deal architect

Burning Platform: Raising the Bar for Analyst Summits with Truly Zoho

In the 83nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sandy Lo and Pooja Mittal in the marketing team of Zoho and they talk about the elaborate planning and logistics it took to host the Truly Zoho analyst event in Chennai and Tenkasi in India.

You have likely read perspectives from several analysts including Brian Sommer, Jeremy Cox, Ankita Singh, Thomas Wieberneit and seen videos from Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary and others. It is not an overstatement to say it was one of the most talked about events in the industry, especially considering only 15 analysts participated.

However, the positive outcomes and experiences took months of planning, which as they say had backups to backup plans and extremely complicated logistics many of which changed on an hourly basis

Here they are summarizing many of the gory details in about half and hour and sharing some of the photos and social media from the event.

Raising the bar for analyst summits does not give it enough credit – they blew the roof off!!

 

 

Time for the tech sector to think about “Business as Unusual”

I have seen it repeatedly, 4 years in a row. In 2020, I saw it in the pandemic stress in many execs I captured in the New Normal video series. In 2021, the Moment of Service book I helped IFS with showed me the massive changes in the industrial world as it servitizes.  In 2022, the book I helped SAP with showed me hundreds of new business applications that have emerged in auto, consumer industries financial services, healthcare and many other sectors. 2023 is still early but the month I have spent in India has exposed me a group of humans who are hustling like crazy to make up for 3 lost years.

And yet, I see too many technology vendors who are not evolving quick enough. The last couple of decades have been generous to most of us. So we hope the current slowdown is a temporary recession. We try to keep selling what we have in the bag. We hire for the same roles which brought us here.

It’s time to reinvent technology vendors. Obviously there are plenty of new addressable markets - but they call for new products, not spray painting old products or hyping up ChatGPT. There are many new networks to explore as we think of ecosystems. Economics to revisit as mature markets are getting commoditized. Analyst relations to be re-examined and organizationally re-positioned.

Let me just spend a minute on the last point. Some of you have heard me talk about using analysts for intelligence v influence. With most AR groups being organizationally part of marketing they mostly want praise from analysts. They spend way too much time striving for the top right in the Magic quadrant of a mature product. They would add much more value if they would help their company explore new markets and help with competitive analysis for that unfamiliar turf.

Cannot say I blame them. Many of them report to execs who clearly love the adulation. You can see the narcissism in these exec's social media postings. It’s delusion - if they looked at their own win-loss analysis they would see they are far from perfect. Very far. 

Personally I would love to see AR groups with a dotted line to marketing and also report to R&D and to corporate strategy.

That’s just one thought around reinventing technology vendors. In the next few months you will hear more from me about other recommendations. Technology is a very wide industry so I will nuance my thoughts for software vendors v outsourcers v hyperscalers.

Let me repeat what I have said a few times recently. Business as usual - circa 2019 - is a recipe for mediocrity. The tech sector is especially vulnerable. Time to shake up every aspect of the business.

Book speedwriting?

I asked followers on LinkedIn how they would use 4 months of sabbatical credits like I have accumulated over two decades at Deal Architect. I got plenty of suggestions including this from Andre Blumberg, CIO at Hong Kong based CLP who I have profiled in earlier books

“Four months? You’d write two books, easily.”

Andre is an ultra-marathoner so I am flattered by his standard of speed, but my style of book writing depends on a large number of conversations with executives. I have said often if my voice is more than 10% of a book, I have failed. My blogs, Instagram and other social media is where I share plenty of my voice. In our advisory work, clients get plenty of my voice. But books that I help write are for story telling by innovative executives. And arranging such conversations takes plenty of time.

But surely, having 7 earlier books helps shorten writing time? It does, up to a point.

I recently shared details of two books my team has helped with in the last 18 months – Moment of Service by Darren Roos, CEO of IFS and Business as Unusual by Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier of SAP.

Moment of Service involved about 50 conversations with IFS, customer and partner executives resulting in 1,000 pages of transcripts, slides and research material and took my team about 4 months. We delivered a draft of 300 pages. The IFS team added their voice and trimmed that total content down to  a very readable 200 pages.

Business as Unusual involved about 150 conversations resulting in 2,500 pages of transcripts and other materials and we delivered a first draft of 400 pages. Took us roughly 6 months. SAP and Rheinwerk Publishing added material, trimmed other and ended up with a 300-page book dripping with innovation stories.

So could we have done either much quicker?

Firstly, it absolutely helps to start with a premise and a pool of potential interviewees. Darren Roos had a pretty crisp definition of the Moment of Service theme. IFS had gone through a branding exercise a few months earlier. Most of his customers and partners were comfortable with the concept. Still the logistics of identifying who to interview, arranging the recordings , transcribing them, getting approvals is a labor-intensive process.

The SAP book subject matter was much more complex. It covers 8 “megatrends”  - Resilient supply networks, Future of capital and risk, Integrated mobility, Everything-as-a-service, Sustainable energy, Lifelong health, New customer pathways and Circular economy. We were looking for very innovative customers who were pushing the boundaries of low-carbon energy, breakthrough medicine, new financial instruments, differentiated store experiences, new business models etc. We were looking to interview a broad range of specialty research firms and partners beyond SIs. We ended up with  strategy firms, Bain and Co and Accenture Strategy,  the mobility services firm, MHP which is part of Volkswagen, the industrial robotics firm, Beckhoff, the Advanced Services Group at Aston U and the energy research firm, Det Norske Veritas among others. Frankly, without SAP’s amazing industry and global reach we would have not got that variety with other vendors even if had taken 3x the time.  

But hasn’t technology and automation helped make the process speedier? Absolutely, in the data collection process. No way could I have traveled to 35 countries to meet with interviewees especially with pandemic travel restrictions. Zoom and Teams were a massive help. So was being able to listen to the digital files of interviews as if they were podcasts on my walks and via Bluetooth in the car. Helped me decide what to excerpt from each.

Tech has also helped make easier the graphics that IFS and SAP developed for their books. Printing and Distribution has similarly become more efficient. SAP Press is offering the Business as Unusual book through many more booksellers around the world and in more eBook formats

Given all the advances in AI, voice recognition and transcription technology has surprisingly not improved much. We have so many accents, acronyms and jargon in tech world that machines just cannot keep up with Tina, who has transcribed most of my book interviews for the last 5 years. And the SAP book in particular has whole bunch of chemistry, geology. medicine, automotive, banking and other lingo in addition.

Same thing with editing. I like to cite the experience from the Godfather movie. Coppola shot 90 hours of film and delivered a 2-hour version to the studio. The studio asked him for more and the released version was about 3 hours long – still less than 5% of what was filmed! Two of the 6 editors won Oscars for their work. 50 years later, I find editing is still an art form. Good editors are worth their weight in gold.

So 2 books in 4 months? Sorry Andre, like I told you if I was to use 4 months of sabbatical time to write another book, it would be fiction. About an analyst who is in the middle of international intrigue and chaos and saves the world. Jack Ryan if he had stayed an analyst.

If the Mrs. would allow me to spend 4 months looking like this nerd 😊

Burning Platform: The year in industry events and travel

In the 81st episode of Burning Platform, we host Jon Reed of Diginomica and Brian Sommer of Techventive to discuss the good and bad in industry events we experienced this year and on the state of business travel.

I carved the recording into two videos.

Part 1 covers the slides all three of us presented. Jon kicks it off at 0.59 “I felt before the pandemic events were largely what I would call legacy and not creative enough. And I felt the same as we went into virtual events that most of those events were really passive viewer experiences that really weren't very engaging and very good. Have however, seen a little bit of progress.” He provides a score card in his slides on how hybrid events have evolved.

Brian, starting at 12.00 is entertaining as he describes the trials and tribulations of post-COVID travel. He has several hilarious slides and also useful advice on what events should aim to deliver for customers, prospects and partners (and also how partners could be effectively using the events) – and yes, us analysts.

I start at 24.08. I had much less travel than either Jon or Brian last couple of years, But I made up with over 700 virtual conversations – about 200 for books by execs at IFS and SAP my team has contributed to and another 500 in various video episodes of Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and New Normal. I also describe the events I was at in-person and some of my travel experiences.

Part 2 is more of discussion between the 3 of us. We cover what we like and don’t like about keynotes and guest speakers, whether we prefer dedicated analyst summits or use conferences, need for expanding ecosystems and their presence at events, showcasing differentiation products and business models and lots of other areas event planners will find helpful

 

 

Burning Platform: IFS Unleashed in Miami

In the 77th episode of Burning Platform, we host Oliver Pilgerstorfer, CMO of IFS, a repeat guest of ours

He provides a sneak preview of their upcoming Customer Event, Unleashed scheduled from October 10 to 14 in Miami.

We discuss their decision to go with Miami when most tech vendors prefer Vegas or Orlando or the Bay Area for their events. We cover some of the agenda – it will center around the theme of “Moment of Service” which CEO Darren Roos does a great job articulating. Every business has multiple, fleeting moments where it either delights or disappoints its customers. Darren is passionate about orchestrating your assets and your people to deliver those Moments of Service. And his customers do so in complex, multinational settings.

We discuss the show floor which will showcase IFS’s growing ecosystem. Finally, we discuss some of the fun items they have planned.

As I tell him, Miami is an inspired choice. While we are partial to the West Coast of Florida having lived here for 3 decades, Miami is a vibrant, cosmopolitan city. With his guests a short walk from the city’s famous beaches, Oliver and his team are putting together a compelling agenda to match that competition.

Feel the excitement in this short session. As he says it will be great to get the band together again. And join me in experiencing it.

See you in S. Florida!

Verticals at Dreamforce

I am looking forward to the Salesforce event next week, and expect to be spending time in the  “Industries” Zone in the Dreamforce Campground. My FitBit is going to be pleased - the Campground is 40,000 square feet in size!

 I hope to get updates with several execs who have presented on their sectors in the Analyst Can series over the last few weeks.

• Eran Agrios, Financial Services
• Amit Khanna, Health and Life Sciences
• David Fan, Communications
• Sunil Rao, Consumer Goods
• Nasi Jazayeri, Public Sector

Under embargo. I was briefed about a new one this week. Will run that after the event.

I also have a post-Dreamforce recording planned with Jujhar Singh, EVP Industry Clouds.

Look forward to meeting several of you there!

Analyst Cam: Buday Thought Leadership Partners

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 Bob Buday of Buday Thought Leadership Partners. For over 3 decades, he has been helping organizations think big at CSC Index, Bloom Group and now at the firm he leads.

We have a really invigorating conversation around “blockbuster” ideas which have influenced so many of us including Michael Hammer’s reengineering, Clayton Christensen’s disruption, CEB’s Challenger Sale concepts and several others.

He shares techniques which work (and do not work) when it comes to developing what he calls “momentous” ideas. Many of the ideas he has helped up shape end up as management books and influential articles in publications like the Harvard Business Review.

Nicely done in under half an hour. It is a nice primer to his new book Competing on Thought Leadership.

The New Polymath: The SAP version

I don’t like to play favorites across my books, but many readers say they really liked my 2010 book, The New Polymath.

The book bio read

“A Polymath—the Greek word for Renaissance Man—is one who excels in many disciplines. From Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin, we have relied on Polymaths to innovate and find creative solutions to the problems of the day. How would these Renaissance men and women manage our current technology bounty? Which disciplines would they choose to focus on? Would they work on the architecture of next-generation green cities, or focus on nanotechnology?

As our challenges have grown exponentially we need to bring together da Vinci, Franklin, and many more. The New Polymath is an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.”

I had a call with a SAP banking customer this week which took me back to the book:

    “He: Vinnie, a lot of these terms I have discussed will be new to you. So happy to revisit and clarify if we need to.

    Me: Believe me, as part of this project, I've gone from the auto industry and all the changes there (electrification, sharing, autonomy etc.) to healthcare to supply chains…

    He: it's fascinating, is it not? SAP is at the center of it all.”

I could have told him about also learning about a dazzling array of new business models,  carbon capture, cold chains. green hydrogen, molecular recycling, robotics in food service, reverse logistics, pharma track and trace and more. And the underlying tech it takes to support them including augmented reality, blockchain, computational chemistry, digital twins, not to mention hardened, high-reliability computing.

Over the last few weeks, SAP has allowed me to “walk the halls” with its executives, its customers and its partners. It has been demanding - not jet lag, but clock lag from Teams and Zoom sessions at all hours with folks in 20 countries so far - and trying to keep up with so much coverage SAP has across verticals, geographies and business processes. I replay the conversations as podcasts when I drive, I have nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts to mine.

Here we are in 2022 and we are worried about climate change, COVID and Ukraine. If you get away from all the political noise, our businesses are thankfully still focused on new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.

And the realization that we cannot do it alone. I heard a story about how a high-level auto executive came to visit Christian Klein, CEO of SAP as supply chains were being disrupted and told him “‘We have a couple of challenges in our business which I cannot solve alone and I don't think we can solve it with just one software company.’ That was the genesis of the auto industry network, Catena-X and since then SAP has been thinking about networks for many more industries.

“We cannot do it alone” is showing up in SAP’s rapidly changing ecosystem. Long dominated by SIs, I have talked to strategy firms, Industry 4.0 operational partners, startups in the SAP.iO Foundries accelerators. The ecosystem also has digital agencies, NGOs, outcome-based outsourcers and more.

Not every customer tells me “SAP is at the center of it all”. Many of them talk about S/4 or BRIM or hundreds of other SKUs in the product portfolio. But then you see the forest for the trees - what the broad SAP family is working on. It about so many edge applications – it’s not just about new medicine, new energy, new algorithms, it’s about new everything….

Demanding it has been, but as I felt when I wrote the book in 2010, most of these conversations make me go “wow” – and optimistic about the state of the world.

2022 will be MASSIVELY different!

Welcome back. Hope you had a relaxing break and are ready for a hectic, very different 2022.

Actually, “very different year” has been our annual guiding principle and reflects Deal Architect’s business model. Every year our revenue stream varies and we have learned to be flexible. Let me explain that first, then my belief why 2022 will be truly different.

Deal Architect will turn 18 this year. Back in 2004, I wrote our mission statement:

“We are a boutique advisory firm and content provider which believes in massive leverage. We use our intellectual property in small teams for disproportionate payback for our clients. Our focus is not just IT – we will also focus on energy, health, space and other STEM areas. Our consulting and research are symbiotic - our consulting clients benefit from our research, and our readers benefit from the practical, field feedback from our clients"

The mission has not changed much at all. The blend of our advice and content has, however, changed dramatically.

Our advisory work tends to be ahead of the curve. We started advising clients on India and other talent sourcing. In reverse, we started to tell some of them to rebalance that by the end of the decade given the quality and inflation issues we were seeing. We started helping clients with cloud computing and SaaS evaluations as early as 2005. Now, we are helping clients rethink business processes to reflect massive changes in every vertical industry sector and take advantage of a wide range of digital and automation technologies from robotics to wearables to machine learning. BTW, you don’t hear much about our advisory work. Some of our clients show up in book case studies or in some of our videos but I would never violate their trust - leave it up to them to share what they are comfortable publicly sharing.

Our content has similarly gone through significant change. We started off with two blogs – New Florence and Deal Architect. They have since cataloged nearly 13,000 entries in IT, but also in energy, food, space, travel and many other dimensions. We have published 7 books. Increasingly, we are helping narrate books for C level executives, even considering non-fiction. Hey, if John Grisham could make attorneys exciting, surely someone can do that to tech industry analysts, no? 2 years ago we started videos in the Burning Platform and Analyst Cam series. We have already recorded over 200 episodes.

Both for advisory and content we rely heavily on partnerships with other professionals. For each book, I have leveraged a transcriptionist, an editor and a design wiz. Most of our advisory projects are similarly with other small, highly driven teams.  

We are always being asked to evolve our services and content. We have considered launching a “lite advisory” service – by the day or even by the hour. Content wise - people have asked me how about a podcast? How about a Substack newsletter? 

All worthwhile, but to me it always comes down to form v substance. Each new delivery format takes time away from the substance. And substance wise, this year will be massively different. Here are some of our guiding principles for 2022

• Rebalancing of private and public sector

Going back to days of Keynes, government deficit spending has frequently revved economies out of recessions and other crises. But nothing like the pandemic has seen. In the US alone, our national debt in 2020 and 2021 increased over $6 trillion. That is unhealthy and addictive. Worse, it has given our politicians and bureaucrats almost autocratic power. I see a course correction and a lot more energy back in the private sector. In 2020, I ran a video series where I interviewed C- level execs. It was called “Acrobatics during the Crisis”. We expect to similarly catalog in 2022 private sector heroics and consult with them as they reshape broken supply chains, rebalance their work forces and rethink processes for a changed world.

• Upheaval in most industries

Every industry learned to do something very different during the pandemic. Telemedicine in healthcare, distance learning in higher ed, micro-fulfillment in retail, last mile delivery in food service, virtual open houses in real estate among them. These will get baked into the business fabric for these industries. Climate change is having a similar impact – the circular economy has become a design principle in product design. Digital transformations are allowing for new business models like servitization in many industrial sectors. It is a hugely exciting or frightening time, but no industry will escape untouched. 

• Ascendancy of customer service

One of the biggest casualties of the pandemic has been customer service. I have coined the terms “COVID copout” and “Brexit BS” for some of the excuses we have all experienced. It is universal - in our travels, at auto dealers, at financial institutions, at dining establishments. Here is my reaction – for the next couple of years, businesses which can provide consistent. predictable service while managing price inflation will ABSOLUTELY gain competitive advantage.

• Man-machine rethink

Five years ago I wrote Silicon Collar. The book looked at how automation – machine learning, robotics, unmanned autonomous vehicles, white collar bots, and exoskeletons – was changing the nature of work in over 50 settings – in accounting firms, on the basketball court, in banks, in the oil patch, in R&D labs, on shop floors, in the warehouse and many more. The conclusion “we are no longer white, blue or brown collar workers – we are all Silicon Collar workers since technology is reshaping all our workplaces”. The man- machine balance shifted significantly during the pandemic. People are also talking about the “great resignation”. I am also seeing the “great migration” and the “great retirement” as tens of thousands relocate to my home state, Florida. Many are technically not retiring but starting new careers. And like our quarterback, Tom Brady who at 44 continues to break the laws of aging, are inspiring others to extend their careers, and are attracting surround talent along with their own moves. Companies have long ignored age as a dimension in their diversity goals. I expect that to get rethought.   

• Further content fragmentation

For my blogs, I have always read a portfolio of magazines and watched a wide range of non-political video channels. The pandemic and climate change focus has got us addicted to lots of COVID and weather and energy related news. I am seeing lots of citizens question government propaganda, media bias and social media censorship. The old Watergate “follow the money” guidance is alive and well when it comes to trust about information.  As a result, information fragmentation has massively accelerated - I have been amazed how many fringe platforms and media personalities have gained market share.  The good news is I tend to depend more on primary research and balance out a wide range of information sources. The more the merrier.

Long and short, I believe 2022 is the true start of a brand new decade after a couple of aberrant years. As Brady likes to scream “Let’s Go” and  that is now part of his new Hertz endorsements.

Burning Platform: Acronyms, Buzzwords and Customer Realities

In the 56th episode of Burning Platform, we host Jon Reed, a co-founder of Diginomica.

He is a fellow Enterprise Irregular who blogs and videocasts on enterprise trends. One of his most popular, regular features is Enterprise Hits and Misses. He is incisive, snarky, funny all at once.

We start off dissecting a Gartner slide from their recent Symposium, a list of 12 of what they call "Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022" like Hyperautomation.  We use that as a launching pad for a discussion on what we think customers are looking for after the turmoil of the last 18 months. Jon makes a great point - he wishes he could see Gartner's hype cycle around each of their 12 trends.

We discuss the need for application/business process vision in addition to architectural evolution, and the need for OT (operational technology, especially industry specific) in addition to an IT focus.

We also discuss virtual events in the industry. Jon has been particularly forceful in pushing for an evolution in that format.

We also bring into the conversation a fellow analyst, Ray Wang and his new book, Digital Giants. Ray had presented about it in the Analyst Cam series here. 

It is a peek into conversations that us market watchers often have when we are away from tech vendors and buyers. Actually both of us are pretty well behaved - we can be far snarkier when there is no camera in sight:)