deal architect

The Analyst Cam: ASUG interview of SAP CEO Christian Klein

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

Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, interviewed Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, on a wide range of topics for an hour. While the entire interview is only available to ASUG members, he kindly allowed me to excerpt a few sections. I selected roughly a fifth of the interview— you really should beg, borrow or pay for access to the full hour. (You can go to ASUG.com to see if you’re company’s a member—if you run any SAP software, chances are you already might be. For those interested in becoming a member, please go to ASUG.com/membership to find out more information.)

First of all, I was impressed how relaxed Christian comes across given the stress of recent announcements and the stock market reaction. At 12.08 in video below you can see how playful he is. 

Right off the bat, Geoff asks Christian to explain the announcements in his own words. 

At 4.22, Christian nicely summarizes SAP's commitments and details executive and other employee presence in N. America.

At 6.55, Christian tackles the thorny issue of slow S/4HANA adoption - makes couple of interesting observations.

At 8.44, Vinnie Vertical, as some call me, likes the discussion around industry applications

Finally, as I mentioned at 12.08, a bit of fun.

BTW, Christian's comments align with my pov when I interviewed Greg Tomb of SAP here

Like I said, get your hands on the full interview. Nicely done.

 

A turning point for Oracle?

I must admit I did a double take when I read this from Bob Evans

"On top of that, Ellison mapped out Oracle’s desire to offer a massive portfolio of industry-specific solutions that fuse (no pun intended) the broad capabilities of his Fusion enterprise apps with unique industry-specific capabilities for vertical markets."

So I checked out the video where Rob Tarkoff, EVP Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud banters with Larry about the future of CX. From 22.06 to 29.55 they do talk about verticals, particularly around telecom. Larry adds "more to come" as he paints a vision of a "closed loop" enterprise connecting the front and back office and everything in-between.

Since the early 2000s, when Oracle went on its acquisition binge I have waited for them to start to dominate with industry applications. Retek, Portal, Primavera, I-Flex, Opower, ClearTrial, JD Edwards and many others gave Oracle a nice foothold in many large sectors of the economy.

At a personal level, Larry knows so much about oceanography, architecture, aviation and so much more - he is a Polymath. He helped Steve Jobs launch Apple's retail foray and look how well it has blossomed.

While they sell plenty of database and horizontal financial, hcm and CX applications to every sector, industry specific applications have been not been as prominent in Oracle marketing.

In April 2018, I wrote about Netsuite's industry approach

The reality is the verticals NetSuite and its cloud ERP and CRM peers have developed “books of record” for leave massive sectors such as utilities, insurance, hospitality and healthcare mostly untouched. That’s a lot of white space for new entrants to target. 

In March 2019 I wrote about Oracle verticals

I would love to see details - to me vertical applications do operational stuff - merchandising in retail, claims processing in insurance, net metering in utilities, support robotics and wearables on the shop floor etc. If it has those, why is Oracle not aggressively showcasing these capabilities?

I hope they are much more serious this time. During the pandemic, in all the C level interviews I have been conducting (see index here ), I have heard how vertical applications have helped some companies survive and others to thrive. They mention applications like:

• Telemedicine in healthcare
• PPP loan processing capabilities and mobile apps in banking
• Distance learning in higher education
• Drive-thru processing in food service and retail
• eCommerce and robotic warehousing in retail
• Last mile delivery in groceries, restaurants even car buying
• Remote home buying and digital mortgages in real estate

Should Vinnie Vertical (as some call me for constantly asking about industry functionality) be excited about Oracle Industries this time around? I would like to catalog their progress like I did with 3 posts on Salesforce Industries in the Analyst Cam series couple of weeks ago. 

New Normal: A conversation with Greg Tomb 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. Here is the index to all the interviews in this series.

This time it is Greg Tomb, President, Global Sales and GTM, SAP Cloud, Platform and S/4 Portfolio at SAP.

My session with Greg was planned much earlier, but took place a couple of days after SAP announced its Q3 results. I called the results a hiccup, but the stock market punished SAP far more. And I since have heard and seen reports which make it sound as if SAP is on its deathbed.

While his colleagues, Peter Maier and Bob Stutz have in earlier episodes talked about customer heroics, I am glad Greg talked about how SAP and its partners have themselves pivoted in the last six months to sell much more "market relevant" solutions - ecommerce, virtual learning, supply chain management etc. And how they have delivered these solutions remotely given travel restrictions.

As you can see in the video, SAP has a very broad portfolio of cloud solutions across the enterprise, and SAP has emphasized them as part of its Amplify initiative in the last few months. The reporting has made it sound as if SAP is just getting serious about cloud applications.

I have invited Greg to present more details next week on Amplify as part of the Analyst Cam series. He did the interview below on the road on his phone and did not have the Amplify slides or I would have included them here.

 

The Analyst Cam: Workday VIBE

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

Barbry McGann, Executive Director, Office of the CHRO, Solution Marketing at Workday presented on their new VIBE Index and VIBE Central offerings. VIBE is acronym for Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity.

Their definition of diversity includes a wide range of dimensions like ethnicity, generation, even political affiliation. Employees self-identify, and Workday functionality across every stage from the hiring process to promotions and Prism analytics allow you to generate the Index. Surveys allow you to quantify sentiment - the employee sense of belonging. What's powerful is they offer  "intersectionality" so you can filter, for example, by "Native American, Male, Veteran, Frontline Worker". Dashboards make up VIBE Central and allow for drilldown across the detail.

She describes how the product originated internally at Workday and how customers have rapidly embraced it especially with a heightened focus on diversity and inclusion this summer. Workday continues to actively partner with customers, with response very positive so far – 300 customers signed up to participate in VIBE Central workshops immediately after launch, and three early adopter customers are now underway with their VIBE Index pilots.

Very crisp presentation and demo - look forward to bringing her back with one of the early adopter customers.

 

 

The SAP hiccup

I am a market analyst, not a financial analyst. I worry about economic health of vendors, not their daily market cap. So I tend to not write about quarterly results. But a 20% stock price drop in a session is a wake up call, so here are some thoughts

First the "this too will pass" reaction. The market is even more volatile than usual - no US stimulus in sight, COVID-19 cases spiking again in Europe, uncertainty about the US elections. Did SAP deserve a 20% hit? In a calmer market, probably would have been much less. The fundamentals have not deteriorated much. It still has a blue chip customer base across countries, across industries. In the last few months, its Amplify initiative has done pretty well. Its Commerce capabilities have done well as companies scampered to new B2C markets.

The problem is more about adjustments. SAP is not the only guilty vendor which keeps trying to sell what was selling in January and pretending the world has not turned upside down. They continue to push S/4HANA when the market has been desperate for what I call vertical "edge" applications - telemedicine, distance learning, PPP loan processing, last mile delivery and many others which has allowed some to survive and others to thrive during the pandemic. When SAP talks industries, S/4 core functionality looms large. When they talk CX, they talk about why integration with inventory availability is important. It is but so are robotic warehouses and efficient last mile delivery. That is a reason many companies go with 3PLs and sell through Amazon and Shopify. SAP also continues to rely heavily on larger SIs. That has been a turnoff and big ticket item for customers for years, but even more so these days with travel and budget restrictions.

In contrast, Marc Benioff of Salesforce has called for vendors to be "market relevant". I was recently part of their Industries Summit (see a write up here). I heard about Work.com for vaccines, I heard customers talk telemedicine, I heard MNCs talk about visiting small stores on a weekly basis across countries even with lockdowns. Salesforce could have just talked about what they had in the bag in January but this was so much more compelling.

The good news is SAP has lots of bite-sized products - Qualtrics, IBP, AIN, Ariba and many more. But they don't make it easy for customers to find them. When I wrote SAP Nation 3.0, I had to push to be introduced to customers on these secondary products. They kept showing me S/4 customers. But they do have many of those customers. And they have many markets they did not develop properly in the last decade - I had a whole chapter on smart products, digital advertising, Industrial Internet, automation, vertical functionality and others they can still develop.

My book was sub-titled "Manifest Destiny". Drawing on US history, I wrote

"In his inaugural address in 1801, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson had talked about a nation “with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” A couple of years later, Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark as they began their pioneering westward trek: “Those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin.” Jefferson was an optimist and helped fire up a country’s imagination for a massive westward expansion. SAP needs a similar call to action."

SAP has the best enterprise customer base - bar none. They just need to broaden out their product portfolio. For too long they have emphasized HANA, now S/4HANA.

Westward, ho!

The Analyst Cam: SuccessFactors Analyst Day

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

SuccessFactors had an analyst update this week. I have excerpted from the session.

I left out 3 big chunks, the first two of which were under NDA

-  The new Chief Revenue Officer, Maryann Abbajay presented metrics for the year to date and presented logos of over 100 big global brands with over 100k users.

- Amy Wilson, SVP, Products and Design, presented on an expanded vision of 'Learning". She wanted that kept under wraps for now

- Lots of questions from fellow analysts. I did not want to include them without their permission.

Still, there is plenty of interesting content in the video below

Jill Popelka, President kicks off with a confident State of the Business. She shares they now have 164 million global users, discusses SAP Work Zone for HR, Litmos learning business unit and their "back to work" services as companies reopen physical work sites (and what Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and others have also been emphasizing)

At 8.07 Amy talks about HXM - Human Experience Management leveraging the Qualtrics unit and a focus on the "whole self" of employees. She also spends a fair amount of time around the journey for on-prem customers to the cloud. As she says their legacy payroll dates back 4 decades - how to plan for the next 4? BTW, at 6.28 I ask a question about CIOs looking to stay with their legacy HCM software but moving that to a hyperscaler and to third party maintenance. They answered that. I also asked what automation SAP was investing in to make migrations to the cloud less people dependent especially in a world of travel restrictions. They did not have enough time to respond to that.

At 26:30 Meg Bear, SVP of Products and Brian Ellison, CTO have a fireside chat around various architectural topics. Brian covers 5 themes that are driving their technology vision.   

Overall, they covered lots of ground. I saw plenty of focus on employee experiences, Learning and on SAP's hybrid on-premise/cloud customer base.

The Analyst Cam: Rimini Street - the "secret sauce"

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

Rimini Street has provided third party maintenance to Oracle and SAP customers for 15 years now. They now support 3,500 customers in most global markets and says they have delivered $5 billion in customer savings.

During the pandemic, we have heard about many frustrations with on-prem applications supporting WFH, scaling etc, and significant IT cost pressures. I invited Rimini to give me an update on what they are seeing in the market. Two Rimini execs presented to me.

Jason Kotsaftis, Sr. Director Product Marketing presented about a recent survey of 200 PeopleSoft customers. I ran that segment last week 

Hari Candidai, GVP, Global Thought Leadership and Research provided a corporate update and shared some of their "secret sauce". Rimini is known for much lower cost than the publishers. I have always believed their superior customer service and their support of customizations to the core software is even higher value. So, I am glad Hari spent plenty of time describing how Rimini delivers

He kicks off with a Q2 update.

He next describes how Rimini delivers tax and regulatory updates earlier than the software publishers. Starting at 5.10, Hari describes their TLR group of 200 CPAs and other professionals which monitors tax and other regulatory sites for updates that apply across 200 countries. In reaction to COVID, most governments introduced measures like PPP loans, tax relief for specific industries, for tele-working, etc. Rimini delivered 3,500 COVID related updates during Q2.

At 12.18 he describes how their processes, increasingly assisted by AI, are helping them deliver to an SLA of 10 minute response time for Priority 1 tickets. He also says the AI has helped reduce resolution time by 23% - by making smarter allocations of tickets to the most qualified support staff.

Starting at 17.27 he compares Rimini support to that from the software vendors. It's not even close.

Hari makes a compelling presentation. I could only joke I would rather pay twice as much for much slower, poorer customer service!

The Analyst Cam: Rimini Street - PeopleSoft Customer Survey

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

Rimini Street has provided third party maintenance to Oracle and SAP customers for 15 years now. They now support 3,500 customers spread across global markets.

During the pandemic, we have heard about many frustrations with on-prem applications - how they supported large number of WFH employees, how difficult they were to scale up or down, and about increased scrutiny on IT costs. I invited Rimini Street to give me an update on what they are seeing in the market. Two Rimini execs presented to me.

Hari Candidai, GVP, Global Thought Leadership and Research provided a corporate update and shared some of their ‘secret sauce‘ - how they deliver regulatory updates earlier than the publishers can, and how their customer service is so much more responsive, even at their much lower cost. I will run his segment in another episode of The Analyst Cam.

Below is the presentation from Jason Kotsaftis, Sr. Director Product Marketing about a recent survey of 200 PeopleSoft customers. He talks about their grudging move to PeopleSoft Release 9.2 and experience with Oracle's move to "continuous innovation" in the form of frequent updates. Many customers are reporting effort of 3-5 resources for 4 to 6 weeks for integration testing and other tasks for each update.  They also describe limited functionality they get from this "treadmill". They do so to stay current and not have tickets rejected when they do need Oracle support. In addition, most are also paying an AMS vendor for support in addition to the Oracle annual maintenance. 

He also discusses interest in PeopleSoft customers about moving to the cloud. Interestingly, many are reporting interest in IaaS, not SaaS. And even when they are moving to SaaS they are taking a best of breed approach not just evaluating Oracle's SaaS offerings.

Lots of interesting insights in this 20 minute presentation. Many of the survey insights also apply to other packaged applications from Oracle and those from other on-prem vendors.  

BTW You can download the survey by registering here 

 

The Analyst Cam: Unit4 ERPx briefing

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

The Unit4 product team gave me a sneak preview of their ERPx product being showcased today at their virtual customer event, X4U.

I have excerpted about 30 minutes in the video below from the 75 minute briefing. 

Matthias Thurner, Chief Product Officer kicks it off with a corporate overview, the people centric industries and geographies Unit4 focuses on

At 9:26, Dmitri Krakowsky, ex-Google who has been advising Unit4 on future product directions, runs through some of the ERPx design principles. They leverage the Microsoft stack and reflect contemporary thinking like easy communication with the digital assistant Wanda which interacts via Slack, Teams or Skype instead of traditional e-mail.

I also liked his modesty - it has a realistic acknowledgement that for most customers today ERP represents Enterprise with a small e - it only delivers 25% or so of the total wall to wall functionality they need.

At 21.32,  Dimitri runs through a quick demo of Smart Invoices and the Extension Kit

At 26.10, Claus Jepsen, Chief Technology Officer and Dimitri go through some of the architectural and functional components and availability of ERPx.

I found it a very crisp briefing. I am sure as a result of X4U plenty of customers will want to learn much more. And I am sure analysts will have questions about migrations, feature parity across releases, hyperscalers beyond Microsoft.

According to Unit4: 

"New capabilities will now be developed in cloud. This enables us to make use of the Microsoft Azure technology stack for building, testing, deploying, and managing our ERP and additional cloud services.
The benefit of releasing capabilities via cloud is that they will not affect our customer’s ERP core installation, significantly reducing the impact of onboarding new functionality.

New capabilities can be made available for ERP 7 if specific features are deemed necessary or of particular interest for our on-premise customers."

Look forward to more conversations with them. 

The Analyst Cam: Zoho Workplace

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

Zoho launched Workplace last month - it is a suite of 9 applications to compete against Office365 and Google tools. The positioning is Workplace allows you to "seamlessly collaborate with your teams, no matter where you are, and get more done in less time."

I got an hour long briefing - I have extracted 20 minutes below

Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer kicks it off with some background on what he calls Zoho's "hidden gem". The suite has been evolving for 15 years and has adapted to the changing nature of work as it has become more remote with WFH, has become mobile-first etc.

At 11.25 Aarthi Elizabeth, Product Marketing Manager provides an overview of the 9 components that make up the suite.

Finally, my favorite part - at 13:36 Aarthi shows how the suite is not just horizontal. She does a nice walkthrough of use cases for the suite in the construction industry.