deal architect

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.

The New York Times still does not get it

In 2006, I asked the question "Is the media biased?" I wrote "No this is not about being liberal or conservative. This is about how little MSM covers business technology as against consumer oriented technology. New York City is home to the largest number of Fortune 500 headquarters. The NY Times has a strong business readership..... Maybe NY Times journalists ought to step away from their Macs and Google searches and go visit some of the CIOs at the numerous headquarters in Manhattan."

In 2007, someone far more influential, Bill Gates pointed out

"The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they're going to tell me about business computing; no, it's all about consumer computing."

Gates singled out the WSJ but the same applied to the Times.

So, over a decade later,  the Times now runs a story about how the city has "become a tech town". Clearly, with Amazon's recent interest (and then loss of interest) in Long Island City, and the growth of Silicon Alley, the tech intensity in the area has increased significantly. But those same CIOs I had talked about in 2006 have continued to spend tens of billions a year on tech. Wall Street has spent hundreds of billions since the deep recession in 2009 on building next-gen fintech. Agencies, another major NYC focus, have seen the swing to programmatic advertising and watched digital advertising become a $ 200 billion a year market.  

It sounds almost like Rip Van Winkle waking up from his 20 year slumber amazed how things have changed. No, New York has long been a flourishing tech town which the Times did not find that interesting. Consumer tech companies and sexier startups have made it bigger and more interesting to the Times but the underlying foundation has not disappeared and still does not get much attention.  

Davos: Not just for the elite

Alan Alper, VP and Editorial Director, has his fingerprints on most Cognizant marketing publications and events. He has been involved in the planning of Cognizant's presence and pitches at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum for the last several years. For a variety of reasons, he did not have a chance to personally attend. He did this year and I caught up with him about his "rookie" impressions of Davos.

This was my first year onsite in Davos.  I was really struck by the fact that there really are two Davoses.  There is annual meeting, where the elites of the world in business, government, policy, and academia get together to try to take on the world's grandest challenges.  Then there is the outside the Congress Center, what we call the alt-dot-Davos experience in which there are popup presences and storefronts up and down the Promenade hosted by big technology companies; banks and brokerages and the economic development authorities of developing countries; and also, not-for-profit and NGO organizations all trying to get heard above the din.

It was fascinating to me to see what I thought was both a divergence and convergence inside and outside the Congress Center.  Inside the Congress Center, clearly the conversation was all about the 4th Industrial Revolution and the impact that globalization is having across our ecology, economies and social systems. There is the hope and the dream that technology - AI, automation, blockchain - applied correctly, can help to alleviate some of the bigger challenges --which is WEF's mission to make the world better. 

There was the continuing conversation inside the Congress Center of keeping up with the demand for talent, primarily in the digital world, how we make sure that folks are well versed in technology, trained, equipped to help society progress and to leave no one behind.  There were murmurs of the tech backlash,  how big-tech is grappling with issues of trust and data stewardship.  And questions about whether we are heading for a global recession.

On the ecological front, I think the talk that took people by storm, really grabbed at its heartstrings was that of Sweden's Greta Thunberg who did a presentation titled “Our House is On Fire.”  I think she stole the show.  I mean it was just so authentic and genuine, this 16-year-old girl who basically is telling the world leaders that if we don't fix the ecological issues of our world, we are sunk - and time's a wastin. 

Inside the Congress Center, there was a lot of conversation about making the world inclusive.  Yet, when I looked at some of the data coming from  WEF, only 23% of the delegates are women.  That's only up 1% from last year.  I would draw a comparison to what's going on outside the Congress Center where, at least in my travels, I  encountered many, many women who are involved and passionate about addressing the issues of the day. They led conversation on the caring economy and how to make FinTech work so that there is more democratized access to information services not just in the developed world, but also in developing economies.

There were a number of really interesting women events, one that was sponsored by an organization called Female Quotient that I dipped in and out of a couple of times.  I could barely get in.  It was standing room only.  Again, they were tackling all the big issues of the day.  It was great to see that, at least outside the Congress Center, women are playing a huge role trying to create a dialog around issues that seem to be vexing to most business leaders and to everyone else.

Tech Talk

Reskilling, upskilling, humans to thrive in the future of work, that was a big topic everywhere you went. The conversation about job losses was a little more subdued this year.  I think people are now finally coming to realize that the whole notion of fearing the bot may be overplayed and that it's going to be some time before AI and intelligent process automation will take lots of jobs from people. 

I think there are places where clearly the rote and routine jobs are going to start to disappear.  But the prevailing wisdom is that, to make businesses work, we need to make technology more appreciative of the human condition.  The future of work is not "no jobs".  There are going to be new jobs that open up as a result of AI and automation.  They're just different jobs than we've seen today. 

Most of the people that I spoke to reject the notion put forth in the infamous Oxford study that 40+% of all  jobs are at risk of being automated away.  There may be tasks that go away, but not full jobs.

We did an event on blockchain, that was quite well received.  I think, down the road, we're going to see places many places where blockchain will boost underserved communities by providing data  and services, what some people call micro-moment applications.  For example, we're working with MetLife on a pilot project in Singapore that enables women with gestational diabetes, once they take a test to see whether they are susceptible to it, and if they do contract it, are able to be compensated for treatment directly on their cell phones without having to file a claim.

The other thing that got attention was just the humanizing impact of AI, the more we can put an empathetic veneer on AI and how it can enable more genuine, authentic, and meaningful interactions and how we can guard against bias, be it intentional or unintentional.  These are things, with proper governance and structural changes -- such as AI offices that enable organizations to create and follow policies and procedures -- that will ensure that AI is used for good purposes and that deliver great experiences, while weeding out bias that can affect  black box algorithms.

I  stopped by the Facebook pavilion.  Unlike a lot of the big tech companies, they allowed you to come in and browse like you would in a gallery or a museum.  On the walls they displayed  this wonderful narrative about the impact of social networks.  You know, obviously it was a very positive spin, but I was very happy to see that they did treat the whole question of the unforeseen consequences from social networking, particularly the  misuse of Facebook as a purveyor of fake news, and how data privacy needs to be better protected. They could have buried it, but it was there.  They didn't hide from it.

People gazing and networking

For me, personally, it was really enlightening.  We ran into so many interesting people. We were walking down the promenade the first morning, and I ran into Tim Cook.  We exchanged glances, and I decided not to say hello to him because he looked like he wanted to be left alone.  Even though Apple didn't have a pavilion in Davos, they had a presence there, so that was interesting. 

We saw Prince William.  He walked across the street from our pavilion, the Hub Culture Pavilion. We saw the Queen of the Netherlands, who had a meeting in the Hub Culture pavilion. 

There weren't as many big name political leaders. I think Merkel from Germany was the biggest name.  Macron from France didn't come.  Modi from India didn't come.  Trump wasn't there. As I said, I think Greta Thunberg was the lightning rod.  I think a lot of folks were very intrigued by her presentation. 

I met a former WEF heavyweight, Dr. Frank Jurgen Richter.  He runs an organization called Horasis.  It's The Global Vision Community.  He's offered us a speaking opportunity at his upcoming event in Portugal.

The alt-dot-Davos

The general press tends to cover the pronouncements that come out of the Annual Meeting, and disparagingly comments on "Oh, it's all these elites and they all fly in on private jets and fly in and out." That may be true, but the ultimate Davos experience is really all about the activity outside the Congress Center, that’s occurring up and down the promenade -- the people who are trying to collaborate, and work together to solve big challenges that we all face.       

We ran into this young woman, Christine Moseley, founder of a company called Full Harvest, which is focused on creating a more sustainable food supply chain.  She had been brought to Davos by Bloomberg.  She had just received her Series A funding, and she's out hiring people.  A great opportunity for her to evangelize what she's doing. 

Again, it's all these young, bright people who descend on Davos and really try to make a difference.  I don't want to say it's just a millennial thing, but it's a lot of people with high aspiration and interest in giving back to society and making the world better.  I know that all sounds very Pollyanna, but it was true.

In my conversations with our WEF partners, I have to tell you they are very encouraging and supportive of this alt-dot-Davos experience.  In fact, we had a number of them at our Future Workforce event.  Eric White, who oversees the IT and electronics industry community that our Vice Chairman & CEO Francisco D’Souza  leads, came to our event. We had a number of WEF shapers both at that event as well as our blockchain event.  In discussions with them, they're glad to see the experience that is blossoming outside of the Congress Center.         

I think WEF has done a good job of making sure that you get this cross-section of people in Davos who can have influence, have input, and shape conversations and strategies that can at least theoretically start to address what needs to be done.  Then it's for everybody else to kind of pick up and run with it and take the theory and turn it into action.

They could say, "This is a security risk that we don't want to deal with."  We're all better for it because they allow this new experience to kind of layer on top of what they're doing in the Congress Center.

New Florence innovation catalog: 14 years, 6000 posts

The New Florence innovation blog is celebrating two milestones in March. I started the blog in 2005 because enterprise tech was going through an innovation lull and I found inspiration in profiling progress in healthtech, cleantech, consumer tech and STEM topics. Honestly, I thought I would run out of material in a couple of years. After 6,000 posts, I can safely say I grossly miscalculated. 

I am glad I was wrong. In spite of all the doom and gloom around us, the blog's moniker continues to remind me this is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance.

My sources of material have evolved over time.

1. some posts are seasonal - every major event, could be the SuperBowl, Chinese New Year, the President's State of the Union address, Warren Buffet's annual shareholder letter and many others provide a nugget to explore. It's fun to see how St. Patrick's Day celebrations have evolved over the last decade!
2. many posts come from my travels - I am blessed to be invited to many conferences. My family is made up of digital nomads so I get to experience or hear of innovation in airlines, museums, event venues around the world. I am also shamelessly curious and ask details about people, products and places others may not notice.
3. other ideas come from Barnes and Noble and from the Texture app - I spent a few hours perusing magazines at B&N every few weeks. I subscribe to Texture and scan 50+ magazines on my numerous flights. Those along with Google News and other subscriptions give me plenty of other ideas.
4. my books provide more fodder - the blog has a symbiotic relationship with my books. Patterns I see across posts become the germ for book ideas. Extra material from case studies for the books become blog posts. I also excerpt chunks from the books for the blog.
5. my advisory work gives me plenty of other ideas but I am usually restricted by NDAs so cannot use much of that material. However, my advisory clients benefit from a rich database of case studies and an annoying array of dinner time stories.
6. many ideas come from readers - their suggestions are always appreciated.

On average, each post takes 30 minutes to research and curate.  I usually validate the stories with a couple of sources, and look for videos and images to enhance each post. It is a labor of love, and I am grateful to my blog sponsors for their on-going support.

I am glad I did not run out of materials after a couple of years. The blog has brought me unbelievable positivity - researching innovation and excellence does that in spades.

Look forward to cataloging global progress across a few more thousand posts! 

Photo Credit of Arno River and Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

Signs of Spring in Enterprise Software

The country is seeing a welcome break from the polar vortex. Temperatures remind us of Spring. Well, may not quite - winter is not done, but there is clear hope.

It's easy when you look at Wall Street's reaction to Workday or ServiceNow results to forget reality.  The reality is that there are over a million SAP, Oracle, Infor, Unit4, IFS, ADP, qad and other enterprise customers who are stuck with 15-30 year old ECC, Siebel, Lawson, Agresso, MFG/PRO and other legacy implementations.  For all the success of Salesforce, NetSuite, other SaaS vendors, and new products like S/4 and Fusion, the vast majority of the enterprise is in the tundra. There are a variety of reasons as Holger Mueller, Cindy Jutras, Frank Scavo and others explain in my upcoming book, SAP Nation 3.0. I also have a section on what I call SAP's "unforced errors". Trust me, I also show plenty of mistakes made by SAP's competitors.

However, I found signs of spring as I finished editing my book manuscript. It has 50 case studies spread over 200+ pages describing how they are  trying out different strategies.

Here is a sampling of strategies:

• Trying out Leonardo ML and IoT at Costco and GEBHARDT.
• Ring-fencing ECC with many of SAP's cloud properties, as with SuccessFactors at Terumo BCT and components of C/4 at Pregis, or Workday at Sanofi and Salesforce at Unilever.
• Two-tier deployments with SAP ByD and S/4 in their subsidiaries.
• Migration from ECC to S/4 on-premise at Johnsonville Sausage.
• New implementations in the S/4 Public Cloud like at MOD Pizza
• Trying out relatively new on-premise, but impactful, SAP functionality like IBP at Louisiana-Pacific.
• Leverage of mobile, wearable, satellite and sensory data at variety of customers    
• Developing new ISV functionality on SCP as Vertex has done with their indirect tax app.
• Next-gen data using the SAP Analytics Cloud like at the Executive Huddle at the San Francisco 49ers statdium
• Moving to new licensing and hosting models like Bombardier with IBM.

We also are seeing blends from this growing toolbox of strategies. So, CF Industries is moving to S/4 in the cloud, and at the same time has shifted to TPM from Rimini for its ECC support while it gradually migrates. GEBHARDT has been implementing a variety of SAP cloud products around its ECC on-prem implementation. Additionally, it has developed a customer portal and set of predictive maintenance services using Leonardo IoT and AIN capabilities.  

In addition, I cover burgeoning developer and startup communities around ML in China, Industrie 4.0 in Germany, in Silicon Valley, in India and open source around the world.

The case studies are spread across 30+ industries and 10 countries. I did that to show diversity and to show that we are just getting started. So many process areas around the world and in most industries are waiting to be modernized.

In fact, I present such a dizzying arraying of SAP product acronyms and industry TLAs that my editors and early reviewers all recommended a section at the front of the book which is titled "Do you speak SAPese?". I expect we will gradually start to see similar groundswell of activity around other vendors.

Secondly, my firm, Deal Architect, is gearing up for intense 2-3 day offsite sessions to help clients take a look at the changing market. That confab should cover the fit of many of the strategies above, while also evaluating internal and external talent and fit with emerging technology trends.

Of course, winter is not done. What we have seen is just a glimpse of what is to come. Time to celebrate with Camus: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

The book is expected to be out in April, in time to celebrate Spring. In the meantime, I will post periodic blogs to remind us all the enterprise is finally starting to thaw.

A key word for 2019 - authenticity

Happy New Year to all my readers!

I have spent the last month extracting from hundreds of pages of transcripts of my interviews for SAP Nation 3.0. I am struck by the frank comments from so many customers about SAP, its partners and its competitors. They realize these will be read by their peers at other customers and I appreciate their willingness to share. I know some of the comments will be used for competitive advantage. Fair warning to folks in the field – if you use it that way, bear in mind I have similar access to your customers and information about your products :)

Similarly, reading my notes from meetings with Franck Cohen, Rob Enslin, Nick Tzitzon and others at SAP, I see an openness which is refreshing. I give credit to Stacey Fish, my contact at SAP. She sets up calls/meetings and mostly observes even when we may be ganging up on her execs. She may ask me what I thought afterwards, but rarely does she push an overt agenda.

So, here is my request of other vendors – converse more with us, don’t just pitch. Don’t just outbound communicate to us,  invite our inbound requests. Open up more access to your customers. I love how Plex invites us to join their Customer Advisory Board once a year. If not,  not to worry, we can access customers through many other channels.

But do encourage your execs to be authentic. On that point, I see a trend for executives to talk about corporate “purpose”. I admire executive commitment to diversity and social good, but in the end as an analyst I am expected to focus on  functionality, architecture and economics. When I talk to customers rarely do they say “corporate purpose” was the reason they selected a vendor. It may have been a tie breaker, rarely a item which counts for more than 10% in their scoring matrix.  

On the other hand on functionality, architecture and economics I expect many more detailed conversations. As you will read in the book, SAP is in far better shape than people give it credit for. But SAP, its partners and its competitors have all missed out on many, many market opportunities in the last decade.

It’s a new year, and a very new market. Look forward to many more conversations.

Two HCM institutions

As Workday Rising kicks off in Vegas, it is time to also recognize two other HCM resources which allow us to keep annual tabs on the changing face of HR

HR Executive magazine announces their annual list of top products

“This year’s winning products represent the full gamut of priorities facing HR leaders: from employee financial wellbeing to learning and development to talent analytics. As was the case in the last few years, a number of leading solutions are in the area of talent acquisition and screening. The 2018 winners also illustrate the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence and machine learning in emerging HR technologies.”

The Sierra-Cedar 2018–2019 HR Systems Survey White Paper, 21st Annual Edition focuses on strategies, processes and vendors in six primary categories and 54 individual application areas.

Dreamforce Keynote–the good and not-so-good

I am not at the Salesforce event this week but changed my travel plans to make sure I could watch yesterday’s streaming of the 2 hour keynote.

Some of it was predictable. Marc Benioff  has an admirable loyalty to Hawaii, friends in the music industry, Monastic monks and Deepak Chopra and as far back as I can remember they have been fixtures at Dreamforce.

The customer profiles were mind-blowing. I love the generous time 3 customers – Unilever, Marriott and Brunello Cucinelli S.p.A – got on the stage. Too many vendors gloss over customer mentions in such sessions – have 50 logos on a slide or invite executives to just pick up some award. Salesforce executives did a really nice job describing technology as applied to each of these customers and their industries. And each had subtle “social” statements. The Ben & Jerry/Unilever portion focused on allowing customers to make sustainability choices about ingredients in their ice cream. Tony Prophet, a black executive pulled up on his Marriott app his reservation at a Bellevue property for a LGBT conference. Nice focus on diversity. Brunello, even speaking in Italian, passionately emphasized “soul” in business and implored Marc to create something enduring by invoking the Parthenon and Florence. All well done.

What I did not care much about was the long lead in. I have written before Salesforce overplays the activism card and that leads to expectations it often cannot live up to. What Tony did in his Marriott segment was so much more subtle. I also think Salesforce overplays the Trailblazer and ecosystem stance. As an application vendor, customers pay it a lot of money. The custom building and SI costs are over and above. If anything Salesforce should be aggressively managing this not bragging about the billions it is costing customers. As an analyst, I tell customers to evaluate vendors based on functionality, economics, architecture not their diversity or activist stance. So,  I cringed a few times at the beginning of the keynote.

All’s well that ends well and other vendors would do well to emulate the time and space the 3 customers got in the Dreamforce keynote. Watch the replay here – especially the portions on the 3 customers.

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

Start of tech event season

This past long weekend my wife and I were at two restaurants and one hotel, each of which was planning to shut down for a week or two for maintenance, to give employees some needed time off. I turned to my wife and said maybe we should also take a hint.

Not likely – Labor Day marks the start of the second half of tech event season. In general, I only accept a third to half of events I am invited to. The decision matrix has become more complex over the years

a) If it is an event aimed primarily at analysts and maybe a handful of customers that gets a high priority

b) If I am speaking, if the event will give me new materials for a consulting assignment or materials for books or many blogs the priority goes up.

c) If the analyst relations team highly customizes the agenda and arranges for customer meetings and relevant partner meetings the priority goes up.

d) if the event adds something interesting like Plex does with plant visits the priority goes way up

e) If an event is being streamed, it actually gets low priority to travel to

f) If it is an event I was at in previous years, it often gets low priority.

g) if it requires somersaults to get to the event, it gets low priority. It seems like some weeks have 4 to 5 interesting events in far flung cities.

Two events I am definitely not going to this year – Oracle OpenWorld and Dreamforce, both because of e) and f). I have decided on some, still considering others.

We live in a many to many world and often its like ships that pass in the night. Some vendors get offended when you decline an invite. Some analysts get offended when they are not invited to an event. I am much more of the mindset that it is September and October and I should be shutting down for some maintenance