deal architect

Thank you, Dennis Howlett

Dennis has announced he is retiring. I knew it was coming - he would often fret he did not have enough time for his large and growing family - but I would have bet it would be towards end of this year. Or next. I am glad I managed to record a couple of episodes with him in the last few weeks.

We had our fair share of disagreements - show me someone who has been spared that by Dennis? :) But I admired several things about him and let me share a few things you may not know about him

a) he is a Polymath

Every few months I would learn something new about him.  Listen to his bio in the excerpt below - it will blow your mind.  And he does not even mention here what he has been up to recently - building and painting 1/35 scale armored vehicles (three in progress and 18 more in his 'stash' he says)

b) a true blogging pioneer.

It hit me when Dennis, Frank Scavo and I recorded a Christmas episode. We took a walk down memory lane - see excerpt below. Each of us has been blogging for 15+ years. He was a purer play than either of us. Frank and I had advisory distractions. I spent a fair amount of time on my many books. He dedicated the last phase of his career to making enterprise blogging and the independent analyst model a respected source of industry influence.

c) he made time for so many

He was a whisperer to so many in the industry - check out the flattering comments on his LinkedIn post where he announced his retirement. I was constantly amazed how he could find the time. I certainly benefited - he reviewed every one of my books.

So, Dennis, thanks for the many laughs and cries. Enjoy time with the family and your train rides.

But please come back and record more episodes from time to time. I want the opportunity to say it a few more times - GFY :)

Burning Platform: Developers, Developers...

In the 31st episode of the series I am joined by James Governor, co-founder of Redmonk.

In September 2000, Steve Ballmer was ahead of most executives in loudly cheering for software developers. The video below leads off with his exuberance at Microsoft's 25th anniversary celebration. Since then. we have seen an explosion in developers in every corner of the world.

James has had a front row seat to these changes. Along with Stephen O'Grady and others at Redmonk they are a bit more subdued than Ballmer but they have been influential cheerleaders for developers, DBAs etc - and not just those with the Microsoft flavor.

James' view is we have gradually moved away from top-down dev mindsets to bottom- up ones facilitated by the intersection of Cloud Computing, Open Source and Social Coding

We cover wide ground - the trend towards more buy v build in the industry, the growth in citizen developers (see also the session with Amit Zavery of Google Cloud here), software quality, vertical differences. We discuss the growth of software communities around the world - he has some really interesting comments about Salesforce Trailblazers and the relatively untapped community in Nigeria. We also discuss Armenia, China and India and several other parts of the world.

Lots of positive energy from James - as there is in the rapidly multiplying developer pools around the world.

The Analyst Cam: IT Central Station on B2B buying trends

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.

I have had several industry analysts join me in my Burning Platform series over the last several weeks. I invited Russell Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of IT Central Station which offers a crowdsourced knowledge platform that helps technology decision makers to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.  

I thought he would provide some insight into the many IT categories his site tracks from Firewalls to RPA tools. Instead, he did something that most analysts have smartly stayed away from in 2021 - making predictions after most went so wrong in 2020.

Russell makes 6 predictions on how enterprise tech procurement will change this year.

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.

Occupation: Advisor, Analyst, Author

In my four decades of global travel, I have always hesitated about the correct occupation to list on a landing card or tell a passport officer (apparently I am not the only one who agonizes about that answer). At PwC, the answer used to be consultant or advisor, and I am sure I noticed a couple of immigration officers smirk at that. At Gartner, the answer was analyst, till an officer asked me "so why are you not using your diplomatic passport?" and I had to say "not that kind of analyst". I felt the most welcome ever entering Canada a few years ago. The immigration officer practically hugged me when I said I was an author. That did not last. Couple of trips later, in some other part of the world, that answer triggered the question "so how many copies of your books are you carrying?" Ergo, let's figure out how much customs duty you owe.

I should say AAA - as in advisor, analyst, author as my professional bio describes me. But then they would assume I worked for the automobile association.  Can you imagine how long I would hold up the immigration line?

AAA confuses far savvier clients of mine. Many of them see my 7 books and assume I am an academic. My accountant does not understand all the different revenue and spend categories that apply to each. Vendors see analyst and wonder why I don't do Magic Quadrants. Still others have no idea I write the New Florence blog - 15 years and 6,000 posts later. The Deal Architect name has led to inclusion on mailing lists for architecture magazines.

But deep inside I know if I were to unbundle AAA I would probably not get a nice reader review like this

'Mirchandani not only does his homework but seems to have first-person access to everyone who’s anyone in the technology sector, so the quotes peppering the text are all germane and keen'

Even better are those from my advisory clients who say "Thank you for stopping us from making a $20 m mistake" or others who say "you opened our eyes to all the white space in the market we were not addressing"

They don't get hung up on monikers. They do ask me how I manage any conflicts of interest. Otherwise, they just know the blend of AAA brings them a very different perspective and much higher payback than what they get from others. 

Curious - would love to hear from readers what unusual experiences you have had with immigration and customs.  

Vendors and Analysts: Influence v. Intelligence

Readers know my favorite vendor event is a summit - a day or two long analyst-centric event. Not that I mind going to user focused events but feel like I intrude on customer time there.

In the last year, I have seen analyst meetings get more nuanced and frankly more enjoyable with richer content

• Plex, which pioneered and continues to take analysts to customer plant tours, invited a few analysts to a Customer Advisory Board meeting. That took some courage but the interaction of their executives, their customers and analysts allowed for far more authentic back and forth. 
• SAP invited analysts and reps from ASUG (the N. American user group) to a licensing day event. Usually vendors are loathe to discuss pricing, trade-ins, audits.   That took even more courage as we were not shy in providing feedback. 
• Zoho invited a global set of employees, not just execs, to join in their analyst day. It accented the reality that Zoho's is blazing a dramatically different global path as I wrote here
• I recently had a chance to present to a group of consultants at Cognizant in India about my new book, SAP Nation 3.0. Instead of just listening to me, we turned it into a much more interactive session where we discussed other platforms, vertical solutions as well. I learned as much as they hopefully did - we could have gone on for a few more hours.

Even the evening gatherings are becoming more creative

• Workfront hosted a few analysts and customers at celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal's restaurant in London. Few things impress a tech analyst more than when you ask for a scoop of simple vanilla ice-cream and they drag in an elaborate contraption and make it in front of your eyes using liquid nitrogen.
• Workday chartered the California Spirit and took customer execs and analysts on a pretty sunset across the bay in San Francisco. Talk about ensuring a captive audience :)

It's not about elaborate settings. Frankly, I am more impressed that one CEO has started to host small dinners with analysts ( I missed the first one, but in an email he told me he looks forward to the opportunity to more sessions and to "listen and learn") and another CEO has similarly promised to make more time for one on ones.

All this contrasts to certain vendors who have not had an analyst summit in years (or ever) and many others where your only interaction with the CEO is via Q&A in a large press conference. It's their prerogative but certainly different from the share, listen and learn approach some of their competitors are taking.

Analysts can be used for influence or market intelligence - the ideal combination involves both.

Influence, Intelligence and SAP

Last week, in the Enterprise Irregulars chat room I said in a thread "Analyst Relations at vendors generally want to influence v. seek intelligence. So they want analysts to say nice things about what they can offer today. As important should be influence of their own R&D. This is how our market and competition are changing and how our offering should change. But how many vendors really want to hear that from an analyst?"

Well, I have to eat crow.

At a meeting SAP organized for analysts this week in Utah, they actively sought feedback on messaging they are planning for their SapphireNow event. They also shared plenty of detail on their $ 8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics. Xs and Os were definitely in the air as it coincided with their X4 Experience Management user event in town . SAP has been looking at datasets which integrate Qualtrics experiential data with operational data from its own systems.  It was all under NDA (at least for a few weeks till SapphireNow) but the conversation with many of the senior executives was refreshingly open. I cannot remember the last time we have had so much candid conversations with a vendor.

Two other things stood out for me on this trip. We got to see the Xs and Os in a very different setting. Stacey Fish and Craig Cmehil of SAP, Jon Reed of Diginomica and I helped kick off a hackathon at Brigham Young University. The dataset the students worked on included employee data from SuccessFactors and related survey data from Qualtrics. Thinking back to my own student days, I would have been intimidated by the assignment. But these young men and women have already used ERP software and data visualization tools in class and in internships. It was invigorating to see their enthusiasm.

I enjoy presenting at campuses around the world on themes from my books. This session coincided with the 14th birthday and 6,000 post anniversary of the New Florence blog. I told these young ones I was amazed my blog was going strong after all these years - for me so much innovation is the sign "it's a great time to be alive" like it was in Florence during the European Renaissance.

On the drive, we had conversations about changing developer communities, a theme I also cover in the book. Open Source, ML in China, Industrie 4.0 in Germany, changing investments in Silicon Valley. We talked about movies about developers and geeks - War Games, Tron, Pump up the Volume and many others. It was a useful reminder of the constant turmoil that technology brings. It's exciting and scary at the same time.

Being around the SAP management team this week, you could not help but sense the restructuring SAP is going through. Dennis Howlett describes it in his own Hollywood terms here. Open as SAP may be, I stayed away from prying too much. There are legal and other sensitivities during such corporate initiatives. As an individual, I sympathize with those that get hurt during such moves. However, in my book, I point to many opportunities SAP has missed so I think we will see even more change. And, whether SAP changes or not, the world around it is changing rapidly as our conversations at and to and from BYU brought out in spades.       

Having said all that, SAP is an aberration when it comes to openness. I see too many vendors seek out a string of positive tweets at their events, limit access for conversations with execs, express annoyance at even the slightest negative comment. What is concerning is many of these comments come courtesy of their customers but they would rather have not have them publicly repeated. I expect to get unhappy comments from other vendors in the book. They would prefer I only pick on SAP. So, for the most part my observation about influence v. intelligence still applies. Will it change? I hope so, but after 25 years at Gartner and since, I am also pragmatic.

What I can do, is to compliment vendors like SAP when they do show openness. And hope it spreads around the industry.

Forged by fire

Dennis Howlett writes about the "current levels of public angst among independent industry analysts at the state of enterprise software". He cites Raven Intel, Josh Greenbaum, Upper Edge, Brian Sommer, Jarret Pazahanick and me pointing to different problem areas in the market.

What's interesting is most of them are in my upcoming book, as are many other industry observers like Holger Mueller, Frank Scavo, Cindy Jutras and Dennis and his colleagues at Diginomica. However, in total they probably make up 50 pages in the book. 40 customer case studies make up 250 pages. In many ways, the customers are more critical than the analysts. As I write in the intro to the book

"All were brutally honest about what they did or did not like on their projects. Vendors will cringe when they read some of those comments, but other customers should benefit from their candid feedback. A point worth making is that vendors are likely to home in on the negatives in comments about their competitors. Trust me, all of them have similar warts."

Here's the reality. 20 years of cloud computing, yet 80% of customers are still hanging on to antique, on-prem solutions. Certain segments of the market like HCM and CRM have decent coverage - most operational areas do not. We are being delusional if vendor executives and analysts together do not scream out loud and say "something is not right". I pointed out a few areas in my note 'Polishing Brand ERP'.  My colleagues have other issues.

Vendors love praise. Some of them live for the stream of tweets they get at their events. Not sure that helps them close deals. Very few buyers are on Twitter, and only when they are in evaluation mode (once every couple of decades) do they read streams about vendors they decided against. They do listen to analysts, consult with them and read their long form reports. Especially balanced reports which point the good and the bad, and then allow them to make their complex decisions.

I was part of the analyst corps at Gartner from 1995 to 2000 which can take credit (and blame) for advising clients on 000s of ERP and related SI decisions. Ask vendor execs who dealt with us then - we were a terror. But if they are honest, they will also acknowledge that we made the market stronger and the solutions durable enough to last as long as they have. Current vendor executives would similarly benefit from a much more vigorous back and forth with analysts. As the saying goes "the strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell"

Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised at the openness I saw at SAP while writing the book. I write in the Acknowledgments

"Next, I want to thank Stacey Fish at SAP. While many others at SAP were helpful, she was my go-to contact and arranged for me to talk with several SAP customers and executives. In a world where software vendors only want to publicize positives, she allowed me "unfiltered access" to these executives.  I told her to help SAP put its "best foot forward." What I expected was plenty of marketing; what I also got was plenty of conversation and candor."

I would love to see similar conversation and candor from other vendors. I cannot force it from them, but I will continue to talk to their customers. I have gotten used to the heat in the forging shop.

Is vendor information flow too lumpy?

Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor recently hosted a virtual fireside chat. It’s something I have encouraged him to do in the past. It was only a half an hour or so and one of my analyst colleagues said it had a feel of “declaring victory after 5 years”. I passed on feedback to his AR team that he should do similar every quarter or so, and pick a different topic to drill deeper into – an industry or geography or a specific product area.

I miss Stan Swete’s updates every time Workday had a new release (they are up to release 31). He would crisply march through new features and also give a quick update on the state of the company.

What I am getting at is I would like vendors to do more phone briefings, not just present at longer in-person events. This is especially true of smaller vendors like Zoho, FinancialForce, Ultimate and many others. It is not that easy for analysts to fly to day-long events for each.

While I would prefer these in a group call, I am happy to take individual briefings as well. With the caveat that these are briefings to add to analyst body of knowledge, not a commitment to write something right away on the briefing topic.

The other feedback I have received from several clients is how removed events are from product reality. There are 50 shades of grey when it comes to features and maturity. What they present to us in analyst briefings under NDA is often are not available to purchase till 3-4 years later. What is shown in user conferences is 1-2 years out. What you get in response to RFPs and competitive evaluation demos is a more realistic representation of current state of product. It is only during implementation that you realistically understand maturity of that release and the quality of implementation resources familiar with that functionality. Finally, it is only when customers periodically talk to each other about their experiences do you get a feel for the real quality of a particular release. That’s another reason we need a more continuous information flow and conversation with vendors about “as-is” not just a “to-be” state presentation common at vendor events.

Of course, I can hear AR reps at vendors groan. They have a tough enough time coordinating information flow even in the current state of affairs. More continuous conversations with pesky analysts?

Come on, while most of us do not have the endless bank of fables Brian Sommer has access to, we are full of all kinds of useless trivia. We are pretty fun to converse with. Try us

Influence v. Intelligence

I am writing this on a flight home. Been gone 12 days in 4 hotels, 7 flights, 20 Uber rides. Have not checked two bags in a long, long while.

A friend asked me if I was ok since I have not posted on this blog in those days. I said yes, there was an entry a day on New Florence. And on this trip I have picked up tons of content. In scripted scenarios vendors are demoing at a consulting client which is modernizing its shop floor. In mind-expanding keynotes at Cognizant Community ranging from technology in healthcare, in the warehouse, to that in financial services and in conversations with executives from a wide variety of executives. And learning about vertical analytics at the Anaplan Hub event.

My reaction has shown up in advice to the client, in comments on the Cognizant Events mobile app and will also show up down the line in two blogs, books, social media, more consulting and presentations. It’s omni-channel in content world. And a reality check that not everything shows up in instant social media for all to see.

My accountant has long been used to the ebbs and flows in the channels we play in. Over the last year, the consulting channel has been vibrant. Lots of ERP customers are embarking on a 20-25 year refresh cycle. Many first-gen SaaS contracts are coming up for renewal. Outsourcers are pitching digital transformation projects. Lots of interest in a variety of automation technologies I covered in Silicon Collar. Even the vendor events I go to are changing – they include new names like Anaplan and Uptake. Briefings include those from new vendors like Aera and Workspan.

Our revenue mix changes from quarter to quarter with the pull and push of technology markets and our channels.What has not changed much is most vendors want influence, not intelligence. Some even get upset when we cannot make time for their events. But in the months following they don’t bother to check in. Bi-directional conversations don’t appear to matter. Just listen to what we have to say and write and tweet nice things about that. That’s influence in their minds.

The really smart ones want to mine all the other stuff we are exposed to and may cite somewhere, sometime in one of those channels. They don’t want to wait for that intelligence to show up in the public domain.

I chuckle that most vendors will gladly show analyst research (so long as it is positive) to their customers. But they ignore that very mother lode when they strategize about their own products.

I did not understand that when I was at Gartner. I don’t even today. In the mean time, far more important things await – like cleaning out the two bags I checked in