deal architect

Burning Platform: Episode 2 - Bumper quarter

Burning Platform: A new series on hot Enterprise topics with Brian Sommer

Brian Sommer and I go back nearly 30 years. We ran parallel Software Intelligence units at Andersen (now Accenture) and PwC (that unit is now part of IBM) and competed. The competition was tough at a professional level, but respectful at a personal level. He was one of the first people I called for counsel when I got a job offer from Gartner. At Gartner, I had to analyze Andersen so I got to torture Brian :)

We then co-founded a marketplace, IQ4hire. Our ambition was to digitize the entire SI/outsourcing sales and procurement process. It was ahead of its time in a world (our plans included proposal engines and video consultant resumes) where relationship selling ruled, but the rigor we codified two decades ago has allowed both of us to bring rigor to many a project since.

Many readers see us at vendor events. Many clients see us together on advisory projects. We look at problems from very different perspectives - something most clients appreciate. We also try to do so with humor. In (very) different ways, we are both story tellers as I wrote here. 

So, not surprisingly we talk quite often on a wide range of topics (and crack plenty of jokes and tell stories). During the COVID-19 pandemic, our conversations have moved to Zoom. We thought it would be fun to share some of our recent conversations about enterprise technology.

Here is the first episode in a series of hot topics - titled the Burning Platform. Notice on the cover how cool the man is, even in the face of the raging fire. That is a good metaphor for how we approach enterprise problems. We will share these on a regular basis, minus much of the snark, family talk and politics that creeps into our conversations.

It is a roughly 10 minute format. The first episode is about how on-premises and cloud applications have fared during the pandemic, and why customers still cannot easily jettison old, ugly on-premises baggage. We also make some recommendations.

Look forward to your feedback, and the opportunity to help you through complex enterprise issues. And do so with much needed humor in these crazy times!

Sidetrade: Machine learning applied to customer invoices and collections

Let me say at the outset, my hype antenna goes up whenever a vendor talks about machine learning. It comes from years of frustration with machines which have supposedly been trained to transcribe voices. Even the hyperscalers only deliver 85 to 90% accuracy when it comes to transcribing my book and blog interviews. I used to think it was the noise in my audio recordings. After all, if doctors can dictate their complex lingo and get pretty good automated transcription what is so complex about my workloads? Well, machines can learn their individual voices and accents - doctor handwriting is a bigger challenge, I think:).

In my case 95% of the voice is not mine - it is that of my interviewees. In tech, many of them have strong German, Indian, Chinese, S. African and other accents. And also in tech we use all kinds of big words and acronyms (thanks, Gartner!).

Machines can be trained well if you can limit the taxonomy they are expected to learn and then you expose them to LOTS of relevant data. It's the latter part where most vendors fail to measure up. They may have a number of large on-premise customers. Vendor machines cannot easily access that data - they are either not allowed to access the customer data center or even if the data is extracted, customers rarely give them permission to benchmark against other customers. If they are in the cloud, they do have easier access to the data, but few have sought or received permission to anonymize the data and use it for ML.

Which is why I was intrigued to hear about Sidetrade and its database of accounts receivable and cash collection data accumulated over 20 years - representing over 300 million invoices valued at over trillion dollars. I invited David Turner, the CMO to talk about their value proposition and have extracted 20 minutes from his presentation below. He discusses his Augmented Cash application and two of his large  customers - Manpower and XPO Logistics.

The pandemic has been good for business. Q2 was the strongest in their history. Cash flow is king with the global economy in turmoil and their insight delivered via their bot, Aimie clearly helps collectors.

You would think ERP and CRM vendors would be all over this with their order processing and eCommerce capabilities? Sidetrade depends on them to process customer orders, do the billing and record the cash collections. (Sidetrade has a roadmap to itself offer some of the transaction processing) But go back to my comments above. Those vendors likely don't have enough real-life customer collection data available to train their machines.

Salesforce's acrobatics

Jim Cramer at CNBC pointed out the irony that ExxonMobil, a major carbon contributor as an oil and gas company is being replaced by Salesforce in the Dow Jones Industrials Index. Salesforce is a major supporter of the WEF's 1T.org initiative to plant a trillion trees by 2030 to offset the effects of climate change.

The official communication said it was related more to Apple's recent stock split and the need to add more tech to the index. However, to me it is another example of CEO Marc Benioff willing to take positions where most other corporate executives fear to tread - on diversity, homelessness in San Francisco and so many other causes - and increasingly being recognized for it. I have been impressed how many other executives mention Marc as an inspiration in the "acrobatics during the crisis" Zoom series I have been running. They have been doing so, unsolicited. 

Of course, it is not just his leadership around "purpose". Salesforce has deftly pivoted its product mix during the pandemic. I could see it in the interview I did with Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, EVP, Industries in May.  She was talking about Salesforce's work helping various verticals including public health officials and with partner nCino helping community banks process thousands of PPP loans

The Work.com launch has been brilliant. One executive after another has told me site re-open protocols are turning out to be much more complex than lockdown processes - which themselves were not easy as thousands were being moved to WFH. Schools, college campuses, sports teams, amusement parks are facing even more urgent and complex reopening scenarios. 

As part of my recent interview with Tony Prophet, the Chief Equality Officer I wrote "Salesforce is a company which elevates equality as a core value and has been widely recognized as a company which is leading conversations on moving to a broader stakeholder, not just shareholder, focus. Given how well it has done for shareholders, the stakeholder goals are even more ambitious and Tony is clearly a key player in that effort and as he advises "aim high".  

I know of customers who think Salesforce tries to be "woke" and support too many social causes. Well, after their product and financial performance (they just reported a blowout quarter) during the pandemic, I say - if they can walk the tightrope, let's just watch in awe.

Very different perspectives on SAP

I interviewed Geoff Scott and Dave Wascom of ASUG (America's SAP User's Group) last week, and we talked about SAP customer heroics during the pandemic, S/4HANA adoption plans, remote implementations and other topics. The replay is here. 

This week, I listened to a joint ASUG/DSAG (DSAG represents customers in Germany, Austria & Switzerland) session which focused more on S/4HANA trends.

They did a nice job highlighting where there were significant differences in expectations in the customer bases. One clear one is DSAG users covet integration a lot more - their S/4 implementations are broader in scope. In other slides, their expectations of SAP provided integration were also higher. Register here to watch a replay

One striking slide to me showed how much focus there is on Financial modules. That's the most mature functionality in S/4HANA, but to me a reminder of what happened with R/3 implementations. Many SAP shops ran out of budget and never got beyond FI and CO in spite of promises of wall to wall coverage. It suited SAP's partners, many of them with accounting backgrounds. As we enter an investment-challenged environment - customers need to think long whether just a "refresh" of that functionality is the best path ahead.

In contrast, I was pleased to see Peter Maier show the 3 minute video below in a verticals-focused session for analysts.  It shows agile customer responses during the COVID-19 crisis using a variety of SAP products. Peter had discussed several of these customers in an interview I did with him - watch it here.

Much as SAP and its partners want to keep the "big elephant hunting" around horizontal functionality, it is these smaller, higher value, industry-specific projects which will likely be more in demand for the near future.

New Normal: A conversation with Geoff Scott and Dave Wascom of ASUG

I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews. 

This time it is Geoff Scott, CEO and David Wascom, SVP Executive Programs of the Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG). They have over 130,000 members across thousands of SAP customers.

They describe acrobatics they have seen at SAP customers in the last quarter.  It 's nice to hear Geoff summarize what they have seen as "unending optimism in the middle of tectonic changes ". They describe pivots and other scenarios at several manufacturing companies, window and blinds makers and life sciences companies.

We discuss the state of S/4HANA implementations - those already started are going ahead with creative remote support. Those planned for later this year are getting pushed back. We also discuss the opportunity to "lift and shift" ECC to a hyperscaler cloud, remote delivery and support from SIs and SAP's role in helping with vertical revenue-facilitating "edge" applications.

We also discuss trends in events world in the Zoom virtual world they find ourselves in, the state of video technology, the change in audience demographics.

I loved the positive tone of both Geoff and Dave. They bring out the stress SAP customer executives are going through with what Dave describes as an "overwhelming sense of optimism, while grounded in reality"

Oracle Nation update

Last August, I had floated the idea of writing Oracle Nation. This blog post laid out the reasons why I was thinking about it. I added in a comment the changing industry landscape I hoped to explore

"The next wave of apps are going to be in vertical operational areas and many geographies beyond the bigger Western countries. The competition will change as more customers are moving back to custom developed and even building industry solutions for sale. Also there will be more regional players and others on Google, AWS and Azure platforms. Got to factor all that in my decision."

Oracle and I discussed various options. They offered access to 6 events around the world as a way for me to meet customers and Oracle executives to interview. That was very generous and would have given me a very nice exposure to Oracle's global reach. However, none of the events was vertically focused. And, honestly, I find conferences a tough place to get decent face time with executives. Much better to catch them in their comfort zones in their offices. Not that it would have mattered. Given the COVID-19 crisis, most of those events have been cancelled.

I also managed to get a dialogue going on verticals. Mike Sicilia, EVP of Oracle's global business units, gave me a nice overview of key verticals such as hospitality, retail and utilities. We were supposed to arrange for drill downs into many of the sectors but again COVID-19 has disrupted scheduling.

I had hoped to re-engage and make Oracle part of the "acrobatics during the crisis" Zoom series I have been running. However, the Oracle executive I approached declined. I understand. While the vast majority of executives I invited have participated, some have not - they don't want to come across bragging during the crisis or for other reasons.

In background, to get a 360 degree perspective I had also talked to Oracle partners, competitors, user groups. Long and short - my books tend to be case study heavy and I don't think I can get a broad enough range of customers for the book.

I will be honest - in my polling I got several comments that I should instead write about SaaS leaders like Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow or the hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft and Google (Oracle IaaS is showing more recent momentum but did not come up much in my earlier conversations). The acrobatics and digital transformations during the crisis (watch the interview I did here) are also really timely fodder for a possible book. BTW these conversations are showing a lot of interest in vertical edge applications (like telemedicine, drive-thru support, PPP loan processing etc) less ERP or other transactional system refreshes in the short-term. Less tech focused, I have also thought about writing a book on US policy matters - our middle class, immigration, global trade etc. I find there are plenty of what I call "toxic myths" about those topics.

Seriously, I am learning so much from my Zoom interviews and can share them on a much more timely basis that I plan to continue doing those. I have several more great executives lined up.

Oracle is continually fascinating. There will be a time and place when we will be able to engage meaningfully. Just not this year.

SapphireNow Keynote: Professional, but in synch with the times?

I listened to Christian Klein's keynote from the virtual Sapphire event today - watch replay here.  It was his first as CEO and he came across very well. Energetic, professional and very comfortable in a digital setting. His keynote focused on 3 themes - resiliency, profitability and sustainability. He established credibility by saying in his previous role, he had lead SAP's digital transformation. He established empathy by invoking his new baby, Emma when he talked about sustainability and how that generation will judge us by our actions in the next few years.

Here are some comments on each of his 3 themes:

Resiliency - Given the turbulent times we live in, Christian could have hit it out of the park if he had focused mostly on resiliency, re-imagining broken supply chains and business continuity. He could have presented on heroics and acrobatics in his customer base as they massively scaled volumes up or down, as they delivered innovative new products or services in weeks, as they pivoted their business model or customer channels. In the lead up to his keynote, Alicia Tillman, the Global CMO did present some public health and emergency application examples.

Profitability - That theme and the presence of Porsche CFO, Dr. Lutz Meschke was likely meant to evoke the sentiment that better days are ahead. I thought Dr. Meschke did a very nice job talking electrification and digitization, but the reality is a Porsche EV starts at $ 100K today. Personally, I am a glass half-full optimist so enjoyed that, but I can see how folks hurting in this economy would not. BTW SAP did a nice job by weaving in Industrie 4.0 shop floor concepts and navigation/parking mobile apps in that segment.

Sustainability - this to me was the riskiest portion of the presentation. In today's turbulent energy markets, it's not just hydrocarbons which are hurting. Renewables have to compete at much lower price points and even after decades of subsidies they have struggled to do so. Let's face it EVs are only as clean as the power that comes from your local utility, and many moved to gas in the last decade. Many will be encouraged to continue with that fuel at today's price points. Also, renewables have not done much in wide swaths of the global economy from shipping to aviation. Finally, SAP tried its sustainability message a decade ago under Peter Graf. Back then, it mostly focused on SAP's internal efforts not much about how SAP was helping customers reduce their carbon footprint. Hopefully, this time it will focus on operational systems and helping customers monitor as an example, methane leaks or wind turbine performance not just on broad carbon reporting.

SAP has had technical difficulties broadcasting this event. Honestly, I am empathetic after doing a bunch of Zoom, Google Meet, ON24 and other interviews/presentations in the last few weeks. As an industry, we are all trying out one giant experiment with relatively immature video broadcasting technology and watching it on spotty last mile bandwidth while competing with our spouses and kids for that pipe. It did make me wonder how Apple will fare with WWDC next week. Over 23 million have registered from over 150 countries. I expect blinking lights and brownouts on some continents!

New Normal: Conversation with Peter Maier of SAP

I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up.

This time it is Peter Maier, President, Industries at SAP. He describes examples from public health, auto, oil and gas and other sectors but I was also pleasantly surprised by many angles he emphasized.

SAP has the image of a lumbering giant whose projects take forever. He described a project where they built a registration portal (Rückholprogramm) within a couple of days for the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswaertiges Amt) to help airlift stranded German citizens around the globe as commercial air travel came to a standstill.

He describes another 2 week project to help manage capacity across 25 hospitals in the Heidelberg University system.

He describes how they quickly collected 750 feature ideas in response to the crisis which should make their way into their products. He repeatedly talks about supply chain opportunities in many sectors. SAP set up a Global Pandemic Taskforce in late January - way before most other companies. That's one advantage of their global reach - they could see first hand what was already happening in China.

SAP is also encumbered with a SI ecosystem which traditionally has depended on large, on-site implementation projects, snarkily referred to as the "school bus" model. In a new world with travel at a standstill, it is good to hear him talk about remote project delivery at Galp Energia, a Portuguese oil and gas company.  He also describes INDEX-Werke's part, service and IoT platform, iXWorld to remotely support the auto industry.

He describes fairly significant public health efforts. He describes contact tracing projects in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Apple and Google in the US. He also describes the Qualtrics COVID-19 Assessment, Testing, and Case Management Solution being used in Utah, Iowa, New Jersey and Nebraska. 

Given their presence in just about every industry, I look forward to hearing about more such agility in other sectors

Finally, it was good to hear empathy about customers - he talks about "survival" time for many of them. SAP did not help its image too much by attempting to raise maintenance rates during the last deep recession. The agility and empathy Peter brings out is a lot more encouraging this time.

New Normal: What to expect from SAP and its partners

Tom Wailgum of ASUG interviewed me as part of the virtual edition of its Executive Exchange last week. It had originally been scheduled in Orlando as a companion to SAP's annual Sapphire event. SAP's event has been postponed till next month and ASUG turned its event virtual, and utilized the ON24 platform for the broadcast.

Tom and I covered wide ground about a post-COVID world in our 30 minute session including

• My recent Zoom interviews with a number of C level executives and VCs and what I have heard across industries/regions - acrobatics, views on return to work, overall recovery
• How customers will likely deal with SAP - cloud applications v on prem, vertical v horizontal functionality, expectations of more integration in the SAP portfolio,  re-shuffling spend, acceleration of digitization
• What customers can expect from SI partners - travel restrictions, more shared services, automation
• CIO performance during the crisis, likely new C- level health-centric exec, expansion of HR role with increased focus on health, work from home etc