deal architect

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: Zoho Creator Platform 6 and low-code positioning

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 version 6 of their Creator Platform and are also positioning it as a low-code development solution. As it says "Organizations currently face soaring demand for new business software, but existing low-code platforms for business users only facilitate basic app building, lacking the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools."

In advance of the announcement, Zoho arranged a conversation with Hyther Nizam. I had talked to him about his regional role in the Middle East and Africa here. In the segment below he provides a 10 minute long exec overview on the low-code market. As he says. we have “crossed the chasm” in terms of IT acceptance of citizen developers. I also liked his point how customers are using the tool for developing industry specific application extensions. 

I also had Tejas Gadhia in Product Management at Zoho present in a longer segment below about new functionality in the platform. It includes role-based access controls and comprehensive audit trails and backup to give IT more visibility and comfort about casual developers and has an embedded business intelligence and analytics engine among other features. More about the features here

It is clearly not just for citizen developers. If anything, I hope Zoho does not overemphasize the low-code moniker - the platform is being used by much more sophisticated developers 

Analyst Cam: HCL Technologies and complex industrial asset monitoring and maintenance

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

HCL is a leading Indian outsourcing firm. Differently from some of its Indian peers, it has long had a strong product engineering/testing focus, not just an IT practice. I profiled some of that prowess in a case study I wrote (see excerpt here) on the innovative Boeing 787 design and the radically redesigned supply chain for the plane’s components. HCL had helped Boeing with testing and other services.   

HCL has also been investing in and offering more in packaged software and IP, not just selling labor and project services. As an example, it acquired collaboration, commerce, digital experience, AppScan, & BigFix solutions from IBM in 2019.

With that backdrop, we had Colin Breakwell, Associate Vice President at HCL Technologies present on their iMRO and iSAM extensions to SAP’s S/4HANA ERP core for applications in aerospace and other complex equipment settings.

Many of those complex product industries have been generating more in services revenues – it is a trend called servitization – see episodes here and here which go into more of that trend. That transition to services is calling for a wide range of asset tracking, digital twin, field service, spare part inventory, outcome based business models, SLA management and other functionality and as Colin points out coordination across a vast ecosystem of cross-border equipment makers, operators, lessors and service providers. 

It is also leading to legislation around the world under the moniker of “Right to Repair”. Customers want the choice to maintain these assets on their own or with third party service providers, not just be forced to sign up for multi-year service contracts with the equipment maker.  

Colin does a nice job describing in about half an hour this new world of making, maintaining and monitoring some of the most complex aircraft engines, wind turbines, mining, oilfield, medical, transportation and other equipment. And the wide range of software functionality SAP and HCL offer this sector.

Burning Platform: Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software

In the 72nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.

Sayan is, in many ways, a rocket scientist. He has degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT. He started his career as an engineer on interplanetary spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on the early commercialization of global positioning systems (GPS).

However, in his career he has influenced more of the arc of enterprise software. He arrived at Workday in 2015 through their acquisition of GridCraft which he co-founded. Prior to that, he led teams focused on next-generation collaboration products at Oracle. Leading up to that he worked at several startups for two decades

So, the conversation is a bit of a walk down memory lane. We invoke terms like SOA, CPU speeds and OLTP as we discuss today’s microservices and how Workday deals with scaling of massive transaction volumes across finance, hcm, procurement functions while also becoming a powerhouse in the planning/analytics space.

We have a bit of a debate on whether consumer tech is leading enterprise tech when it comes to ML and AI. That leads to threads on data regimes and bias in AI.

We have an interesting section on the need to rethink enterprise application categories and definitions, to break down traditional silos and to rethink business processes. As he says, the pandemic has forcefully shown us an enterprise is not just a “campus of buildings”. He discusses how Workday’s string of acquisitions has already helped challenge some of the traditional thinking.

This a master class on IT architectures.  You can see and hear Sayan's high-energy and passion for his role in shaping the industry in his body language and tone.

An absolute must watch.

 

Burning Platform: Enterprise Software in Emerging Markets

In the 71st episode of Burning Platform, we host Hyther Nizam, President, Middle East and Africa for Zoho.

Let me start off by saying I became a fan of Zoho way back in 2006 after this session with the CEO, Sridhar Vembu. Over the years I have written plenty about their business model,  his leadership style,  his humble philosophy about life and rural revival and what he calls “transnational localism” 

I had a chance to talk to Hyther about an exciting new product release (he also wears a product development hat) announcement planned for early March. I asked him if we could also talk about “transnational localism” as applied to his region which spans 10 countries across the Middle East and Africa. He does in the conversation below and you have to marvel at the product enhancements (like RTL – right to left UX needed for Arabic and other scripts), the sweat equity, the pricing subsidies and other investments Zoho makes in developing each market.

Contrast that to most other enterprise software vendors who try to replicate their expensive direct sales, partner heavy model when they look at global expansion. Additionally, most of them prioritize English speaking countries in their global plans. No wonder most SaaS applications, even after two decades, have very little customization for most of the world’s local languages, currencies and regs.

Zoho’s investments in MEA are clearly paying off as Hyther shares. His is one of the fastest growing regions at Zoho. Not sure other vendors can match their pricing model, but there are several philosophical and behavioral attributes they should consider emulating.

Personally, I am in awe of how Hyther managed to accomplish so much with global travel constrained in the pandemic affected last couple of years. And how he seems to fairly easily juggle his product responsibilities as well.

More on the product announcements next week.      

Burning Platform: Experiential Design in Enterprise Software

In the 70th episode of Burning Platform, we host Jeff Gelfuso, Workday’s first ever Chief Design Officer.

The pandemic has exposed all of us to the most honorable of customer services and in reverse, some incredibly disappointing experiences – in what I have called COVID copouts and Brexit BS. I worked on a project last year where I had a chance to ask a number of executives to catalog their good and bad personal experiences and I heard plenty around eCommerce, auto dealers, travel and other services. Accenture's design agency Fjord, has coined a term "liquid expectations" — "when you experience a service in one industry, it raises the bar for what you expect from other industries." I have a corollary to that: employee experiences play a huge part in customer experiences. Their frustration, fatigue, fear all negatively affect how they manifest themselves to the outside world.

With that backdrop, it was nice to host Jeff who has significant product design and R&D experience in the consumer tech world at Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. It is a fascinating conversation about the enterprise tech view of experiences and how wfh and hybrid workplaces have complicated the thinking.

Jeff talks about how he spent the first few months at Workday talking to over a hundred customer executives about their experiences and expectations. He also talks about the test bed of Workday’s own employee-centric culture and how that is helping his design thinking. His personal, virtual on-boarding experience and their HR moves like “Thank-you Fridays” during the pandemic are guiding his thinking. And how the HCM experiences are being adapted to Workday’s planning, financial, procurement and other applications.

I like his point about thinking about “end to end experiences” and being humble enough to recognize that you will never be able to anticipate how every user reacts to your software. And the resulting need to think about multiple roles, tailored experiences and to build flexibility into your design. We also discuss natural interfaces and the need to weave in external collaboration tools like Slack and Teams (and soon Metaverse tools).

He has a noble goal – simplification. He defines it as not pretending you can eliminate enterprise complexity, but pushing it more to the background. Other competitors have long promised ‘Run Simple”. Jeff is doing it in a vastly more complicated, hybrid workplace with heightened employee expectations.

Kudos to Workday for recognizing the need for a visionary design officer and recruiting someone from the consumer tech world. Jeff particularly impressed me with his empathetic approach to experiential design.

Analyst Cam: Salesforce – 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 Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM, Salesforce Industries. He presents an update on their vertical clouds – he presented last year in the Burning Platform series

He covers a wide range of industries. He drills into micro-verticals within Financial Services, one of their strong focus areas, talking about Rocket Mortgage and investment banking. How they are helping government agencies reinvent themselves. How Slack and conversational interfaces are influencing higher ed and healthcare. How their own experiences with nonprofits and internal experience with philanthropy and net zero programs are helping verticalize ESG for various sectors. How their anonymized data across 150,000 customers in the cloud and Einstein AI are allowing for “Insights” – like a Shopping Index from over a billion shoppers and Pandemic Insights for Manufacturing. It is allowing them to move customers to more ‘impact-based” thinking – their version of “outcomes”

I like how he emphasizes their ISV, hyperscaler and SI partners.  His colleague Tyler Prince had spent much longer on their ecosystem here. Throughout the session you see the state of the economy – hybrid, working, shopping, learning from anywhere from an industry lens.

I like how he responds to my question about the vertical competitive landscape. He says “the more the merrier” and it is "heartening" that competitors are validating what Salesforce has been executing for the last few years. That reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It described an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read:

"They Say IBM's Entry into Minicomputers Will Legitimize the Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"

Jujhar is too polite to say that but he does a really nice job in half an hour given the wide scope he covers.

Analyst Cam: Altec - Connect right people at the right time with the right document

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 Don Howren, President & COO at Altec, Inc.

Most ERP, CRM and other enterprise vendors like to call themselves "books of record". More often than not, they just have the meta data. The record itself is in some document system - often messy paper files, or in an unlinked digital archive.

Don presents on his DocLink product aimed at the SME market. It could used as a standalone document management system with multiple tags, rules engine and configurable forms. However, the solution becomes much more powerful with its integration with Acumatica, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage and SAP Business One. It is designed to support cloud and on-prem integration to give customers deployment flexibility. There is a lot of rich data which is available independently without cluttering the ERP or other enterprise system.

I particularly like the wide range of use cases he discusses including Payables, T&E, Receivables, Seasonal recruiting, Disaster recovery,  Regulatory compliance and Annual audit prep. Of course, over the pandemic, it has facilitated all kinds of remote access to documents, with appropriate security, as everyone has moved to WFH.

Connect right people at the right time with the right document. The value proposition is simple and compelling, especially for paper-intensive processes.

ERP - Generation Next

I read Jon Reed's  Diginomica interview with Rondy Ng, Senior Vice President, Applications Development at Oracle. He cites some very large cloud ERP customers - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, FedEx, Kroger and Albertsons. Encouragingly, he also cites plenty of global coverage. Good to see that traction.

But what functionality have they deployed? I saw General Ledger mentioned a couple of times along with procurement and analytics. But no mention of manufacturing, logistics, banking/brokerage functionality, micro-fulfillment, or reverse logistics. I have heard Larry Ellison similarly use the ERP moniker in earnings calls and event keynotes, but never really discuss any operational functionality. Leads me to ask: Is that the new, shrunk definition of ERP - core financials and possibly human resources?

While I was pondering that, I found myself going down memory lane to 1995 when I joined Gartner. Gartner had coined the ERP term and they had made a conscious effort to bring in several new recruits with business process expertise. Tom Ryan, as part of the ILS service, brought warehouse management and broader logistics experience. Chris Jones, part of CIM, brought process manufacturing. As part of AAS, I brought financial and hr expertise from years at Price Waterhouse. There were several others who focused on PDM, MKT and other functional areas. We definitely contributed to a proliferation in TLAs but I know for a fact we drove vendors to sharpen their process breadth and depth.  Talking of TLAs, I had coined one - AMM - Addressable Market Myopia for vendors who were narrow in their functional reach, but did not dare propose it to Gartner censors :) 

When I left in 2000, I was confident Gartner would expand its ERP focus beyond manufacturing sectors. After all, in most western economies, nearly 3/4 of jobs were in the service sector. And each has unique books of record - insurance needs those around policies and claims, health care had unique clinical and compliance requirements and so on. The manufacturing sector itself was morphing significantly. The products are smarter with embedded software and sensors. The plant was becoming more autonomous. Asset management was no longer just about calculating depreciation for the CFO. It is about predictive maintenance, more sophisticated servicing via digital twins and augmented reality.

But Gartner has only inconsistently focused on this functional evolution. Many of the process experts they had hired in the 90s were gone by the end of the decade.  If anything, it swung back to its IT comfort zone and has emphasized the architectural aspects of cloud computing. And, almost on cue, many ERP vendors made transitioning to the cloud their major focus of the last couple of decades. Functionality and process expertise took a back seat. No wonder, some vendors are shrinking their definitions of ERP to suit their limited functionality. And CRM, EAM and other categories have encroached on spaces ERP vendors have neglected.

I sense a new generation of ERP coming. The pendulum is swinging from a technology focus to a functional focus. The pandemic has sharpened industry specific needs. Telemedicine in healthcare, distance learning in higher education, virtual open houses and digital mortgages in real estate are just some of the examples.

Just last week, I had several reminders of the functional evolution. Zoho gave me a pre-briefing on its updated Zoho One suite. It will officially be announced in a couple of weeks, but the suite has now grown to 45 applications. SAP has lined up 9 briefings for me across its verticals. I met with Mike Ettling, CEO of Unit4 and we discussed how his verticals are evolving. I was part of a virtual event on Servitization and heard how automotive, construction and many other sectors are increasingly moving to "everything as a service".     

Gartner coined the term ERP just prior to when I got there. But for a couple of decades companies had already been deploying MRP and MRP II functionality. We will similarly see a next generation. It may not even be called ERP - to shed the baggage the moniker has acquired with too many delayed and bloated projects.

But the market is definitely marching forward. One thing I am fairly certain of - the next gen of ERP will not suffer from AMM - Addressable Market Myopia.

Adding from a twitter thread with Jon

In fairness many other vendors have not evolved their functionality especially during the pandemic and with recent supply chain issues. Lots of brilliant architects but few process visionaries. Need both.

With brilliant architects but no process visionaries you would never get Amazon’s fulfillment center with chaos theory models, miles of conveyors and hundreds of robots. You would deliver the old process model.

Burning Platform: AI in the Enterprise

In this 53rd episode of Burning Platform, we have Roy Altman, CEO of Peopleserv.

We draw on his recent experience editing of an issue of Workforce Solutions Review focused on AI (available here)

We cover a wide range of angles - the long history of AI , how it has under-delivered in the past and why the current iteration is more promising. We talk about abundance of data in consumer world to train machines, compared to that in enterprise settings where most data is locked up in proprietary data centers. We cover ethical issues around smart machines and whether AI will lead humanity to utopia or dystopia.