deal architect

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.

Burning Platform: A Curmudgeon Christmas Greeting Card

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting and Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel have joined us.

This time it is a special episode with two of the longest tenured players in IT world - Frank Scavo at Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.

We cover three major topics:

- At 0.40, we take a walk down memory lane going back over 15 years when each of us was pioneering blogs focused on enterprise tech - you will enjoy the photo archive we banter around

- At 7.08, we look back at 2020. Hint - it is not all negative.

- At 17.52, we look ahead to 2021. Fair warning - none of us is dumb enough to make forecasts after a year like 2020:)

As a special episode, it runs twice as long as others in the series.  But I promise there are plenty of laughs, and lots of name dropping. Watch it, you may have a mention!

Burning Platform: Project Management in the Age of COVID

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here 

For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last couple of weeks Rob Kugel of Ventana and Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting have joined us.

This week, it is Bonnie Tinder, founder of Raven Intel which monitors project management trends and SI quality metrics.

We discuss how project management has undergone a major transformation during the pandemic. The accelerated clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccines have certainly raised the bar. In IT projects, especially HR projects she tracks, the key word as she says is "shift". Some have been postponed, some shortened, a new category of projects has been fast tracked,

We also discuss how SIs have been doing during the pandemic. Many smaller and midsized SIs are being squeezed out by the larger SIs as bigger projects disappear.

She provides a nice Raven's - bird's eye - view of the state of project and program management.

Burning Platform: Mediocre, Myopic or Merry?

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here 

For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last week Rob Kugel of Ventana joined us.

This week, it is Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Application Consulting.

We start off talking about a note he wrote a couple of years ago titled Mired in Mediocrity. I have written about vendor myopia - they have missed out on several large markets as I wrote here 

There have been several moves during the pandemic which make both of us a bit more positive about the industry  - and feel merry in keeping with the holiday season.

I have a great slate of analysts and industry observers lined up who will bring other nuanced perspectives on enterprise tech in the next few episodes

Burning Platform: Wall Street and Enterprise Software

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here.  For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers.

Rob Kugel, SVP & Research Director of Office of Finance and Business Research at Ventana Research is the first guest and he talks to me about the wild ride on Wall Street during the pandemic. Nice to get his perspective which reflects his earlier career at Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street firms and his CFA certification.

We talk about whether the market is in synch with the state of the economy and how much attention enterprise buyers should be paying to Wall Street impressions of vendors in their tech spend analysis. We discuss how Wall Street innovations like SPACs and the increasing level of M&A activity will influence the tech economy and why Wall Street has been tough recently on certain vendors. We also talk about the pandemic's effect on financial and planning software he now tracks

Look forward to more guests who will similarly bring nuanced perspectives on enterprise tech.