deal architect

Burning Platform: SAP projects in Asia/Pac

Brian Sommer and I recorded the first 12 episodes in this series. Since then, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho and Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications. See the index here

Kicking off this year in the 25th episode of the series is Paul Coester of Big Blue Ventures. He has played a role in 20 SAP ECC and 12 S/4HANA projects  - most of  them in the Asia Pacific region. We discuss how 2020 played out for SAP in that region and how 2021 is likely to shape up - around S/4HANA, its cloud properties and its industry applications.

We also discuss how SIs and hyperscalers have evolved over the last couple of years. Finally, we discuss the growth in "fractional IT" - he is a prime example of that with his simultaneous hand in enterprise architecture, quality assurance and other roles on multiple projects.

I have always known Paul to call it as he sees it.  He appropriately calls himself a "SAP Whisperer"  Nice to get his perspective from "Down Under".

2020 - filter out the bad, preserve the good

Most people I know cannot wait to say good riddance to 2020. Very understandable - so many have lost friends and family to COVID, others have lost friends to ugly politics, it was financially devastating to so many of us.

But 2020 also saw unbelievable business heroics, innovation, digital acceleration and so much else which will define this decade. My personal hope is continue with all that goodness.

In an episode I recorded with Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica last week, I presented some of my personal positives from 2020 - it is about 2 minutes long. In there I mentioned I have uploaded 3,000 minutes of video across the various series I launched during the pandemic - Acrobatics during the Crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform. That was from 20 gb of raw video.

Over the next few days, I will run an even tinier excerpt on the New Florence blog. About a hundred minutes of highlights - unbelievable scaling up/down, rapid innovations, business pivots, leadership. And also basic decency - humor and humanity. That is the side of 2020 I hope we continue in 2021 and beyond.

Have a safe and uneventful New Year's Eve!

Burning Platform: Cloud Wars!

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here  Last few weeks, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy and Sandra Lo of Zoho

This has been the year of the cloud - unbelievable scaling of ecommerce, wfh etc - so nice that I can wrap up the year with an episode with Bob Evans who authors the Cloud Wars site. As you can see, both of us are basking in the sun - helps the mood at the end of this crazy year.

We cover a lot of ground - how the hyperscalers have picked up momentum as companies look at lifting and shifting on-premise, legacy apps to their clouds. Google, Oracle, Microsoft and AWS in particular get a fair amount of time during the session.

We discuss the increasing focus of both the infrastructure and application vendors on the platform layer and the likely turf wars there.

We cover recent public offerings from Snowflake, C3, Palantir and momentum of vertical players like Teladoc, Shopify, nCino and what that means for the incumbent players. 

Bob also talks about every company in every vertical becoming more of a software company and what that means to the industry as a whole. The SaaS, IaaS etc definitions of the last few years look increasingly dated. 

More episodes to come in the New Year!

Burning Platform: A Christmas Carol

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here  Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere and Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.

This time it is Sandy Lo of Zoho. Not an analyst but an amazing musician and a wonderful AR executive - read here how talented she is

She sent me a beautiful holiday gift - a video of her playing carols on the piano. I asked her if I could share with the world. She kindly agreed.

Last week I shared the Curmudgeon Christmas Card with Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett. That was a lot of fun. 

This one is pure joy - certainly has been the easiest episode for me to edit:)

Enjoy and Merry Christmas! 

 

Burning Platform: Pandemic and Tech AR/PR

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests  -Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Bob Ferarri of Supply Chain Matters

This time it is Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy Consulting. She has been a tech industry pioneer - I called her a "marathoner" in this 2018 interview.

We cover a lot of ground in the video below about what she has seen in tech marketing during the pandemic.

She talks about the initial wave of empathy that guided vendors to focus on customer problem-solving and not come across as "ambulance chasers". We discuss how some vendors still want to pitch what they had in their bag in January, not reflective of how dramatically most markets have changed. We talk about "influence v intelligence" when it comes to industry analysts in changed markets, and whether AR would be better positioned in product development v marketing. We also talk about changed messaging as the whole world has moved to video communication and a much more digital world.

She shares a few details about her upcoming book with a working title of "Make it, Don't fake it". It is part autobiography about her leadership style, and part philosophy about her integrity and "getting to the truth and sticking to it".  Should be a fascinating read and timely given some of the crazy expectations we are seeing on Wall Street. I look forward to bringing her back to present on the book in much more detail.

In the meantime, enjoy this really invigorating session.

Burning Platform: Supply Chain Resilience and Renewal

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere.

This time it is Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters.

We talk about how the pandemic severely stressed so many supply chains – PPE, toilet paper, anything China sourced, the cold chain for food and now vaccine distribution among others. Yet, we somehow coped and moved so much of the flow from brick and mortar to ecommerce. Bob describes the war rooms many companies set up to cope.

We discuss how many companies have reacted to both the demand and supply shocks - rethinking historical demand forecasts, simplification and reduction of product choice with rationalization of multiple product SKUs and BOMs. How companies are  rethinking global supply chains (with strategies like China+1 or 2 or 3) and re-location of manufacturing to increase resilience.

We next talk about the cold chain which has been challenged all year - first with food distribution challenges now with the daunting COVID vaccine logistics, while simultaneously coping with the holiday shipping load.

Bob describes several of the supply chain planning and execution technologies he has been impressed with, that have helped enterprises cope with the unprecedented stress.

It truly is a riveting conversation about the acrobatics it has taken the supply chain community to keep us hundreds of millions of us fed, sheltered, entertained during 2020 and the many changes we are likely to see in 2021.    

Burning Platform: Digital Acceleration

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research and Holger Mueller of Constellation Research.

This time it is Tamas Hevizi, Global Head of Private Equity at Automation Anywhere. I had interviewed him in May about acrobatics he was seeing early in the pandemic. In June, he had invited me to his show to summarize some of the acrobatics I had seen. He also wrote a guest column for me in July describing his unbelievably disciplined digital work habits. 

So I invited him to update me on more of the Digital Acceleration he has seen in the last few months. He also talks about the 7 C's of excitement he is seeing in the private equity world he lives in - commerce, cloud, collaboration, cybersecurity etc. Finally he provides many examples of acceleration in "citizen developers", especially in small businesses.

We may never become as digitally disciplined as he is, but the examples he shares shows that as millions of us have moved to WFH, as small businesses have moved to digital commerce, we are individually feeding the digital acceleration of the last few months.

It is a truly invigorating, rapid-fire session. 

Burning Platform: Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here . Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras and Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research

This time it is Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. He follows architectural, platform and other technological underpinnings of application vendors like SAP and Workday and of hyperscalers like Amazon and Google.

He talks about how the public cloud has scaled amazingly during the pandemic. He also says first-generation SaaS players will have to adjust to the growing strength of the hyperscalers. SAP has been talking about its 4+1 strategy and Salesforce has announced Hyperforce. He sees an opportunity for application vendors to not emphasize their platforms but to re-imagine business processes. Traditionally, they have relied on customers and SIs to help them codify business process logic - now they can lead using new technologies like ML that their traditional sources of guidance are not that familiar with as yet.

We talk about AWS, Azure and Google and why Europe still does not have a player like Alibaba. We discuss the prospect for Oracle in this segment.

We talk about how it has been an amazing year for new data streams - COVID-19, election polling, census, shortened sports seasons, all kinds of planning/forecasting scenarios, video streams and new players like Snowflake and Palantir. In the enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth" Yet the citizen on the street is actually cynical of much of the data because definitions are inconsistent and the media has been cherry picking data to suit its narrative. It's the Mark Twain's quote updated for today - Lies, Big Lies and Big Data. We talk about how to build trust in data.

We discuss developer communities - Salesforce Trailblazers, SAP breathing new life into ABAP, Apple, Microsoft and Google expanding their developer communities and what that means in the meta context of building v. buying enterprise applications.

Finally, we have some fun. You can see his playful side and how he convinced a Starbucks barista to brand my cup as "Sugar Daddy". I was the only one on the Southwest plane who did not realize it, even though they were laughing at me. He finally showed me a photo of my cup. No more freebies for him:)

Really invigorating session.

Burning Platform: Services and other Industry solutions

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica and Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras.

This time it is Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research. He pioneered coverage of the Professional Services Automation (PSA) category two decades ago.

We talk about how the pandemic has affected services firms and the PSA category. He also discusses initial findings from his annual survey of the market - way more promising than he anticipated earlier in the year.

We also discuss why just about every application vendor has developed PSA functionality but are loath to develop operational functionality for so many other, wide-open industries. As he points out when he was at Oracle in the late 90s, the PSA functionality did not require as much investment as that in manufacturing or financial services, and yet generated a nice, predictable revenue stream. Also, since then just about every industry has had a growing services revenue component - field services, training etc - what he calls embedded services and have become new candidates for PSA. 

Nice, crisp discussion.

Burning Platform: Diversity Trends in Tech

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests like Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.

The BLM movement this summer has brought more urgency for HR and procurement groups to diversify employee and supplier bases. Related to this, I did interviews with two prominent African-American tech executives, Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer at Salesforce  and Charles Phillips, Chairman at Infor. Also a presentation by Barbry McGann of Workday on their new VIBE product which allows companies to better visualize employee diversity from multiple dimensions.  The Tech sector should be proud of its efforts.

While the recent intense focus is nice to see, it would be remiss to not point out we have been making steady progress for a long time. I invited Cindy Jutras, President of Mint Jutras to talk about her 45-year career at software vendors and analyst firms, and draw from her experiences on how gender and ethnic-based diversity have evolved in the industry. I add my own experience as an immigrant and someone who has worked in and traveled to 70 countries and seen the US "from the outside in" in the video below.

I particularly liked Cindy pointing out the movie, "Hidden Figures" about a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a critical role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. As she says "we have come so far"

We also touch on age discrimination. Silicon Valley and outsourcers tend to be focused on young recruits, but even corporate IT tends to be ambivalent about older employees. The pandemic has resulted in many older employees who are traumatized or those who finally having spent more time at home with families and have relished the experience. Both categories are opting for early retirements. These accelerated (and unplanned) exits may also bring more of a focus on the age attribute as companies refine their diversity policies.

It is a not a "woke" conversation. It is a realistic discussion about why a system of meritocracy, more enlightened executives and driven individuals work better than forced mandates for diversity.