can focus more on selling and less on algorithms which drive their paycheck. No wonder they are already a “unicorn” - valued earlier this year in its Series C round at a $1.25 billion valuation.

Mark does a nice job explaining why sales commissions can be obtuse in many enterprises and how they are likely to become even more so as business models evolve and customer contracts blend product, service, data and other components across a product lifecycle.

I was introduced to them by Workday Ventures. They are an investor along with many others like Accel, Bessemer and Sequoia.

Crisply done in about 25 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Workday’s architectural journey

In a February episode of Burning Platform, we hosted a back and forth on architectural trends in the industry with Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.  Here we have him back to present more specifically on Workday’s architectural journey.  He only presents 5 slides but makes powerful commentary.

He presents some high-level philosophy, he discusses how Workday has integrated several acquisitions – some analytical, other transaction processing heavy. But I really liked his description of how Workday’s architecture has evolved over 15 years

"Today, we have a highly scalable platform that can support millions of employees on a single instance of Workday. We have elastic capability, horizontally scaling elastic capability because you have business cycles. You do payroll on particular days and times. You run specific reports at times during the month or during the fiscal year.

If we look back 15 years ago, we would see a lot of general compute engines in the Workday stack. Today, you see a lot of highly specialized compute engines, and we send the right workload to the right engine.

• If you've got an analytics workload, it will go to the Prism technology that came in through the Platfora acquisition that is designed for that type of workload and optimize for that workload.
• We have the OMS transaction service in the middle of this diagram that handles our high-performance transaction workloads.
• We've got integration servers that handle the ins and outs, as you connect Workday to systems outside of Workday.
• You have ML workloads that move into our ML environment that have a different kind of usage rate, memory consumption, CPU usage than these other workloads.

            We can optimize for all of those, and I think that's really the dramatic difference. If you time-traveled back 15 years and showed this slide to architects at Workday, what they would be surprised by is the specialization and the elasticity and the horizontal scale that's now ...

The age when you would do machine learning processing at a hardware level on standard CPUs from Intel or AMD is essentially over. The industry realized that there were these devices, these GPUs that had been developed primarily for gaming, and realized that, hey, these are really, really interesting because of the way they tackle the processing problem, and we can leverage that capability – essentially, parallel processing versus serial processing (parallel at scale) – and those kinds of problems are the kinds of problems we have in deep learning networks or other kinds of workloads within the ML AI capability."

25 minutes of wizardry. Very well done.

Analyst Cam: CRM Watchlist

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 Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC. He summarizes the results from his latest CRM Watchlist survey. He is a repeat guest and was last on the Burning Platform episode where we discussed generational shifts in content creation and distribution.

This is the 19^th edition of his signature, annual project. He describes how the effort has evolved over the years. Lot of factors go into his scoring and they change every year. As he says, he looks at a vendor’s strategy and scores it on how well they executed on what they said they would. He then measures the impact they had on the market. Impact as a company – so not just their architectural excellence or financial performance or social responsibility posture. And it is based on the vendor’s stated strategy and market focus – which allows smaller vendors to be evaluated fairly depending on how they delivered against their geographic, vertical or size of customer focus.

He does factor in what he calls “intangibles”. His scoring for that category is a bit less transparent considering how much he guides vendors about the others. But he shares one nugget - he deducts points for “competition bashing”. Good for him.

He is tough and thorough, but very fair. Does not matter if you are a client of his or a close friend. This year, he evaluated 59 vendors reading every word of the 4,682 pages (yes!) if they were submitted to his guidelines. It is a testament to his market impact that vendors spend so much time and effort on their responses.

He has three winning categories -Winners, Winners with Distinction, and Elite. Only a handful have qualified for the Elite designation over all these years. There were 4 winners with Distinction this time around – Oracle, ServiceNow, Thunderhead and Zoho. He discusses another 12 in the Winners tier. Zoho scored highest in total this year. It also submitted the longest response at 259 pages. Paul insists there is no correlation between size of the response and his scoring.

He also shares the vendors who scored highest for each of his categories and summarizes with 4 promising and 2 concerning trends he gleaned from this year's responses.

I have run competitive evaluations of software vendors and outsourcers for many a client. At Gartner, I ran similar structured reviews for Magic Quadrants and other long-form content. I feel no shame saying I did not ever come close to evaluating 50+ vendors or reading 4000+ response pages for a single deliverable.

Next year, Paul says will be the final Watchlist. I suspect he will get an even larger population of vendors who pay homage by participating. In the blog post he said “Since this upcoming one is the very last one so, if I'm you, I'm registering to take a crack at it. Even if most companies don't win the award, they more often than not appreciate the exercise that you go through to put together the submission because it, when completed, gives you a holistic look at your company that you otherwise do not have.  It's worth it for the workout.”

I will absolutely bring him back for to describe the process for the 20th in the series. In the meantime, I need to have him back around his other passion – professional sports. We can discuss Tom Brady’s “un-retirement”, the return of baseball after a near shutout and so much else.

Analyst Cam: IFS Industry Solutions

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 Antony Bourne, Senior Vice President of Industries at IFS. He presents an overview on 5 sectors they particularly focus on

• Aerospace and Defense
• Utilities, Energy, Telecom
• Construction and Engineering
• Manufacturing
• Services

While many other vendors can claim to be focused on these industries, IFS usually has a nuanced perspective. Services for many vendors means call centers or PSA – Professional Services Automation and project time and expense billing. The IFS perspective is much wider to include field services, digital twins and remote assistance to those technicians and to support outcome-based business models. Their aerospace customer base covers OEMs, operators, MRO vendors, national defense agencies – again a much wider definition.

Antony also talks about several strategic trends across these industries including:

• Servitization – where industrial companies are getting more revenues from post-sales services, adopting subscription and other business models and organizationally blending product and service organizations. (I had previously hosted Marne Martin and Mark Brewer of IFS on two episodes of Burning Platform on the topic here)
• Resurgence of Capex – as he points out 70% of industrial assets are over 25 years old so there is a growing focus on capex spend and harnessing the mountains of data that modern assets with sensors and software are generating
• Smarter Construction – Pre-fab concepts are allowing manufacturing concepts to be applied to that sector

I have invited his group to do a drill down across a few of their verticals. Antony whets our appetite in a 25-minute presentation – actually more of a back and forth. He did not need any slides. Nicely done.

Analyst Cam: ASUG – Pulse of Customer Survey

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 Geoff Scott, CEO of the Americas' SAP Users' Group. He has been a frequent guest in this series and on Burning Platform. Here he summarizes results from their recent N. American Pulse of Customer survey including:

• How does the COVID-19 pandemic continue to affect organizations’ operations?
• Who is making IT buying decisions today?
• Where are SAP customers placing their focuses in 2022?
• What technology is having the most impact on digital transformation efforts?
• What’s the status on migrations to SAP S/4HANA?
• What role is cloud playing in organizations’ current landscapes?
• Why does SAP talent and training continue to challenge SAP customers, especially with the “great resignation” affecting most talent sectors?

This truly is an abridged version, though as you will see I asked a number of questions. If you are an ASUG member you can access a much longer version here. And if you are not a member yet, as Geoff says you should definitely consider signing up here

 

 

Analyst Cam: Empower – Digitizing the journey from linear to circular econo

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 Wilhelm Myrer, Founder and CEO of Empower.eco, an Oslo, Norway based startup. Empower is the last in the Sustainability cohort introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ).

The US EPA defines a circular economy as one which “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”

In many ways, Norway, and Scandinavia broadly, epitomize the growing focus on the circular economy. Norway has an incredibly effective plastic exchange system - 97% of all plastic bottles are recycled, while most countries around the world barely get to 10%. Norwegian company, Tomra, has since inception in 1972, become an icon for the circular economy with its reverse vending machines which collect bottles and cans from consumers. Mark Brewer of IFS had described them here https://bit.ly/2KvjkXg

Wilhelm describes the basic principle which works for Tomra and Norway – reward consumers for each bottle returned with cash or credits and businesses with tax and other incentives. Enpower is helping companies digitize the flow from consumer through the recycling ecosystem using blockchain technology, providing detailed traceability, accountability, metrics and "product passports" along the way. The traceability is showing up in interesting ways to delight customers - he tells the example of how seats from a soccer stadium in Spain are being recycled and the end products will allow consumers to proudly brag about that origin.

While the major focus is on plastics, the concept can be applied to paper, glass, metals and so many other materials. 

Very inspirational conversation below.

Analyst Cam: Specright – making standards and specifications sexy

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 Matthew Wright, Founder and CEO of Specright which provides specification data management to Fortune 1000 companies with complex needs.

They were introduced to me by SAP.iO Foundries, which represent SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers (see their presentation here ).

Specright was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year but as you will hear precision in specifications can have an impact in every  process which touches raw materials, ingredients, formulas, packaging and finished goods.

Matthew’s passion comes from a couple of decades in the packaging industry. As he describes in his book The Evolution of Products and Packaging, we have seen an explosion in SKUs and complexity in supply chains. As he says, existing ERP, PLM and other software were designed before complexity grew exponentially, and the lack of focus on specifications is the root cause of many supply chain issues we are seeing. BTW, Gartner identified them as a Cool Vendor in their Supply Chain category in 2020.

He presents on three customers and how they have benefited from better specs – one reduced scrap production, the second reduced spend on corrugate packaging and the third in sourcing a critical ingredient across multiple product SKUs. He also describes how they have helped industries set standards and work with other bodies which are tasked with defining them.

Very nicely done, and I am looking forward to reading his book.