ERP Today North America March 2023

BILL M c DERMOTT

MELISSA DI DONATO

CHRISTIAN KLEIN

ROB ENSLIN

DARREN ROOS & ALEX RINKE

CARL ESCHENBACH TO LEAD NEXT CHAPTER NEW DAWN NEW WORKDAY

ORACLE & IBM ON THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABILITY INFOR: WHAT DOES A PAPER COMPANY KNOW ABOUT ERP?

Accelerate your journey to Oracle Cloud and transform with IBM’s cognitive and automation solutions, tailored by industry and business process domain.

EDITOR

Paul Esherwood paul@erp.today

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Tony Little tony@erp.today

DESIGN DIRECTOR

Ceci Perriard ceci@erp.today

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Giacomo Lee giacomo@erp.today

HEAD OF OPERATIONS & EA

Lauren Tilbury lauren@erp.today

TECHNOLOGY EDITOR

Adrian Bridgwater adrian@erp.today

CHIEF STAFF WRITER

Stephanie Ball stephanie@erp.today

SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Sarah Thomas sarah@erp.today

DESIGNER

Jasmine Roberts jas@erp.today

COMMERCIAL MANAGER

Richard Carr richard@erp.today

YPN CO-ORDINATOR

Grace Barrington grace@erp.today

PR ANALYST

Melissa Evatt melissa@erp.today

OFFICE SUPPORT ASSISTANT

Michelie Blaney michelie@erp.today

TRAINEE

Ella Moloney ella@erp.today

EVENTS DIRECTOR

Hilary Campton hilary@erp.today

EVENTS PROJECT MANAGER

Leah Bradley leah@erp.today

TECHNOLOGY MANAGER

Lee Sherwood lee@erp.today

FEATURE WRITERS

Marc Ambasna-Jones, Christine Horton

PHOTOGRAPHY

Darren Miller, Michael Weschler

Joel Chant, Kurt Rebry

EDITOR’S WORDS

Welcome to the first edition of ERP Today North America

We have been publishing ERP Today in the UK and Europe since 2019 and we thought it was about time we brought our brand of journalism to our friends across the Atlantic.

ERP Today is a different kind of media platform. We deliberately stay away from technical analysis and try to educate and entertain our readers with creative and thought-provoking journalism. We cut through the hyperbole and zero-in on the information that CxOs need to navigate the complex world of enterprise technology.

This first edition is a showcase: we have profiled many of the brands and leaders that are at the sharp end of digital transformation and designed the magazine to give you a preview of what’s to come. In future issues we will dive much deeper into specific topic areas like ERP modernization, artificial intelligence, sustainability, cloud and diversity.

Our exceptional design and production values help to build trust in our brand and our print publication is the foundation for all our other content. Our editorial attempts to break down complex multi-layered problems into three simple steps: what was the problem, what is the solution, what are the benefits? This simple formula can be applied to virtually any effort to use digital technologies. Tech for tech’s sake is a waste and we believe that investments should be made to solve specific problems with sustainable and measurable outcomes.

Despite our title, we don’t only talk about ERP. We believe that ERP is the core component for any digitally ambitious enterprise. But, we also know that a reliable and clean core is just the start of the story. ERPs are the engine that power agility, resiliency and opportunity. They are the foundation on which an enterprise can compose its digital future and they have the potential to solve many of the world’s most complex problems.

ERP Today abides by a simple guiding principle that shapes how we think and report. We write all our content with the end user in mind and have spent four years learning what CIOs and CFOs want to read and what they don’t. I am yet to meet a single finance leader who bought an ERP solution based on a share price or how much ARR grew in the last quarter. Other media outlets wax lyrical on the back of quarterly earnings calls, but that narrative has very limited audience interest.

We know from experience that business leaders consume information in different formats, so we deliver our content through a blend of print, digital and video platforms. Combining these elements allows us to meet the user where they choose and provides an opportunity for brands to connect with an engaged audience on a platform that is trusted and respected.

ERP Today also hosts the industry’s biggest in-person event in the UK. The ERP Today Awards is the only event that the whole industry attends and we will bring the same format event to North America soon. To find out about the awards program, scan this QR code. We are also staunch supporters of young talent and operate a young professional’s network (YPN) to give young talents a voice in the industry and will also bring the YPN and the YPN Awards to North America in 2024.

I hope you enjoy the first issue of ERP Today North America. If you would like to contribute to a future issue, please say hello.

Scan for more on the ERP Today Awards & Fundraiser

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CONTENTS

78

Do ERPs hold the key to meeting sustainability goals?

Oracle and IBM explain why it’s time we thought about a new value metric

ERP TODAY . NORTH AMERICA . Q1 2023

NEWS DEALS &WINS

Oracle delivers cloud for Uber in “landmark competitive win” for the vendor

BY STEPHANIE BALL

In a series of new and hefty contracts, Uber has announced a seven-year partnership with Oracle to drive new product innovations, modernize infrastructure and pump the accelerator on profitability.

The ride-hailing and delivery service goliath is set to migrate some of its most critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle will also become a global Uber for Business client.

Oracle CEO, Safra Catz, named the deal a “landmark competitive win for OCI” and said: “Uber is expanding into a ‘go anywhere, get anything’ platform, and the company needed a cloud partner that shares a relentless focus on innovation.

“This is further validation of the momentum and acceleration we are experiencing in the market. Enterprises, governments and startups around the world are recognizing the differentiation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and experiencing our performance, security and economic benefits versus other hyperscalers.”

Back in December 2022, during Oracle’s fiscal second quarter announcement, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison

hinted at the success of signing “multiple customers to infrastructure contracts exceeding $1bn”. By the size of Uber, and the landmark seal of approval issued by Catz, it’s unconfirmed, yet very likely, that this Uber contract is one of the mystery deals.

But like many other firms, Uber is refusing to put its entire technology shopping list into one digital basket. Its tech stack is cloud hopping with an additional seven-year contract signed simultaneously with Google Cloud, as well as a pre-existing deal with AWS , which allows the firm to stream real-time analytics with Redis, AWS Fargate and Dash framework.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has touted Oracle as the cloud provider that will deliver maximum innovation while reducing overall infrastructure costs. Uber and Oracle will also continue co-innovating on additional retail and delivery solutions, including last-mile logistics.

Meanwhile, Google has been earmarked as Uber’s go-to cloud provider to improve, reimagine and innovate the customer experience with Ads and the Google Maps Platform, data cloud

technologies, AI, ML, security and microservices.

“Uber is revolutionizing the way people, products and services move across continents and through cities,” said Khosrowshahi. “To deliver on that promise for customers while building value for shareholders, we needed a cloud provider that will help us maximize innovation while reducing our overall infrastructure costs. Oracle provides an ideal combination of price, performance, flexibility and security to help us deliver incredible customer service, build new products and increase profitability.”

It’s a tech stack that is becoming more complex by the deal. But with Oracle, Google and AWS jostling in Uber’s backseat, it’s also a further endorsement of the multi-cloud strategy that is being adopted by many of the world’s digitally-native companies. Uber makes its living by moving people around the planet and this new technology deal will allow the firm greater flexibility to deliver improved customer experiences. The key challenge for Uber will be to focus on its own destination in a more complex cloud environment.

Safra Catz

ALL CHANGE AT WORKDAY AS CEO BHUSRI PAVES WAY FOR SUCCESSOR

Workday has announced the appointment of Carl Eschenbach to co-CEO as part of a succession plan that will see Aneel Bhusri step back from the business. Chano Fernandez is also leaving Workday as of De-

cember last year.

Eschenbach will serve as co-CEO alongside Bhusri, Workday’s co-founder and CEO, until January 2024, when it is expected that Eschenbach will assume control as sole CEO.

The new exec is a venture capitalist with strong

technology experience. He has been a partner at  Sequoia Capital since 2016, having worked closely with high-growth, innovative enterprise software organizations.

Commenting on the announcement, Bhusri said: “We have an incredible op-

portunity in front of us and I’m confident that Carl, with his leadership skills and experience in helping technology companies scale, as well as his commitment to culture and values, will help lead Workday through its next phase of growth. Chano has been an integral part of Workday since he joined almost nine years ago and has helped us to achieve great success and growth. We thank him for his many contributions.”

Eschenbach added: “I’ve long admired Workday and how it has redefined the enterprise software industry, with a focus on putting people at the center, a values-based approach to leadership and a relentless focus on customer service and innovation. I’m thrilled to be expanding my role at Workday and working with Aneel, the leadership team and our amazing group of employees to help us build on this great momentum and take hold of the massive opportunity in front of us.”

EY AND SAP PARTNER TO DRIVE SMART CHEMICAL DIGITIZATION

EY  has launched its Intelligent Chemicals Solution (ICS), to sup port chemical companies with innovative technologies across the chain and help prepare their businesses for the future through digital transformation.

Based on the latest version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the solution covers key chemi

cal processes including: oduction planning and detailed scheduling, sales and service, enterprise asset management, multiesource scheduling, and environment, health and safety management. ICS also improves program design by taking an xperience-led approach to workshops.

Carl Eschenbach

IFS has announced its financial results for the full year, marking the fifth consecutive year the company has secured strong double-digit revenue growth.

Software revenue grew by 28 percent year-on-year to SEK 6.6bn. Cloud revenue growth was up 80 percent as existing and new customers switched to IFS Cloud, ac-

High five: IFS sees double-digits for fifth consecutive year

celerated with  the launch of Arcwide in April last year.

Annual recurring revenue was up 57 percent YoY, with the rise driven by bookings from new customers. Net revenue was SEK 8.4bn, representing a 19 percent increase

"2022 was characterized by acceleration. We have reached a landmark $1bn revenue."

on 2021 figures. The firm attributes its success to its evergreen model, with its twice-yearly release cycle allowing IFS more than 10,000 customers to adopt regular updates while negating the need for costly upgrades. New customers are currently av-

eraging 9.5 months from contract to value.

The IFS partner ecosystem also grew 65 percent YoY, and participated in over 50 percent of implementations, with over two-thirds of its largest partners signing up to the IFS partner success program following its launch in Q1 2022.

The 2022 financial year also saw IFS win several awards for its software, notably ERP Today’s Vendor of the Year Award, and, for the ninth year running, the  Gartner Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management.

IFS CEO Darren Roos said: “For IFS, 2022 was a year characterized by acceleration. We increased our headcount to over 5,500 employees, reached a significant landmark in revenue at $1bn and outpaced our competitors by delivering double-digit growth for the fifth consecutive year."

Samsara swings three-year high with headcount swell

Samsara announced its fourth quarter financial results, reporting quarterly growth at its highest in three years and a 40 percent headcount swell.

Q4 revenue grew 48 percent, reaching $186.6m and bringing full fiscal year revenues to $652.5m, up 52 percent year-on-year.

Annual recurring revenue

(ARR) reached 795.1m, increasing by 42 percent YoY, and showing the gains of the firm’s continued investments in the physical ations market. Going against the industry grain, a rise in customer demand has seen Samsara boost its headcount team in fiscal 23 to over 2,200. a added over 400 more large customers to the fold this year, with

over 1200 accounts now reaching over $100,000 in ARR, a 53 percent rise YoY. Operating losses shrank significantly, reducing to $60m in Q4, and for the full fiscal year down to $259.5m, a $94.3m difference YoY.

Guidance for Samsara’s full fiscal year 2024 expects revenues between $838-$848m, representing 28-30 percent growth YoY.

Darren Roos

Sanjit Biswas

ServiceNow has unveiled a major partner program transformation to further partner growth and customer success.

The multi-year vision supports the $500bn market opportunity for the Now Platform and associated partner services with a redesign of the company’s partner program, featuring a new partner development fund amongst other incentives and benefits.

The new ServiceNow Partner Program includes four new distinct modules for build, consulting and implementation, resale and service provider partners. New incentives

will enable partner growth through maximized investments and opportunities to demonstrate expertise. Additionally, the partner experience will see enhancements such as a ‘partner finder’ that allows customers to choose the right partner best suited to their business.

Erica Volini, senior vice president of alliances and channel ecosystem at ServiceNow, said: “The vision for ServiceNow partners is that they should be treated as co-creators of value, and as co-pilots on our journey to becoming the platform for digital business.”

Unit4 launches new Marketplace platform

Unit4 has launched Unit4 Marketplace, a new platform where its ISV, reseller and service partners can showcase their innovative, bespoke industry and vertical apps that link to

Unit4’s ERP solutions.

The Unit4 Marketplace will launch with nine of the company’s global partners and will enable customers to quickly extend the capabilities of their

THOMA BRAVO TO ACQUIRE COUPA FOR $8BN

Thoma Bravo has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire  Coupa Software, a leader in business spend management.

The all-cash transaction has an enterprise value of $8bn and is expected to close in the first half of 2023, wherein Coupa will become a privately held company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Coupa shareholders will receive $81 per share in cash, representing a 77 percent premium to Coupa’s closing stock price on November 22, 2022.

existing Unit4 solutions with ready-made integrations. Customers will be able to access a catalog of apps, visible through a single and filterable storefront.

"SERVICENOW PARTNERS SHOULD BE TREATED AS CO-CREATORS OF VALUE AND AS CO-PILOTS ON OUR JOURNEY"

Mike Ettling

Carl Thoma

Erica Volini

SAP drives continued cloud momentum with Q4

HPE delivers recordsetting results for Q1

HPE has revealed its highest first-quarter performance since 2016 with revenues of $7.8bn up 12 percent, 18 percent for adjusted currency.

The earnings were boosted by record performances from Intelligent Edge and High Performance Computing and AI, which both reached $1.1bn in revenues in Q1, rising 25 and 34 percent respectively yearon-year. Compute revenue also increased 14 percent YoY bringing in $3.5bn for the quarter.

Additionally, the HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud platform powered a 26 percent rise in annual recurring revenue for the firm, exceeding $1bn for the first time.

The HPE board of directors declared a regular cash dividend of $0.12 per share on the company’s common stock, payable on April 14, 2023, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on March 17, 2023.

to €12.5bn.

2022 saw S/4HANA cloud revenue up 91 percent to €2bn, with backlog rising 84 percent to over €3.1bn.

Q4 S/4HANA cloud revenue further consistently accelerated, up to 101 percent.

At year end, current total cloud backlog exceeded €12bn for the year, up 27 percent. The figure is stated to be €62m lower due to SAP’s decision to wind down its business operations in Russia and Belarus.

IFRS cloud gross profit grew 38 percent for the year, while non-IFRS cloud gross profit rose 37 percent.

Elsewhere, software licenses revenue fell 37 percent to €2bn for 2022.

two percent to €8bn for the year, despite a fourth quarter lift.

For 2022, IFRS earnings per share (EPS) decreased 56 percent to €1.96 and non-IFRS EPS decreased 39 percent to €4.08. The decline is said to reflect a contribution to financial income by Sapphire Ventures that, mainly due to market conditions, was significantly lower this year.

SAP’s 2023 outlook anticipates ac celerating top line and double-digit non-IFRS operating profit growth, with targeted restructuring reflecting a focus on strategic growth areas and accelerated cloud transformation.

Q2 fiscal 2023 revenue is estimated between $7.1bn –$7.5bn, raising the fiscal 2023 revenue growth predictions to 5-7 percent adjusted for currency.

"2022 SAW S/4HANA REVENUE UP 91 PERCENT TO €2BN, WITH BACKLOG RISING TO €3.1BN."

Antonio Neri

Christian Klein

PwC and SAP strategy supports ESG enterprise targets

PwC and SAP have joined forces in a coinnovation strategy to help enterprises make sustainability an integral part of standard business operations.

This strategy builds upon the existing alliance between SAP and PwC and creates co-innovated solutions to enable businesses to apply ESG metrics through their operations.

Helping operationalize sustainability, the new strategy will support the incorporation of ESG measures directly into business functions, such as trading, capitalization and tax.

The enterprise tools being leveraged for these solutions include: PwC’s ESG and accounting expertize,

SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, SAP Sustainability Control Tower and the SAP Product Footprint Management. All of these will assist in enhancing carbon measuring, reporting and steering, supply chain decarbonization, climate risk and competitive analysis, third-party risk management and compliance.

Bob Moritz, global chairman at PwC, said: “ESG has become a business imperative and is central to PwC’s global strategy, The New Equation, which aims to help clients build trust with their stakeholders and deliver sustained outcomes. New ESG reporting and disclosure requirements are being established, and greater transparency is criti-

cal to building trust.”

Christian Klein, CEO and member of the executive board at SAP SE, said: “The key to every organization’s ability to reach their sustainability goals and drive positive change is transparency. Our collaboration will combine the deep

industry expertize and customer insights of PwC with our leading sustainability technology portfolio. The resulting ESG transparency will help companies reinvent their business models and deliver the sustainable outcomes the world urgently needs.”

SALESFORCE PUSHES PROFITS IN STRONG SHARE-BOOSTING Q4

Salesforce has announced compelling results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year ending January 31, causing shares to leap up 16 percent.

The company reported total fourth quarter revenue at $8.38bn, an increase of 14 percent year-on-year. Additionally, FY23 revenue was reported at $31.4bn, up 18 percent YoY.

Salesforce’s fourth quarter GAAP operating margin was 4.3 percent, non-GAAP reported at 29.2 percent. Its fiscal 2023 GAAP operating margin was 3.3 percent with non-GAAP being 22.5 percent.

The company returned a total of $2.3bn in fourth quarter and $4bn in FY23 to shareholders in the form of share repurchases, with news its Share Repurchase Program has increased to $20bn.

Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, said: “Now we immediately put into place an accelerated transformation plan; restructuring the company. Our profitability is up, and we are not done. We’re reigniting our performance culture and doubling down on our accountable management of our sales organization.”

Marc Benioff

Kroger groceries well-stocked with Google Cloud and Deloitte

Google Cloud and Deloitte have entered into a strategic collaboration with Kroger to help the grocery chain use cloud technologies to increase productivity across its nearly 2,800 stores nationwide.

Kroger has previously deployed a variety of Google Cloud analytics, AI and ML tools under an application framework codeveloped by Deloitte and Kroger.

The grocery giant worked with Google Cloud and Deloitte to create two purposebuilt applications to enhance productivity and boost customer experience. The first

is a new task management application, and the second is Kroger’s new store management application, empowering store leaders to be less dependent on paper tools. The app provides employees with a standardized audit checklist to ensure a high-quality shopping experience for customers.

These new applications leverage Google Cloud technologies used by Deloitte to build a modern, eventdriven architecture for the retailer. Technologies utilized include AI and ML, Spanner and Dataflow for enhanced workflows and task optimization.

Accenture investment in Forma Vision beams new life into the Metaverse

Accenture has made a strategic investment in  Forma Vision, a provider of live-streamed, volumetric video technology enabling 3D holographic images to be beamed into the metaverse from any location.

Through the Accenture Ventures investment, enterprises of any size will be able to use Forma Vision’s low-cost, live-streaming volumetric video technology to teleport people, places and things into their metaverse experience. Accenture and others have already conducted executive town halls, training and small meetings using Forma Vision.

Snowflake to acquire SnowConvert to storm legacy migrations

Snowflake has signed an agreement to acquire SnowConvert, the premier suite of tools for efficiently migrating databases to the Data Cloud, from Mobilize.Net

The SnowConvert toolkit has been a preferred solution for migrating customer workloads to Snowflake, using automation technologies that reduce the need for manual coding and help ensure migration projects are successful.

SnowConvert’s ability to convert workloads written in Scala and Python will make it easy to transfer that code to Snowflake’s Snowpark developer environment.

TWO PURPOSEBUILT APPLICATIONS FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Microsoft Q2 earnings scrape by expectations

Microsoft  has beaten earnings per share expectations with $2.30, adjusted to $2.32 non-GAAP for the period ending December 31, 2022.

However, revenue, despite a two percent increase from the same period last year, was reported at $52.7bn, missing the expected $52.9bn forecast and representing the smallest quarterly increase in more than six years.

Operating income was $20.4m GAAP and net income $16.4m, falling by eight and 12 percent respectively.

Cloud drove profits for the firm this quarter, as intelligent cloud revenue grew 18 percent, to $21.5bn against an expected $21.4bn. Server products and cloud services revenue increased 20 percent with Microsoft Azure reported as the key growth driver, showing revenue gains of 31 percent.

Productivity and business processes revenue was reported at $17bn against an expected $16.8bn, with seven percent growth. LinkedIn revenues grew by ten percent, and Dynamics products and cloud services revenues additionally rose by 13 percent.

DOUBLE DIGITS FOR UIPATH Q3 RESULTS

HAMMITT BAGS A GROWTH PARTNER IN NETSUITE

Luxury US brand Hammitt is working with Oracle NetSuite to deliver a clientfocused, functional and fresh approach to modern handbags as it scales its business, with a NetSuite enterprise resource planning system.

The brand also uses NetSuite Inventory Management and Demand Planning, NetSuite CRM, and NetSuite Connector to sync order, inventory, and customer data from Shopify Hammitt can now manage its operations on a single cloud business system, increase efficiencies and reduce costs.

UiPath, the leading intelligent automation platform provider, announced financial results for its third quarter of fiscal 2023.

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the vendor grew 36 percent year-onyear, reaching $1.11bn after a net new ARR of $67m. Revenue for the third quarter reached $262.7m, a 19 percent increase YoY.

The company reported a non-GAAP operating

income of $18m and a GAAP operating loss of $67m.

For Q4, UiPath is projecting revenues of

$277-279m and an ARR of $1.17bn. Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be approximately $35m.

“We are pleased with our third quarter fiscal 2023 results,” said Rob Enslin, UiPath co-chief executive officer. “Our new go-to-market initiatives are driving results and resonating with customers. We closed several notable third quarter deals using this value-selling approach and are widely engaged with both new and existing customers as we head into the last quarter of fiscal year 2023.”

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Satya Nadella

Sugar

cane firm Florida

Crystals sweetens SAP estate with AWS Cloud

Florida Crystals Corporation (FCC), a vertically integrated cane sugar company based in West Palm Beach, Florida, has entered into a collaboration with Lemongrass, the SAP on cloud company, to move its SAP estate to AWS.

FCC’s migration project has now completed, a targeted Landing Zone on AWS has been built, and Lemongrass is

HPE TO AUTOMATE REPRODUCIBLE AI-AT-SCALE WITH PACHYDERM

HPE has expanded its AI-at-scale offerings with the acquisition of  Pachyderm to automate reproducible machine learning pipelines that target large-scale AI applications.

HPE can unlock AI-at-scale oppor tunities for customers by bringing together its supercomputing technologies that are foundational for optimized AI infrastructure and the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment.

The combined solution enables users to train more accurate AI models faster and at scale, on supercomputers that have been purpose-built

HPE will integrate Pachyderm’s reproducible AI capabilities in one integrated platform to deliver an advanced data-driven pipeline that automatically refines, prepares, tracks and manages epeatable machine learning processes used throughout the development and training envi-

tin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC and AI at HPE, said: “As AI projects become larger and increasingly involve complex data sets, data scientists will need eproducible AI solutions to efficiently maximize

NVIDIA opens up the metaverse for enterprise

NVIDIA has released updates to its metaverse platform, Omniverse Enterprise. The new enhancements allow users to take advantage of streamlined workflows along with real-time RTX ray and path tracing to help teams develop.

NVIDIA brings these enhancements to the core components of the platform, including: Omniverse Kit SDK, Omniverse Create, Omniverse View and Omniverse Nucleus. All are designed for maximum flexibility and scalability, allowing users to connect tools, assets and projects to collaborate in a shared virtual space.

Accenture invests in Cosmo Tech digital twin technology

Accenture has made a strategic investment in  Cosmo Tech, a global provider of digital twin simulation and optimization technology.

The agreement through Accenture Ventures took place during the first phase of the company’s Series C fundraising. It joins other Project Spotlight investments from late last year, including  Planet Labs PBC for climate solutions and  BehaVR  for digital wellness.

Cosmo Tech’s 360˚ Simulation Digital Twin platform allows organizations to test business changes in order to see the potential short and long-term impact. The cloud-native platform uses data from current systems to test various scenarios and automatically determine an optimal action plan, enabling organizations to find new ways to reduce costs, improve resiliency and efficiency and lessen environmental impact.

Founded in 2010, Cosmo Tech’s solutions have helped organizations increase profit by five percent across complex supply chains and cut capital and operating expenses by 10-15 percent.

EIGHT LEGS GOOD: IBM TO ACQUIRE OCTO

IBM has entered into an agreement to acquire Octo a US-based IT modernization and digital transformation services provider, exclusively serving the US federal government.

This acquisition will see approximately 1,500 Octo employees joining IBM Consulting’s US public and federal market organization.

Octo will be IBM’s eighth acquisition of 2022 and will complement Big Blue’s existing strengths in IT modernization and digital transformation, enhancing its ability to support federal agencies with a flexible, modern approach to digital transformation.

Snowflake reports 54 percent growth in Q4

reported $555.3m in product revenue for the data cloud company, representing 54 percent year-on-year growth. Fiscal year 2023 saw owth, totaling $1.9bn.

-

cal 2024, Snowflake’s

product revenue is expected to fall between $568-573m, falling short of analyst anticipation. Stocks fell 6.8 percent accordingly following the results announcement.

The Q4 report revealed a total of 7,828 customers for the company, and a net revenue retention rate of 158 percent. 330 of those customers boast trailing 12-month product rev-

enue greater than $1m. During fiscal 2023, Snowflake added approximately 1,900 net new employees, and plans to add 1,000 more in the new fiscal year, going against the current layoff curve in tech.

Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO, commented that Snowflake is “staying on track for our $10bn product revenue goal in fiscal 2029.”

Mehul Sanghani

Frank Slootman

NEWS DEALS &WINS

Workday overshoots in Q4 gaining ground on $10bn target

Workday announced financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter ended January 31, 2023, with revenue wins bringing the vendor closer to its 2025 $10bn target.

Total revenues jumped 21 percent, reaching $6.22bn and showcasing consistent growth over the year.

Quarterly revenues rose 19.6 percent to $1.65bn in Q4 yearon-year.

Q4 subscription revenues increased 21.7 percent to $1.5bn, matching the announcement from coCEO Aneel Bhusri that the company reached 10,000 customers globally this quarter.

Subscription revenue backlog continued to overshoot 20 percent growth targets. The two-year backlog increased 21.3 percent

to $9.68bn, bringing the total subscription revenue backlog to $16.45bn, a 28.4 percent increase YoY.

Despite Q4 operating losses shrinking almost two points YoY to $89m, losses for the full fiscal year grew to 3.6 percent YoY, reaching $222.2m.

Operating cash flows

grew to $1.66bn and cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities almost doubled YoY from $3.64bn to $6.12bn as of January 31, 2023.

Looking ahead, Workday is doubling down on AI and ML investment through Workday Ventures, having announced a $250m expansion of the fund to focus on larger growth areas such as generative AI. The firm will also continue to branch into SME, niche industry and EMEA markets.

“We closed our fiscal year with another solid quarter,” said Bhusri. “Despite the unpredictable environment, we remain well-positioned to drive the future of work for our more than 10,000 customers thanks to our amazing employees and unique approach to embedding artificial intelligence and machine learning into the very core of our platform.”

RED HAT EXPANDS VISIBILITY ACROSS HYBRID CLOUD WORKFLOWS

Red Hat has announced enhancements to Red Hat Insights, its predictive analytics offering. This includes integrations for ServiceNow and Slack, as well as expanded monitoring capabilities to identify known threats in Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Insights malware detection will assess Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, utilizing over 175 signatures of known Linux malware. The enhancements will reduce risks in customers’ hybrid cloud operating environments for a more secure IT framework.

Deloitte and Marqeta to accelerate payment modernization

Deloitte and Marqeta, the global modern card issuing platform, have announced a strategic alliance to provide innovative payment solutions and accelerate the payment

modernization efforts of banks, fintechs and payments providers.

The alliance combines Deloitte’s payments expertise and consulting services with Marqeta’s API-driven platform and is designed to

help companies in the payments ecosystem create innovative digital payment solutions and scalable and customized payments experiences designed to increase customer loyalty and drive value.

Aneel Bhusri

IBM hits highest growth in a decade with mid-digit push

IBM  has announced its financial results for 2022, with success across business segments producing the highest revenue growth in a decade for the firm. A six percent rise has seen revenues of $60.5bn for the full year and $16.7bn for Q4.

Hybrid cloud revenues reached $22.4 billion for 2022, up 11 percent year-on-year.

The firm’s Q4 software revenues rose 2.8 percent to $7.3bn and its hybrid cloud and solutions grew by five percent.

Of IBM’s software segment for Q4, Red Hat grew ten percent and automation, data and AI, and security all rose by four percent. Only transaction processing fell, shrinking by three percent.

Consulting revenues saw modest Q4 growth of 0.5 percent, bringing in $4.8bn for the quarter.

Infrastructure saw Q4 revenues

of $4.5bn, growing 1.6 percent, and led by a 16 percent rise for IBM zSystems. Hybrid infrastructure also brought six percent growth.

Cash flow for the year was $9.3bn, sitting below its target of $10bn due to higher-than-expected working capital needs. Net cash from operating activities was $10.4bn.

Strategic partners bookings also grew over 50 percent for the year, with SAP, Microsoft and AWS all bringing in over a billion dollars in revenue.

2022 saw eight acquisitions across IBM’s software and consulting divisions.

Looking ahead, the company expects the constant currency revenue growth to stay consistent with its mid-single digit model for 2023, projecting $10.5bn in consolidated free cash flow, which would result in growth of more than $1bn year-on-year.

ORACLE PAYMENT CLOUD GIVES RETAILERS GREATER PRICING FLEXIBILITY

Oracle has extended its retail cloud platform to include the Oracle Retail Payments Cloud Service.

With the solution, US retailers can now accept current contactless payment options, including debit/ credit cards and Apple, Google, and Samsung Pay, without the hidden fees and unpredictable costs that erode the bottom line.

The ser vice has fixed-fee rate pricing with no long-term contract lock-in or monthly minimum requirements and integrates with Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and Oracle MICROS hardware.

AZURE OPENAI SERVICE EXPANDS ACCESS TO AI MODELS FOR ENTERPRISE

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service in a commitment to its ongoing partnership with OpenAI and to further democratize AI.

The announcement will give more businesses access to the most advanced AI models in the world, including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2, backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure of Microsoft Azure.

Access to ChatGPT, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5, through Azure OpenAI Service will also come soon.

IBM EXPECTS GROWTH TO STAY CONSISTENT WITH ITS MID-SINGLE DIGIT MODEL FOR 2023, PROJECTING $1BN GROWTH.

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At Infor, we understand that every industry has its own unique challenges. That’s why we’ve developed industry-specific cloud software to help companies transform their data into a business asset that drives outcomes, not just insights. Unleash the power of technology that puts the user first.

At Infor, we understand that every industry has its own unique challenges. That’s why we’ve developed industry-specific cloud software to help companies transform their data into a business asset that drives outcomes, not just insights. Unleash the power of technology that puts the user first.

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Empower Over 65,000 organizations worldwide rely on Infor® to help overcome market disruptions and achieve business -wide digital transformation.

NEWS DEALS &WINS

SUSE LAUNCHES TELCO-OPTIMIZED PLATFORM ATIP

SUSE has launched a new telco-optimized edge computing platform called SUSE Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP), developed in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia and Telefonica and more.

Built for the telco edge, ATIP enables faster rollouts with a scalable and programmable management solution for telco-grade infrastructure. The platform allows Telco operators to leverage Linux infrastructure, lightweight Kubernetes distributions, security for devices in regulated environments, telecom management tools and a modular design for multi-vendor environments.

With Walmart and Salesforce, retailers are able to: enable buy online and pick up in-store with Store Assist, manage local deliveries and drive efficiency and profitability across the omnichannel shopping journey using Commerce Cloud and Order Management.

RED HAT UNVEILS OPENSHIFT FOR MICROSOFT AZURE GOVERNMENT

Walmart Commerce Technologies has entered into a partnership with  Salesforce  to provide retailers with technologies and services that power frictionless local pickup and delivery for shoppers everywhere.

Walmart Store Assist technology and Walmart GoLocal delivery solutions will be available through AppExchange to help retailers thrive in the existing hybrid shopping world.

Tyler Prince, executive vice president, alliances and channels, Salesforce, said: “Salesforce is thrilled to partner with Walmart as it transforms its business and further expands into the digital technology market.

“Through this partnership with Salesforce, Walmart can grow its business in new ways by productizing its proven retail processes – empowering other retailers to create new and personalized experiences for their customers.”

Red Hat has unveiled the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure for Government, combining a leading enterprise Kubernetes platform with the power and scale of Microsoft Azure to US government agencies. With OpenShift, agencies can build and deploy applications in a dedicated cloud designed to address stringent federal security and compliance requirements for highlysensitive workloads.

Streamlining modernization efforts, agencies can focus on providing value for users rather than maintaining complex infrastructure OpenAI Service will also come soon.

Google sights on AI as Q4 misses mark

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has announced its Q4 financial results, revealing missed targets with total revenue at

$76.05bn against an expected $76.53bn, prompting stocks to drop four percent.

Google Cloud brought in $7.3bn, less than expected,

although up 32 percent. Cloud losses almost halved from $890m to $480m year-on-year. Ad revenue dropped from $61.2bn to $59bn year-on-year.

Going forward, Google’s sights are set on developing its AI search engine in competition with the Microsoft ChatGPT investment.

Walmart and Salesforce partnership changes the face of retail

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SERVICENOW Q4 RESULTS CHIME WITH LEADERSHIP OPTIMISM

ServiceNow has announced a positive Q4, with results exceeding GAAP guidance.

Revenues saw 20 percent year-on-year growth to

$1.9bn, and subscription revenues were $1.8bn, rising 22 percent.

Customer numbers increased to 1,637, equalling over $1m in annual

contract value, and current remaining performance obligations (cRPO) were $6.9bn as of Q4 2022, seeing 22 percent YoY growth. Net new annual contract value

(NNACV) contribution to cRPO also outperformed company expectations in Q4, driven by over 30 percent NNACV growth YoY from new logos.

ServiceNow has additionally announced a program aimed at tapping into the estimated $500bn market opportunity for the Now Platform and associated partnerships.

For 2023, subscription revenues are projected to see another 23 percent growth, to $8.5bn.

ServiceNow chairman and CEO, Bill McDermott said: “ServiceNow continues to perform as a beyond-expectations company. Our Q4 surge in new business shows that the secular tailwinds of digitization aren’t going anywhere.”

Uber unlocks the power of cloud, AI and edge with Google

Google and  Uber have expanded their partnership to support Uber’s modernization of its data cloud infrastructure and reimagine the customer experience for users, drivers and merchants.

Uber will migrate some of its most critical infrastructure onto  Google Cloud and will leverage additional Google capabilities, such as Ads and Google Maps Platform, to modernize its architecture, create an engaging experience for users, earners and partners, and accelerate application development.

The migration will also enable Uber to access cloud services including data cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, security and microservices. Additionally, the companies plan to deepen their engineering collaboration to deliver new innovations.

Moving to the cloud will enable increased flexibility and scalability for Uber and is secure by design, supporting the firm’s goal of a fast, secure and efficient user experience around the world.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google said: “We look forward to

expanding our collaboration with Uber to deploy our cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data analytics and edge networking solutions.

“ This partnership is bringing together the best of Google technology across Cloud, Maps, Ads and more to help Uber continue to improve the customer experience for their users.”

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said: “Our partnership with Google centers around a shared commitment to putting customer experience at the forefront of everything we do.

“It is our job to continually improve and reimagine. We’re excited to deepen our work with Google to deliver new innovations that push the boundaries of what’s possible for transportation, delivery and more.”

Bill McDermott

Salesforce has announced it will purchase 28,000 MWh of renewable energy certificates from small, distributed energy projects over the next eight years.

The purchase aims to accelerate clean electricity access in emerging markets and help maintain the company’s commitment to match 100 percent of the electricity it uses with renewables.

Contracting with Canada’s Powertrust, Salesforce can leverage Distributed Renewable Energy Certificates (D-RECs), as a financial mechanism to enable organizations to accelerate development of capita for small-scale distributed renewable projects and drive the new clean energy supply.

Salesforce’s purchase of D-RECs will help drive critical social and environmental benefits, focusing on procuring projects in non-traditional markets to communities in Brazil, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. These projects will be located in schools, hospitals, public

service facilities, or in disadvantaged communities and hope to deliver on UN sustainable development goals.

Additionally, Salesforce has joined forces with nine other leading companies in launching the Emission First initiative, which calls for a shift in accounting standards to focus on decarbonization.

Megan Lorenzen, lead for the power sector decarbonization for Salesforce and co-author of the More than a Megawatt report, said: “Nearly 95 percent of corporate renewable energy purchases today take place in North America and Europe. We need to ensure the rest of the world isn’t left behind.

“Small, decentralized renewable energy projects can, in many cases, deliver greater impact than large utility-scale facilities. Especially in regions where energy access is limited, these projects can positively transform lives and communities around the globe.”

AWS MDC LAUNCHED TO ASSIST US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled the availability of AWS Modular Data Center (MDC) to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

AWS MDC allows DoD agencies to deploy modular data centers managed by AWS in infrastructure-limited locations. Available as a selfcontained unit, the MDC is an environmentally controlled physical enclosure that can host racks of AWS Outposts or AWS Snow Family devices.

The data center allows customers to use familiar AWS services, APIs and tools in edge locations, converting data centers from fixed infrastructure to a more manageable and flexible service. With AWS MDC, DoD agencies can run low-latency applications in infrastructure-limited environments for scenarios like large-scale military operations, crisis response and security cooperation.

Liz Martin, director of the defense business at AWS, said: “We are converting data centers from fixed infrastructure to a comprehensive service that can respond to large-scale compute and storage needs wherever the mission demands.”

Salesforce buys into global net zero focus with renewable purchase

“SMALL, DECENTRALIZED RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECTS DELIVER GREATER IMPACT”

LIVE NOW EPISODE 1

DELVING DEEPER INTO THE WORLD

OF ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY

NEWS DEALS &WINS

ORACLE OPENS NEW ORACLE CLOUD REGION IN CHICAGO

Oracle has unveiled the opening of an Oracle Cloud Region in Chicago, Illinois.

Continuing one the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider, Oracle’s 41st global region and fourth in the US offers customers and partners a new option to locate their infrastructure, applications and data for optimal performance and latency.

The Oracle Cloud Chicago region gives customers and partners based in

the US Midwest access to a wide range of cloud services to modernize their applications, innovate with data and analytics and migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to OCI.

The Chicago region will offer over 100 OCI services and applications including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave,

OCI Data Science, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and Oracle Analytics. These tools will allow organizations to harness data to uncover new business value and optimize applications.

Additionally, the Chicago region offers a focus on driving sustainable operations across the globe, supporting Oracle’s com-

mitments to powering all Oracle Cloud regions with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, OCI, said:

“As the home to more than 20 percent of the Fortune 500, 60 percent of all US manufacturing, and the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, the US Midwest is a global innovation hub across key industries.

“These industries are increasingly seeking secure cloud services to support their need for high-speed data transfer at ultra-low latency. We are excited to open the new Chicago region to help our Midwest customers and partners easily and securely move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud.”

IBM enhances API portfolio with StepZen acquisition

IBM  has acquired  StepZen , the creator of a GraphQL server with unique architecture that helps developers simplify API builds.

As part of this acquisition, StepZen’s team and technology will become part of the IBM Software unit and complement development areas such as integration, API management, data fabric and data management.

StepZen’s programming results in smaller and more intuitive code, better runtime performance and faster time to value. Developers can also benefit from an easier way to

build GraphQL API and StepZen’s as-a-Service model.

It follows 30 other IBM acquisitions in 2022 including  Databand.

Octo and  Neudesic, as IBM continues to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI capabilities.

Kareem Yusuf, senior vice president of product management and owth, IBM Software, said: “We believe StepZen’s innovative technology for GraphQL API creation complements the innovations IBM is driving in API Connect to enable businesses to build better digital experiences for their clients.”

Kareem Yusuf

Google Cloud and Accenture modernize businesses with ai.RETAIL

Google Cloud and Accenture have unveiled new initiatives to help retailers modernize their businesses and benefit from cloud technology.

Updates have been announced to Accenture’s ai.RETAIL platform, deeply integrating Google Cloud’s data analytics, AI and product discovery capabilities.

Accenture’s ai.RETAIL is an integrated solution helping retailers utilize data and AI to optimize common systems and programs, such as customer acquisition, pricing and promotions, assortment and supply chains. Retailers can now deploy the ai.RETAIL platform on Google Cloud, as the platform has been extended to Google Cloud’s infrastructure and integrated with several Google Cloud products and capabilities.

The new features and benefits of the solutions include: centralized supply chain analysis, personalized customer experiences using Google Cloud’s Discovery AI, and assortment

optimization using BigQuery, Looker and Vertex AI.

Carrie Tharp, vice president of retail and consumer, Google Cloud, said: “Retailers require solutions that enable them to holistically analyze their businesses and create value across their functional boundaries, but they are often limited by siloed data and legacy infrastructure.

“Through our work with Accenture, retailers can quickly adopt integrated solutions that apply the best of Google Cloud technology and deliver the true benefits of AI and ML, with tools and capabilities that allow them to continuously optimize their businesses for today’s complex retail environment.”

Jill Standish, a senior managing director at Accenture who leads its retail industry practice, said: “Powered by cloud, these technologies can help our clients spot trends, make decisions faster and repeatedly reset the business as the market changes.”

AWS LANDS $724M CONTRACT WITH U.S. NAVY

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been awarded a $723.9m, five-year enterprise software license contract with the United States Navy

As part of the contract, the Navy will be able to access the AWS commercial cloud environment, Professional Services, and its training and certification courses.

This contract extends AWS’ relationship with the Navy, having previously provided cloud services in June 2021 for Project Overmatch, a DevSecOps initiative to speed up secure software development.

In a statement, Liz Martin, director of defense at AWS, said: “We are proud to continue our support for the Department of the Navy and are committed to enabling their critical mission by delivering innovative, efficient, scalable and secure cloud services.”

“This collaboration with AWS will ensure that the Navy’s networks are modernized, secure and capable of providing our sailors and marines with the enterprise network architecture required for mission success,” added a Navy spokesperson.

“Retailers can quickly adopt integrated solutions by applying the best of Google Cloud technology”

Bard

for business? Google enters the chatbot battle

Google has thrown its hat into the AI chatbot ring with Bard, an artificial intelligence search tool which may have profound implications for enterprises.

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications. LaMDA for short, the large language model (LLM) has long been in the making at Google HQ, but without the public access that has recently seen OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT take the internet by storm. After openly partnering and investing in OpenAI since 2019, Microsoft said it will

be incorporating the viral tool into its Bing search engine.

Following the news of an almost $400m investment by Google Cloud in ChatGPT rival Anthropic Google has announced Bard is available to private testers in beta before a public rollout. Google plans to onboard individual developers, creators and enterprises to test out its Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow thereafter.

Theo Priestley, CEO and founder of AI analytics platform Metanomic, commented on LinkedIn that “[ERP companies] will all

be scrambling to integrate either Bard (if Google allows it) or ChatGPT (as it’s already an open tool) to quickly offer enterprisegrade solutions that allow businesses to use the power of LLMs pointed directly at their own data.

“Will it be more cost effective [for companies] to develop and train their own LLM vs the immediate lead over the competition they’ll get paying the price elsewhere? Time will tell but it’s going to get bloody.”

Pentagon picks AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle in $9bn cloud contract

The Pentagon has announced that joint cloud contracts have been awarded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft Oracle

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contracts, which total $9bn, will run until 2028 and look to enable the US Department of Defense (DoD) to leverage commercial cloud capabilities.

Cloud technology will be available across all security domains and classification levels, with global accessibility from headquarters to the tactical edge.

It follows the cancellation of the previous Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract in 2021. In an ongoing legal dispute, AWS and Oracle challenged the decision to make Microsoft the sole JEDI contract winner. In July 2020, Microsoft pulled out of the contract.

With the new JWCC contracts, the DoD will now have the opportunity to acquire resilient services including centralized management and distributed control, elastic computing, storage and network infrastructure, advanced data analytics, fortified security and tactical edge devices.

“COMPANIES WILL BE SCRAMBLING TO INTEGRATE EITHER BARD OR CHATGPT”

SAP AND RED HAT STRENGTHEN PARTNERSHIP TO POWER SAP SOFTWARE WORKLOADS

SAP and Red Hat have expanded their partnership to significantly increase SAP’s use of and support for Red Hat Linux.

This strategic collaboration aims to enhance intelligent business operations, support cloud transformation across industries and drive holistic IT innovation.

SAP is migrating part of its internal IT landscape

and the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio onto the standard foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which aims to meet SAP’s evolving business and IT demands. As part of its migration journey, SAP is boosting support for the RISE with SAP solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its preferred operating system.

By adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SAP will gain

greater flexibility to address modern and future technology requirements. Paired with the RISE with SAP solution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers enhanced performance capabilities and allows for easy cloud adoption and transformation for customers.

Over the next year, both companies will collaborate closely to strengthen support for RISE with SAP solution workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and accelerate SAP’s adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux more broadly. Additionally, customers can benefit from greater business agility with Red Hat’s scalable, flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Lalit Patil, CTO, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP SE, said: “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a robust, open infrastructure to support SAP software deployments, providing a consistent foundation for hybrid cloud workloads. We look forward to building on our legacy of innovation together with Red Hat to empower our customers with greater flexibility and resilience across cloud environments.”

Matt Hicks

Oracle Cloud and Oracle Red Bull Racing gear up for the track in 2023

MICROSOFT PRUNES AS EVEN INDUSTRIAL METAVERSE ISN’T SAFE FROM INDUSTRY WOES

Microsoft has announced a fresh round of job cuts, culling its industrial metaverse unit, amid slowing growth and ongoing waves of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Staff working on HoloLens, Surface laptop and Xbox products, along with the 100 workers on the four-month-old industrial metaverse team - Project Bonsaiwill go, including its co-founders.

The pruning comes as part of CEO Satya Nadella’s plan to shed 10,000 workers, affecting just under five percent of the Microsoft workforce and totaling a $1.2bn hit to earnings. The VR company AltspaceVR, acquired by Microsoft in 2017, will also terminate operations.

Microsoft saw the worst quarterly growth in six years in its last quarter, affecting even cloud incomes, and Nadella hints at a fast and direct return on investment from artificial intelligence (AI), as Microsoft customers hope “to do more with less”.

ChatGPT and other AI tools will take focus, as the firm extends its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

Google Cloud and Redox unlock legacy formats for healthcare

Redox, a leader in healthcare interoperability, and Google Cloud have joined forces to simplify the exchange of healthcare data from legacy systems into Google Cloud products like Healthcare Data Engine and Healthcare API. As part of the partnership, Redox will replicate its platform on Google Cloud.

The Redox Healthcare Integration is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling health plans, providers, life science, medical device companies and digital health organizations to incorporate standards like HL7v2, C-CDA, X12, DICOM and more into FHIR. Leveraging existing provider integrations and libraries, this solution makes it faster and easier for organizations to use Google Cloud’s Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine, enabling an interoperable, longitudinal record of patient data.

Luke Bonney, CEO of Redox, said: “Healthcare organizations are transforming using new applications and analytics tools driven by cloud technol-

ogy. Redox was designed to support these new tools with enterprise-scale data exchange with hospitals, clinics, health plans, Healthcare Information Exchanges, networks and other sources.

“Together, Redox and Google Cloud enable providers and health plans to maximize the use of their legacy system data in a single cloud database up to 80 percent faster than other solutions.”

Chris Sakalosky, vice president, strategic industries at Google Cloud, said: “When we first collaborated with Redox and saw how fast we could help a healthcare organization further accelerate data interoperability, we had an ‘aha’ moment.

“With this partnership, we continue to help organizations across the healthcare spectrum tackle the most complex data harmonization challenges, unlocking insights and improving outcomes.”

Snowflake launches Telecom Data Cloud to increase network efficiency and monetize data

Snowflake has launched Telecom Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake’s data platform, partner-delivered solutions and industry-specific datasets. The Telecom Data Cloud helps telecommunications service providers break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, allowing organizations to access data easily and securely in real-time and share and analyze data to drive better decision-making. Telecommunication companies can modernize the telecom network, maximize operational efficiency, access advanced AI and ML capabilities and monetize data and applications.

Punit Renjen, the former global CEO at Deloitte, is set to replace Hasso Plattner as the new SAP chairman.

Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner, who cofounded SAP in 1972 with Dietmar Hopp, Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector, is the only remaining founder still involved in an operational role at the German software company and will retire from his position at the end of his current term. His departure heralds another new era for SAP which will be confirmed at the company’s AGM in May this year.

Commenting on the announcement, Plattner said: “We are excited to propose Punit Renjen as a new member of the SAP Supervisory Board for a four-year term at the AGM in May 2023. This initiates a structured transition at the helm of the Supervisory Board, ensuring the continuity necessary for our company’s ongoing growth. With extensive experience as a highly successful CEO of one of the world’s largest consulting firms, Punit brings valuable insights and expertise to the board. His deep understanding of our customers’ needs, and the broader industry make him an ideal candidate for chairman of the Supervisory Board from 2024 onwards.”

Renjen served as Deloitte Global CEO from 2015 until his retirement on December 31, 2022. As Global CEO, Renjen developed and executed a strategy that resulted in Deloitte revenues growing from $35 billion to more than $59 billion in just seven years. Today, Deloitte is the leading professional services organization in the world and one of the world’s best places to work. Deloitte employs 415,000 people in 150 countries.

Deloitte also has a thriving partner ecosystem, of which SAP has been part of for over 30 years.

“I am very pleased to be considered for a role at SAP – an iconic company with a key role in the global economy,” said Renjen. “At a time when the company is successfully transforming into an enterprise application leader in the cloud and delivering on Hasso Plattner’s original vision of helping the world run better and improving people’s lives, I could not be more excited at the opportunity to help shape the future of a company that has unmatched relevance for global business. I am looking forward to working with talented colleagues around the world to ensure the company continues to help its customers solve their most pressing problems”.

Celonis and Carahsoft to combat US government inefficiency

Celonis is partnering with government IT solutions provider Carahsoft Technology Corp to make the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) widely available to the U.S. federal, state and local governments.

The Celonis EMS is designed to reveal inefficiencies and accurately calculate their impact on performance by providing a real-time “X-ray” of an organization’s business processes.

The partnership has made the Celonis EMS operational in key departments and processes across government agencies like finance, procurement and administration transformation; to mission-focused employee and citizen service transformations.

Benefits include end-to-end transparency of how agency processes actually run and whether they are meeting key performance indicators; enabling agencies to improve process efficiency and effectiveness.

Chris Lisk, vice president of public sector sales at Celonis, said: “Celonis’ inclusion on Carahsoft’s GSA Schedule represents a major milestone for our public sector business. It allows us to serve government agencies at speed and drive our mission to enable government modernization, one business process and source system at a time.”

Christian Klein

I AM VERY PLEASED TO BE CONSIDERED FOR A ROLE AT AN ICONIC COMPANY WITH A KEY ROLE IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

PUNIT RENJEN TO REPLACE HASSO PLATTNER

AS SAP CHAIRMAN

Chris Lisk

EY has unveiled the release of the fourth generation of EY Blockchain Analyzer: Reconciler. This webbased analytics tool can now be accessed through EY Blockchain’s SaaS platform, blockchain. ey.com, and is designed to support EY audit teams across the globe.

EY Blockchain Analyzer: Reconciler allows audit teams to bulk-reconcile clients’ offchain books and records to the public ledger. The tool also uses analytical dashboards to identify matches and mismatches in transactions, wallet address balances and

digital signatures.

Additionally, this latest generation now analyzes data for Dogecoin, as well as five public blockchains; Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

The update includes an Ethereum event search and retrieval dashboard and expands EY audit teams’ ability to reconcile more digital assets by making it easier to add new ERC20 tokens in the future.

Developments to the EY Blockchain Analyzer suite of tools form part of a multimillion-dollar investment from the firm. EY’s engineering teams are continually working to add

Cognizant reports growth for Q4

Cognizant has announced its fourth quarter financial results, showing 1.3 percent growth and bringing $4.8bn in revenues, reaching $19.4bn yearly revenues. By business segment for Q4, financial services revenue fell by four percent, while health sci-

‘ORACLE PLAYBOOK’ ETHOS DRIVES STEADY Q3 FISCAL RESULTS

support for blockchain data across additional chains based on client demand, as well as to support the evolving needs of clientserving teams, such as additional blockchains, block explorers and staking.

David Byrd, blockchain strategy leader, assurance, EY, said: “This latest version of the EY Blockchain Analyzer: Reconciler with support for Dogecoin and event retrieval capabilities is a significant enhancement for EY audit teams and approved clients. These new features greatly improve EY audit teams’ ability to analyze a larger number of digital assets and Ethereum events on the public blockchain.”

Despite narrowly missing expectations, Oracle announced a total Q3 fiscal revenue of $12.4bn, with Oracle Cloud bringing in the lion’s share and heading off a decent quarter of cloud growth. Q3 Cloud Infrastructure brought in the highest revenue jump at 55 percent in USD, 57 percent at constant currency to add $1.2bn of revenue to the pot.

Last June, Oracle acquired healthcare giant Cerner, which added $1.5bn to the Q3 fiscal results and allowed Oracle to increase Cerner’s healthcare contract base by around $5bn.

In the company earnings call, Oracle CEO Safra Catz shared that one of its competitors had coined the phrase ‘the Oracle playbook’, which she fully embraced and said was a reflection of Oracle’s ability to do more while spending less.

ences, products and resources and communications revenues all grew by 4.1, 2.9 and 5.4 percent respectively.

Predictions for the first quarter of this fiscal year sit at a decline of up to 2.5 percent, with revenues of up to $4.7bn expected.

EY releases new generation of EY Blockchain Analyzer: Reconciler

BMW GROUP DRIVES NEW GROWTH WITH RISE WITH SAP

BMW Group has expanded its strategic partnership with SAP to drive growth and accelerate its digital transformation.

Using RISE with SAP, BMW Group will transfer its entire SAP software landscape and merge its cloud strategy with its existing SAP S/4HANA systems, allowing for joint innovation for critical business areas such as finance, parts supply, warehousing, supply chain and production. This move enables BMW Group to digitalize faster, more comprehensively and more efficiently.

RISE with SAP will allow BMW Group to combine the latest SAP technology and cloud solutions to drive business innovation, with applications, platforms, tools and services in one contract. Moving from the traditional licensing model, both companies will operate a model covering infrastructure, cloud applications and operations.

Thomas Saueressig, member of the executive board of SAP SE responsible for SAP product engineering, said: “Our two companies are closely connected through 30 years of trusting cooperation. By expanding our partnership, we are taking a decisive step toward a digital future. This shows how SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and our broad portfolio of solutions create the foundation for companies to drive innovation and ensure our customers’ long-term success in a competitive world.”

Alexander Buresch, CIO and senior vice president, BMW Group IT, said: “This strategic decision will help us to drive our digitalization leadership even faster forward. We are increasing the flexibility of our infrastructure and creating maximum global scalability. And most im portantly, it allows us to bring business innovations to our customers and users much faster than before.”

DOMINION ENERGY PLUGS INTO ORACLE FOR OUTAGE RESTORATION

Dominion Energy Virginia is leveraging capabilities in the Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS) to improve its network visibility, reliability and outage management response. The expanded platform will enable the utility to better manage increased data from distributed energy resources (DER) and meet its regulatory requirements.

Providing electricity to 2.7 million homes and businesses, Dominion Energy has utilized Oracle Utilities NMS for over a decade to plan and execute key switching activities. The company has upgraded its systems and added Oracle’s Fault Location Isolation and Service Restoration (FLISR) application. By implementing this solution, Dominion Energy will be able to automatically sectionalize outage impact, reduce service interruptions and increase reliability.

Brad Harkavy, vice president, Oracle Energy and Water, said: “Our collaboration with Dominion is the perfect example of how we constantly evolve our ADMS technologies to help utilities more confidently meet their pressing DER, customer service, regulatoryand business

A DECISIVE STEP TOWARD A S/4HANA DIGITAL FUTURE FOR INNOVATION IN CRITICAL BUSINESS AREAS

1

CEO Q&A

MELISSA DI DONATO SUSE

2022 was a difficult year for big tech, but how did SUSE fare overall and what’s the outlook for this year?

While global instability impacted all industries in 2022, SUSE experienced strong growth and is well positioned to drive longterm value for our stakeholders. In December, we announced a strong close to FY22, which was driven by our robust business model and strong product line-up. The megatrends of cloud-native transformation, increasing edge adoption and the ongoing transition to the cloud continue to underpin SUSE’s growth as we empower our customers to pursue digital transformation. 2

18 months on from your IPO, what do you wish you knew then that you know now?

that this moment in time won’t throw what has been built into reverse. We are beginning 2023 with strong business momentum and there is plenty to be optimistic about. We have an exciting pipeline of solutions coming to market, including new versions of SUSE ALP and Rancher Prime. Furthermore, the SUSE team is hungry to work with customers to make them innovation heroes in 2023 and beyond.

4As well as leading SUSE, you are a staunch advocate for diversity. Why are you so passionate about changing the game for women in our industry, and what does a more representative and inclusive workplace look like?

A representative and inclusive workplace is one where people of all genders and backgrounds are present, welcomed and their opinions embraced. When I began my career as a software engineer, it felt familiar to see just a couple of women in groups of hundreds of men. The tech world had precious few female role models, and bias was commonplace. I became acutely aware of the importance of visibility, mentorship and challenging the norm in building equality. I made it my mission to inspire women in STEM, not least because teams are stronger and more commercially successful when embracing DE&I.

What’s been the biggest challenge you have faced since becoming a public company?

This has certainly been a challenging period, characterized by pandemic, war and macroeconomic instability. If I’d have known how resilient our team would be in successfully dealing with these circumstances, it would certainly have helped my peace of mind! The team has done a great job maintaining SUSE’s momentum and continuing our growth through uncertain times, to the point that we could not be more optimistic about what the next 18 months hold. 3

Navigating unprecedented conditions, including the effects of war, the ongoing impact of the pandemic and macroeconomic instability. Globally, 2022 was a pivotal year for the tech ecosystem. However, I’m confident

5The last time we spoke, the picture of equality and diversity in the tech industry was pretty dire. Have things moved on since then?

Data suggests that DE&I is steadily on the rise in the tech industry, but we need to accelerate the pace of

“A representative and inclusive workplace is one where people of all genders and backgrounds are present”

change. Businesses and governments must set clear targets, not quotas, for women and underrepresented communities in tech leadership to guarantee long-lasting impact and facilitate the holistic transformation needed for genuine DE&I. Getting technology into the hands of schoolchildren, and presenting them with strong, diverse tech role models, will also empower future generations to pursue studies and careers in STEM.

6In your 2019 cover story with ERP Today you set out some bold objectives for championing diversity within SUSE and the broader tech community –have you managed to stay true to those objectives? We have made strong progress in this journey. My first initiative at SUSE was to establish employee networks, including Women in Tech (amongst several). Today, one in every four SUSE employees identifies as an active Women in Tech member.

I’ve also spearheaded SUSECares, our philanthropic arm. To-date, SUSECares has donated to over 45 charities globally, touching on themes such as digital inclusion, tech literacy and social and climate justice. Additionally, all SUSE employees are entitled to paid time off to volunteer within their communities. In 2022, SUSE employees have volunteered over 2,480 collective hours.

More recently, we launched SUSE Camp, our early careers program dedicated to nurturing diverse talent. We are looking forward to rolling this out globally very soon.

Outside of SUSE, I was recently appointed to Handelsblatt and Bain & Company’s Female Allstar Board as chief executive. In this role, I collaborate with other female leaders to find ways to achieve greater gender parity in senior leadership teams across industries.

What’s the best and worst things about being a female tech CEO?

I take pride in being a CEO within an industry where strong female role models are still few and far between. This fuels my personal conviction that while I may be the first in many regards, I cannot be the last. I am determined to see to it that I am not. The best thing is to be able to stand on this unique platform to inspire and empower future generations of women leaders, showing them that careers in STEM are attainable for all.

The most challenging aspect, however, is the label and associated stereotypes that come with being referred to as a “female” CEO. It is similar to how I feel about being described a “working mother” – rarely do you hear the term “working father”. My husband, for instance, is a CEO of another tech company, and never gets described as a “working father” or “male CEO”. Why is that? This is not just a question of semantics. If we want to see a real cultural shift in gender norms and child raising, we need to start by questioning why our language creates such arbitrary separation, holding women to impossible and sometimes divisive standards. 9

What traits do you see in yourself which have made you successful?

From an early age, I have been inspired to make a mark on the world through positive change and innovation. My intellectual curiosity and openness to learning have opened up significant opportunities throughout every chapter of my life.

I also credit my self-belief as another trait that has aided my success. Unless presented with compelling reasons or data points, I have never yielded to pressure to conform to the norm. This ‘dare to be different’ mentality has allowed me to successfully execute high-stakes projects.

How will tougher economic conditions impact the drive for diversity and what’s your forecast for both diversity and the tech industry in general in 2023?

I am also the co-founder of Inner Wings, a charitable foundation dedicated to empowering young girls to be confident and brave, whilst equipping them with skills to navigate their journey to becoming strong and independent women. 7

In the face of macroeconomic headwinds, it’s crucial to stabilize economies. The tech industry plays a key role here as a driver of skilled employment and growth, underpinning many economic elements by its very nature. Tech funding also acts as a virtuous flywheel: more capital attracts more talent, which seeds success, which breeds success, which ultimately attracts more talent and so on. However, we’re already facing a digital skills gap – where will we find the extra talent we need? Underrepresented groups. This will require new approaches to talent attraction and retention, which prioritizes DE&I from the outset.

It is also this same mindset that guided my leap from the US to the UK in 2005; and the same that first led me into the tech industry. Undergirding all of the above: resilience and a constant desire to find new ways to deliver measurable outcomes and success have consistently defined my career. 10

If you had one piece of advice to give to the next generation of leaders currently making their way up the corporate ladder, what would it be?

Successful careers are a little like the New York fire escapes that you see in movies. You climb up a ladder, walk straight ahead on the new level for a while, until you get to the next staircase, which takes you a bit higher and so on. The key to success is to gain as much experience as possible at each level of the career fire escape and seek mentors along the way. Trusted mentors are the best sounding boards, able to give honest guidance and inspiration, with the benefit of experience you may not yet have.

“I have been inspired to make a mark on the world through positive change”

NEW DAWN

Carl Eschenbach and Aneel Bhusri on the next chapter for the jewel in the ERP crown.

NEW WORKDAY

WORDS/ PAUL ESHERWOOD

PICTURES/ DARREN MILLER

Carl Eschenbach, the former VMWare executive and venture capitalist, is the new co-CEO at Workday and plans to assume full control next year. After more than 18 years at the helm, Aneel Bhusri, the co-founder of the company, will transition into a product-focused role leaving Eschenbach in sole charge.

During an interview at Workday’s San Francisco office, Eschenbach told me: “I am humbled and honored by the opportunity to work alongside Aneel and our workmates across this amazing company.” And, on a recent earning call, he proclaimed: “I’m truly energized by Workday’s unique opportunity to be one of the largest and most profitable software companies in the world.”

Eschenbach is considered to be one of the most accomplished operators in the software industry. Although he never took the CEO role at VMWare, its revenues soared to $7bn under his influence while his time at Sequoia Capital provided a unique lens into the characteristics of high-growth cloud companies like Snowflake, UiPath and Zoom.

Some may argue that an unproven CEO at the top of a cloud ERP company is a gamble. Anyone who meets Eschenbach will soon have that concern quashed - he brings the scale and commercial mentality that Workday has needed for some time. While there has never been a doubt about Workday products, its glacial journey towards profitability has always posed questions and Eschenbach’s appointment will provide the impetus, experience and answers to that conundrum.

He is a former wrestling champion and a big sports fan with a winner’s mentality that will sharpen Workday’s go-to-market strategy and refine its competitive edge. During our interview he was thoughtful, composed and calm - there was a modest tone that I wasn’t expecting from a venture capitalist and a rapport with Bhusri that demonstrated a strong friendship built on mutual trust.

When I asked Bhusri why now was the time to step down from the CEO role and place Eschenbach in charge, his answer was humble and frank. “Workday needs a better CEO,” he told me. “This is a new chapter and Carl is one of, if not, the most talented operating executives in the software industry - Workday is very lucky to have him.”

Workday was founded by Dave Duffield and Bhusri in 2005.

“Carl is one of the most talented operating executives in the software industryWorkday is very lucky to have him.”

Scan the QR code to listen to interview highlights

Born out of adversity

Workday was founded by Dave Duffield and Bhusri in 2005. Duffield is a legendary software entrepreneur and Bhusri was an understudy in the formative years of the relationship. After a bruising encounter with their previous business, the two long-time friends decided to try and build a new kind of business applications company. The idea was simple: take everything they had learned at PeopleSoft , use what happened with Oracle as motivation, mimic Salesforce ’s SaaS model and ensure that every employee, product or partner associated with the brand put people and customers at the center. That simple recipe created the foundation for a company that has become the default

choice for many of the world’s biggest enterprises and is admired and respected across the industry.

Duffield said: “When Aneel and I met over pancakes at a diner to talk about our futures, we both knew we wanted to continue working together. Aneel knew that cloud computing, patterned off Salesforce, was the next big technology trend and we both agreed that our new company’s core values would be the same as our former company’s - because they worked.”

Workday flourished under the PeopleSoft mantra by adopting a completely different approach to that which was taken by most other software firms. While many of its early successes can be attributed to Duffield’s reputation and the goodwill previously

banked with global facilitators like Deloitte and Accenture , the longevity of its esteem is largely down to Bhusri’s principles and style: a style that, still to this day, places the company’s human capital above all else.

“Workday was founded on all the good qualities that influenced PeopleSoft’s growth and success: core values that inspired a strong culture, a good sense of humor, widespread enthusiasm for innovation and deploying leading technology, and quite simply, an honest and transparent approach to doing business,” said Duffield.

In order to appreciate why these principles are so important, it’s essential to understand what happened with PeopleSoft and why that experience left such a mark. The acquisition by Oracle remains one of the most bitterly contested corporate deals in history. Duffield’s vision and philosophy was diametrically opposed to the way Larry Ellison and Oracle operated. There was absolutely no synergy between the corporate cultures and most PeopleSoft employees were fiercely opposed to a deal. A long and acrimonious battle ensued but ultimately Ellison won-out when PeopleSoft’s corporate structure and a failed US Department of Justice suit ultimately prevented Duffield from blocking the deal.

Duffield not only lost control of PeopleSoft, he also had to contend with intense feelings of liability for the employees and customers who got caught in the crossfire. He knew Oracle was going to swallow 17 years of hard work and, in the immediate aftermath, Ellison slashed more than half of PeopleSoft’s workforce - confirming Duffield’s fears at a stroke.

Duffield described the events as “disheartening”, but the perverse truth is Larry Ellison did Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri a big favor. If it had not been for Oracle’s sledgehammer tactics, we may never have gotten to see what two passionate visionaries could achieve when they had a point to prove.

Workday is the only global cloud ERP company

That’s a bold statement that many would argue with, but the fact is, Workday is the only major player that was born in the cloud and operates unhindered by a legacy of on-premise applications. Smaller cloud-native ERPs have emerged and the giants from Waldorf and Austin have developed significant cloud businesses off the back of their on-premise legacies. But only one company can lay a genuine claim to being cloud ERP trailblazers, and that’s Workday.

While others like Infor have developed solid cloud ERP portfolios through a series of acquisitions, and SAP and Oracle have developed huge

was Duffield and Bhusri that started the cloud ERP conversation - with just a little inspiration coming via Mr Benioff.

Being the first cab off the rank has many advantages but it also poses an equal number of challenges. At the time Workday took its SaaS HCM product to market, the notion of business services via the cloud was still in its infancy. Consumer internet services had emerged much quicker and the dot.com boom had already given birth to the likes of Amazon and eBay. But, businesses were much slower to adopt the concept and after the failed hype of the application service provider industry, it was Benioff’s Salesforce.com that broke new ground for business applications via the cloud. Salesforce was unique at the time as it was a ‘new’ company that started with a SaaS playbook instead of trying to transition to SaaS from a previous paradigm.

“I’m truly energized by Workday’s unique opportunity to be one of the largest and most profitable software companies in the world.”

Workday followed suit some five years later but, even by then, the internet was still largely misunderstood and businesses were cautious about putting their applications and data into an unproven environment. To give the timeframe some context, when Duffield and Bhusri launched the first iteration of Workday Human Capital Management, Zuckerberg’s enterprise was still called ‘TheFaceBook’ and had just one employee.

While Workday is known throughout the world as an HCM company, it may surprise some to learn that it started building its Financials product just six months after it started on HR. Workday Financials was launched in August 2007 with its first customer going live soon after.

I won’t cover Workday’s rich product portfolio here. The accompanying supplement to this magazine includes analysis of Workday’s platform, Workday Extend, Workday Skills Cloud and many other facets of its offering.

Over the next 18 years, Bhusri cultivated a business with a reputation that resonates loudly within the C-suites of the world’s biggest enterprises. Workday has a footprint inside more than half of the Fortune 500, over a quarter of the Global 2000 and recently passed the milestone of its 10,000th customer. Its products and services have been built with innovation at the core, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning long before they were commonplace.

The combination of cloud-native products delivered by an organization that demonstrates the highest levels of customer satisfaction has created a globally admired brand that is the jewel in the ERP crown. Its financial success will be a source of great pride for Bhusri, but it was evident from the time that I spent with him that he doesn’t measure success that way. Customer satisfaction and retention are the metrics that are used to determine progress and, on that front, Workday is in an industry of one.

Eschenbach’s appointment

Having spent five years as the editor of an M&A publication, I have met enough venture capitalists to have a pretty good picture of one in my mind: Harvard , pinstriped, NYC and the Hamptonswith little empathy for people and a singular focus on value realization. Maybe my presumption is too general, but years of experience talking to and working with VCs left me with some serious questions about Sequoia’s top performer taking a role at Workday. Oracle maybe, but surely not at the company whose founder has pledged to give his fortune away and has spent nearly two decades

building a business based on integrity and being a good citizen?

I wanted to be wrong about my concerns so put Eschenbach under some pressure at the start of the interview by asking how he would measure success and what makes for a good leader. “15 years ago, I changed my life from focusing on success to living a life of significance,” he told me. “And what I realized is when you have a life of significance and you focus on your impact on others, what naturally happens is you get more success.”

An unexpected but reassuringly authentic answer to a challenging question. I know from speaking to many stakeholders that the decision to hire a VC had raised similar questions, but in just a few short weeks, Eschenbach appears to have answered all of them, and some.

Eschenbach continued: “It’s not just about making money. It’s about building companies. Yes, I was a venture capitalist, but 80 percent of my time was not focused on investing. It was helping companies build something that would stand the test of time. Along the way, yeah, we’ll make money and profits, but that wasn’t my primary driver.”

Bhusri described a “new energy” within the organization and extolled the impact that Eschenbach had made since taking the co-CEO role: “Carl is driving operational excellence and making every part of the business better. And it’s happened in just six weeks,” he said.

“Dave and I were always nervous about hiring someone from the outside. We didn’t want Workday to change into something that’s more like one of our competitors. But we have 100 percent alignment on values and the direction we want to go. When I knew we needed a new leader for the next stage, there was only one name on the page, and that was Carl’s.”

Eschenbach, therefore, is a dichotomy. He displays many of the typical VC credentials but also exhibits a much more thoughtful and reflective approach to business, and to life. He is commercially astute and well-versed in scaling cloud companies. He is fiercely competitive and not afraid of a fight. But he also shares the same values that were the foundation for Workday to thrive and that have cemented a long-standing friendship with Bhusri.

Eschenbach also brings an operational playbook that will sharpen some of Workday’s softer edges. That’s not to say that Bhusri has been complacent or lacks commercial acumen - he’s certainly no pushover. But Bhusri is a product guy at heart and always has been. His first priority has always been his employees and then his customers, and while

they are exceptionally admirably qualities, Workday has reached an inflection point where it needs some optimizing if it’s going to reach its true potential.

“I hope I bring a different level of operational rigor to the company,” Eschenbach said. “And by doing that we will free-up Aneel to go back to what he’s absolutely brilliant at doing and that is driving the product and technology strategy.”

In the early days, it was Bhusri’s product genius and Duffield’s connec tions and reputation that created the first wave of success. In recent years, Chano Fernandez provided invalu able support to Bhusri in taking the go-to-market and partner proposition as far as he could. Now, with Eschen bach on board, Workday can return to a time when its products are being de veloped by one of the smartest tech nologists in the industry and its sales and operational strategy are being led by a proven winner. The combination could be formidable.

Duffield offered one final endorsement, stating: “Everyone in the Workday community is blessed to have Carl at the helm. Carl is personable, positive and humble, and his skills perfectly complement Aneel’s. They relate to one another personally, and as with any great partnership, they bring out the best in each other.”

The road to $10bn and beyond

All technology vendors like something to aim for and Workday has consistently highlighted $10bn in revenue as its next milestone. During our interview, I asked Eschenbach how he evaluated

the opportunity and what would drive the growth needed to reach this target.

“The potential I thought Workday had is actually bigger than I expected - I can break it down into three key areas,” he said. “We have a $120bn opportunity in front of us within our existing Financials and HCM markets. Then you look at international - 75 percent of our business comes from North America and I think we have a huge opportunity to expand. Thirdly, our ecosystem is going to drive significant growth as we expand our relationships with the global partners and cloud providers.”

“When I knew we needed a new leader for the next stage, there was only one name on the page and that was Carl’s.”

One of Workday’s biggest market opportunities is to sell its Financials product into its HCM customers, and given the size of most of those customers, they could be very big deals - The New York Times being just one example that went live on Workday Financials in the last quarter.

As Eschenbach noted on the most recent earnings call: “We’re going to double down even further on our Financials opportunity, both to sell into our customer base as well as into net new. We see this as a rich opportunity. We did a nice job in Q4 and we think that’s something we can do a lot more of.”

Eschenbach was also bullish on Workday’s competitive credentials and far more vocal on its ability to win ERP dollars away from its two main rivals.

“Every time we win one of our legacy dinosaur competitors loses,” he told me. “Every customer that goes on a true digital transformation is going to the cloud. When that happens, we are going to get a look at it and I expect us to win our fair share.

When you pitch Workday against the competition, I truly believe that we have the best platform.”

This bravado was echoed in the earnings call. Eschenbach took the majority of the questions and there was a noticeable spike in the narrative, especially when highlighting competitive wins. “Three of our new Fortune 500 wins replaced cloud solutions from our legacy ERP competitors,” he said.

This comment was significant because it emphasized wins for Workday where it replaced other cloud ERP solutions, not old on-premise tech. In the past, and despite the history, the Workday

earnings call has been a relatively cordial affair without the bluster offered by some of its competitors. Although Eschenbach’s inaugural conversation with analysts followed the same orderly form, it was noticeable that he was keen to underscore Workday’s successes, especially when it came at the expense of Oracle or SAP.

Revenues for FY23 reached $6.22bn, representing a 21 percent increase over last year. More interestingly, total subscription revenue backlog was $16.45bn indicating a very strong forward-looking picture coupled with impressive current performance. Cloud backlog and remaining performance obligations are key metrics for assessing the future growth opportunity for subscription cloud companies as they provide a window into the short term committed revenue that a vendor can expect to realize.

This healthy order book is a good indicator for future performance and Workday has returned low-20s growth rates for the last six quarters. In fact, a graph of revenue over time shows a steady and consistent climb for almost a decade. However, if that trend continued, its path to $10bn could take some time and Eschenbach’s plan to reach the new landmark is significantly more aggressive.

“I see continued opportunity in our international business, both in EMEA and in APJ,” said Eschenbach. “Today, we have only 25 percent of our revenue coming from our international operation, yet it represents more than 50 percent of our TAM. We’re also going to continue to leverage our

“I’ve heard many times that it’s hard to work with friends. I’ve found exactly the opposite.”

ecosystem - our partners around the world are doing a great job, implementing our technology and driving deployment. But we’re also going to work with them to build business plans., not just to do implementations, but help us drive new business into the base as well as with net new customers.”

The importance of its partner ecosystem cannot be exaggerated and it will be vital to create the kind of fertile environment that global consultancies need to operate. Historically, Workday has leveraged two key relationships at a global level and a bunch of smaller boutique partners. There is also a thriving community of developers that augment the core offering through a marketplace called Workday Extend, but if Eschenbach is serious about getting to $10bn quickly, he will have to compete for resources within the GSIs and that’s not an easy task when there is already enough SAP work for every consultant on the planet.

Eschenbach reiterated the importance of partners and said: “Our partner ecosystem will be critical to our next phase of growth. We expect our partners will play an even more important role in FY 2024 as we look for them to drive an increased number of new opportunities, while we strategically shift more customer deployments to our ecosystem.”

You can read more about the Workday partner ecosystem in the accompanying supplement, A Complete Guide to Workday.

Conclusion

While researching for this article, I have spoken to customers, partners, employees and shareholders. Usually, those interviews present a mixed picture of an organization and my job is to find a balance between the hype and reality. However, that has not been the case with this project.

I always knew that Workday regarded itself as

unique, but it wasn’t until I lifted the hood that I started to understand why. It has tried to deflect the tag of being an ‘ERP company’ for some time - I always assumed because it didn’t necessarily agree that HCM plus Financials equals ERP. But the truth is, Bhusri has built the perfect ERP company - he just hates the categorization because of the reputation that other ERP companies have.

During my research, words and phrases that are rarely associated with an ERP vendor were repeatedly used to describe the company and its leaders: friendship, honesty, transparency and fun were commonly expressed to paint a picture of an organization that is a true anomaly in the industry.

What struck me the most during my time with Bhusri was the level of humility that he displayed when openly discussing the areas of his business that required a different set of skills to the ones he possessed. “Dave and I did a pretty well to go from zero to $6bn but I don’t know how to get to £10bn and beyond,” he said. “That’s why Carl is the right person to lead our next chapter. This is not business as usual with a new CEO. This is a new era for Workday. We have an opportunity for greatness. Our markets are huge and our penetration is still relatively low. Getting to that next level of scale, well that’s something Carl has great expertise in and nobody else in the management team does.”

Admitting that your business needs a different type of leader to navigate the next phase of its growth must be an incredibly hard realization for a founder, but Bhusri has done so with grace and modesty. “What’s really impressive about Aneel is the recognition of where he was at and having the character to make these decisions,” said Eschen -

ently talked about friendship as being the foundation for Workday’s success, highlighting the longstanding comradery he has enjoyed with Dave Duffield and his other Workday colleagues. That theme continued without a blip when we discussed the relationship with Eschenbach and the rapport and chemistry between them was palpable.

“Workday is a company built on values and friendship,” said Bhusri. “At the start that was about mine and Dave’s friendship and now it continues with the friendship I have with Carl. But friendship also means the relationship we have with our employees and with our customers. I’ve heard many times that it’s hard to work with friends. I’ve found exactly the opposite.”

For the first time in four years of writing about ERP vendors, the story about culture finally makes sense. I’ve always adopted a skeptical view when I listen to tales from vendors regarding their approach to employees, customer centricity or broader ESG credentials. However, Bhusri’s first-hand explanation of what really makes a company special was authentic and believable in a way that I have not experienced before.

I have no doubt that Workday’s growth goals will be achieved under Eschenbach’s leadership. He is, after all, a consummate corporate operator blessed with a loyal customer base, market leading products and incredibly strong brand credentials. The greatest challenge he will face is preserving the foundational values that made Workday special

whilst shooting for the moon (and profitability). It’s not an impossible task and ‘wrestling’ Workday into the black will be made easier as businesses start to evaluate what is really important to them. I wouldn’t mind betting that there will be an increased premium placed on partnerships with organizations that demonstrate the kind of values that Workday is built on. As Eschenbach succinctly summarized our discussion, “If a CEO truly believes that their most important assets are their people and their financial systems, they should bet on Workday.”

“If a CEO truly believes that their most important assets are their people and their financial systems they should bet on Workday.”

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BY CHRISTINE HORTON

Once upon a time software companies would simply target IT decision makers within organizations. But now it’s increasingly common for those brands to speak directly to the individual consumer. Think about it - how often now do we spot consumer billboard campaigns from enterprise software companies, or their branding emblazoned across sports arenas or players’ shirts?

But what’s driving this change in focus? The answer is a few different things. Firstly, it’s end users, or consumers, that drive product adoption.

“End-user marketing - next to client

success - is arguably the most important investment organizations can make in 2023,” says Sarah Danzl, VP of communications and client advocacy at education technology company, Degreed

“Without your users, you cannot succeed as an enterprise technology platform. The people who use the technology every day will be the ones who ultimately drive results, and marketers are increasingly recognizing this through campaigns that inform and equip users.”

Danzl points out that renewals are unlikely without good results, and that starts at the end-user level. This means targeting individuals is a savvy move for SaaS businesses that heavily rely on retention for growth.

“There are few that know your product as well as a regular user,” she says. “So listening to individuals is key, as it can

uncover areas for improvement in your enterprise technology and also spark new ideas. These people engage the most with your platform every day, so they really are the ultimate stress test for your technology.”

The ‘Spotifyication’ of enterprise tech

Another driver of this shift to more individual-centric messaging is the consumerization of enterprise tech. Users’ expectations have evolved thanks to the intuitive nature of consumer technology in their lives, says Danzl. Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon are all good examples. They have streamlined their user experience so people feel more engaged with them - such as purchasing something with just one click.

“The same expectations are now being seen in the workplace with enterprise technology, both in how a tool works for someone and how a vendor communicates with them. There’s no room for clunky features or dry messaging in the modern-day workplace. People want their enterprise tools to make their lives easier and to inspire them at work, and if they’re not satisfied with this, they’ll soon switch off,” she says.

Mike Marcellin, chief marketing officer at networking vendor Juniper Networks also points to how a new generation of IT buyers are increasingly engaging in consumer-like ways.

“Whether it’s short-form Tik-Tok -like videos to learn about solutions, digital buying when they’re ready to purchase, or automated quick-start for new products vs. the old-style user manuals, our buyers are consumers in their personal lives, so meeting them where they spend their time is important,” he says. “And, if the COVID-19 pandemic has done anything positive for business, it has accelerated the acceptance of work-life fluidity. People will get their work done at the time and location that works for them and that gives them the ability to flow into and out of personal activities.”

Marcellin says that work-life fluidity means that “someone may take some meetings from the car where they might see a billboard. They may be doing an email on Sunday while watching a Formula One race on television. They may

“THE PEOPLE WHO USE THE TECHNOLOGY EVERY DAY WILL BE THE ONES WHO ULTIMATELY DRIVE RESULTS”

SARAH DANZL / DEGREED

THE LAST FEW YEARS HAVE SEEN SOME SEISMIC CHANGES TO HOW WE LIVE, WORK AND INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER. IN RESPONSE, WE ARE SEEING A SIDESTEP IN HOW ENTERPRISE TECH FIRMS

NOW MARKET THEMSELVES TO POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS.

be spending time at DreamHack because they’re a gamer. They may just want to do business with a company that also works with their favorite retailers, with the sports team they follow, or the university they attended. And increasingly, they want to do business with companies who are committed to the things that are important to them - sustainability, ethical sourcing, equity and inclusion, social justice. These are personal drivers first. It has always been true that businesses don’t buy from vendors, people do. And work-life fluidity has made it even more important because the dividing line from my workday and my personal time has blurred.”

B2B? No, now it’s P2P

There was one overall trend among the companies we spoke to - they were erasing the lines drawn between B2B and B2C and focusing instead on the individual.

“People talk about B2B and B2C, but for Sage it’s all about human to human,” says Craig Inglis, EVP integrated campaigns at the company. “We know that people buy from people. Business owners haven’t set their business up to deal with admin, accountancy or payroll, they have a passion, a dream. So, our focus is on enabling them to realize their dream, taking away friction and barriers to run their companies more efficiently.

“Our marketing reflects that, both in terms of the media choices we are making and the stories we’re telling. In terms of media, our aim is to engage with our target customers in the places (the channels) that they are living their lives and that allows us to connect with them both emotionally and rationally. For instance, we know that sport is huge passion point

in our target customer’s lives, and so finding sponsorship opportunities that allow us to engage with them in that environment was a clear choice. Our storytelling focuses on the highs and lows our customers face every day, and the role that Sage can play in making things easier to allow their business to flow.”

Michael Park, chief marketing officer at ServiceNow says a big difference is that people are more purpose-driven than they were a few years ago.

“When COVID-19 came along the world changed. Now we’re living in a hybrid world. It’s not about the job anymore; it’s about engagement of the employees, and customers are becoming even more purpose-driven. A lot of enterprise purchases are driven off of the variables in the requirements of ESG. The world is just a different place now, even geopolitically.

“We took the opportunity to say, ‘The world is different when it comes to enterprise B2B marketing.’ We don’t believe that there’s a B2C, B2B model anymore. We think there is a ‘business to people and purpose’ model. We call it B2P Squared (B2P^2).

“Moving beyond that, everything we do is delivering solutions that [are] helping the world work better, which ties to the purpose of the brand and the products we build and the services we provide. But when we message that out, it’s to the customer’s customer as well. Because if a customer is using ServiceNow [that] implicitly means that it’s helping the customer’s customer help the world work better.”

In B2C, Park says the goal is to influence the consumer to pull the trigger on a purchase - whatever that may be. In B2B, however, it’s different because of the diversity of the buying group within organizations today.

“The buying group, especially in enterprise software, goes from the board of directors to the CEO to the C suite, to the departmental heads, to the practitioners who use it, to the system administrators who run it, to the developers who code against it. And so, the classic B2B model [has] outlived itself because of the world of digital, and the best way to hit on the value and hit the hearts and minds of that specific group is really helping people understand the value of what the underlying products deliver to employees and the customers.”

Similarly, Oliver Pilgerstorfer, chief marIFS contends that the company looks for partnerships “that tell

“OUR BUYERS ARE CONSUMERS IN THEIR PERSONAL LIVES, SO MEETING THEM WHERE THEY SPEND THEIR TIME IS IMPORTANT”

“OUR AIM IS TO ENGAGE WITH OUR TARGET CUSTOMERS IN THE PLACES THAT THEY ARE LIVING THEIR LIVES”

CRAIG INGLIS / SAGE

MIKE MARCELLIN / JUNIPER NETWORK

our target audience - with hotels and restaurants. What makes it authentic for IFS is that it was built and is now run by two IFS customers.”

In the US, IFS partners with legendary golfer Jim Furyk, vice-captain of the US Ryder Cup team, and sponsors both college basketball’s Big 12 tournament and the Aston Martin Formula One team.

entertaining to the business audience as well as people beyond the profession and industry.

“Accounts Deceivable is a limited series podcast, looking at a growing category of white-collar crime: invoice fraud. Three real life stories uncover the impact this type of fraud has on people, businesses and communities,” explains Kim Albrecht, chief marketing officer at

“The true crime podcast format enabled us to create engaging content which is also well-suited to a business audience impacted by fraud. The podcast has helped us reach a new and highly engaged audience of people who could use our product. We were able to target the podcast to account-

“PEOPLE WHO DECIDE AND BUY TECH FOR WORK LIVE THEIR LIVES BEYOND THE OFFICE WALLS”

OLIVER PILGERSTORFER / IFS

“THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE CONTINUE TO BE INCREASINGLY BLURRED”

KIM ALBRECHT / MEDIUS

“WHEN IT COMES TO ENTERPRISE B2B MARKETING. WE DON’T BELIEVE THAT THERE’S A B2C, B2B MODEL ANYMORE”

MICHAEL PARK / SERVICENOW

SHORT READS

WHAT KIND OF FUTURE DO WE WANT?

Peter Drucker, one of the original business thought leaders, is famous for pioneering the philosophical and practical foundations of modern commerce. As early as the 1950s, Drucker advocated decentralisation, outsourcing, collaboration and corporate responsibility as key tenets for successful businesses.

Drucker was ahead of his time, advising companies like General Motors, Sears and IBM on effective business strategy with a particular focus on people and management. The challenges of modern day life were not fully understood in the mid-twentieth century but when Drucker said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” he highlighted an idea that has big implications today.

In the past, creating the future was a glacial process. It took years, sometimes decades, for an idea to be developed and executed. That slow pace of change afforded time to check and balance progress and if an idea turned out to be bad it was easy to alter course.

In today’s breakneck economy there is no luxury of time to appraise the direction of travel – we conceive and create the future as quickly as technology will allow. New concepts are developed on the fly without guiding principles to steer them and we deliver the future for citizens, workers and the planet without asking if it’s the destiny they want.

new technologies that evolve and mutate almost as quickly as the virus that recently held the world to ransom. Our world, both at home and at work, is defined by technology. In many cases tech makes our lives more convenient but it’s unclear to us whether it’s actually making it better? Is an infinite choice of serial killer documentaries on Netflix better than the joy of taking a trip to Blockbuster? Is the convenience of endless Zoom meetings more rewarding than saying hello in person? Does social media have a positive impact on society or not? Is a virtual world something that we want or need? We’re told that technology is making our jobs more satisfying but are we working harder than ever?

Can we see a straight line between technological evolution and human happiness?

Until recently our ability to influence ideas at scale had been limited – we simply didn’t have the tools and technology to make an impact on a global scale. In 2023, the way that we live, work, eat, travel and communicate is dictated by

Of course, there are many examples where technology has made very clear improvements to the human condition. But aside from obvious benefits in science and medicine, can we see a straight line between technological evolution and human happiness?

Recently we learned that Accenture is proudly onboarding its new recruits via the metaverse. Is that what 20-year olds who are just starting their career in consulting have asked for? Whenever we speak to our YPN members their number one criticism of the industry is that it feels remote and disconnected from real life. At this rate it won’t be long before five year olds are sending invites to virtual birthday parties. Our future is being designed for us and we have very little say in the process. Drucker told us we could predict the future by designing it, the only question that remains is what kind of future do we want?

ERP TODAY VOICE

DARREN ROOS

CAN IFS DO FOR

ASSETS

WHAT SALESFORCE DID FOR CRM?

WORDS BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

PHOTOS BY JOEL CHANT

Identity is everything in today’s super-competitive enterprise tech market. Oracle built an imperious business on its database credentials and then dominated finance. Salesforce has owned the CRM space for two decades and became the world’s biggest biz apps vendor as a result. Workday emerged to tackle HCM for big enterprises and is now the default choice for HR leaders.

Each of these vendors has commanded market-leader status and become synonymous with a particular enterprise function. Over recent years, the concept of identity has also taken hold across industries as well as line of business opera-

to provide an end-to-end solution for asset-heavy businesses that also wanted to run finance, supply chain and HR inside a single suite or vendor offering.

The domain of physical operations is therefore without a tech vendor that can lay claim to be the default choice –IFS has ambitions to fill that spot and is making significant headway to achieve that status.

Five years in the making

In 2018, Darren Roos started a mission to transform IFS from an anonymous Swedish software publisher into a global tech vendor with a clear identity. For 30 years previously, it had ambled through

claim was that IFS would emerge as the go-to partner for customers that relied on assets, infrastructure and physical operations.

How five ‘Ps’ have changed the game for IFS

In 2019, IFS hosted its WoCo get-together in Boston. It was one of my first ERP vendor expos after launching ERP Today so I didn’t have much to measure it by. The event was well organized, well attended and the sessions were interesting. But years later, and having been to countless vendor shows since, it is easier for me to measure IFS’ progression and compare where they were in early 2019 and today.

tions – and we see this most clearly with Oracle as it prepares to take a sovereign position in healthcare tech.

In traditional enterprise applications, the gap between the leaders and the also-rans has closed. In the past, many dominant positions in ERP and HCM were maintained due to a lack of credible competition. Today, that’s not the case and to be a true leader you must fend off stiff competition to claim superiority.

However, in asset management a clear leader has failed to emerge. Pure play EAM vendors have largely failed to keep up with the expectations of modern enterprises while those which offer asset management as part of an integrated solution or suite have demonstrated a lack of commitment to the sector. Oracle and SAP have mature offerings for assets but usually prefer to keep their hands clean and focus on back-office functions. IBM’s Maximo product is considered a leader but its usefulness is reliant on integrations with additional systems which need to be provided by other vendors. Until recently, Infor was able to deliver asset management alongside an ERP offering. However, its surprise decision to dispose of that business to Hexagon curtailed its ability

various ownership structures and operated in a disjointed, federated environment with little or no status and an absence of strategy.

Today, it boasts an industry leading field service and asset management capability which can be coupled with a modern ERP and HCM solution, all delivered through IFS Cloud. By focusing on just six key industries, the company has honed its positioning and built a $1bn business that boasts significant customers such as the U.S Navy , Lockheed Martin, Aston Martin and a host of other global businesses in aerospace and defense, utilities, construction and manufacturing.

Whilst it is unlikely that IFS will oust SAP from many of the larger customers that reside in this asset-dominated sector, there is more than enough meat for Roos and Co to make good on their pledge to grow the business to $2bn in revenue by 2025, and significantly more than that in the long term.

At the IFS Unleashed conference in Miami, I spent several days talking to the company’s leadership to get a better understanding of just how lofty their ambitions were and how credible the

Across virtually every metric, IFS has raised the bar and presents itself as a completely different business from that which it was just a few years ago. Back in 2019, IFS had five key challenges: product, partners, people, personality and perception.

Product

Its core applications suite, Applications 10 (ERP, HCM and CRM), was a big step forward when it was released in 2018. It offered a modern look and feel for customers with a browser-based interface coupled with infused AI and chatbots. It adopted a microservices architecture that allowed for easier interconnectivity with other solutions and a host of service-oriented features that boosted workflows –compared to Apps 9 it was night and day. But, IFS also sold other products that sat outside of the core application suite and, as a result, forced users to switch between interfaces and engage with totally different UIs even if they were running several IFS products, such as field service or asset management alongside finance, procurement and HR.

As enterprise architectures became more complex a premium was placed

FIVE YEARS AGO, DARREN ROOS STARTED A MISSION TO TRANSFORM IFS FROM AN ANONYMOUS SWEDISH SOFTWARE PUBLISHER INTO A GLOBAL TECH VENDOR WITH A CLEAR IDENTITY

on ease of integration between solutions. Enterprise leaders (and users) demanded something much closer to a single pane of glass than the historic multi-screen, multi-interface hairball that they had previously been subjected to. There is no better demonstration of this than in the rise of companies like ServiceNow which can abstract the complexity away from users and present them with a familiar experience.

To combat the disjointed nature of its solutions, IFS launched IFS Cloud in 2021 and delivered a completely new way to consume its products across the entire portfolio. Back in February 2021

I wrote:

IFS Cloud represents the culmination of three years’ work by Roos and his team to deliver a harmonized set of applications that are functionally rich, highly flexible and built on an underlying technology platform that provides choice for customers.

The new proposition represents a step change for existing customers and provides a genuinely credible alternative for potential new logos that may not like the look of their upgrade options from incumbent suppliers. IFS Cloud is es -

sentially one application – whether you are using ERP, HR, EAM or FSM – there is one platform, one data model and one experience. IFS Cloud is essentially a single product where components can be switched on or off without the need to integrate individual modules or artefacts. This new architecture abstracts the complexity of integrations away from the customer and allows them to focus on their business, their customers and delivering their own moments of service without needing to invest time, money and effort in managing a hairball application landscape.

18 months on, more than 50 global customers are live on IFS Cloud with another 150 in-flight with their projects. That may seem like small change compared to some, but ask SAP how many live customers they had on S/4HANA 12 months after its release and you will find a new perspective.

Partners

Four years ago I boldly told Roos that he would not be able to accomplish his objectives if the partner network that sold, implemented and supported IFS customers was not significantly

strengthened. Whilst I doubt my input had anything to do with his strategy, it is clear I was not alone in that thinking as major steps have been taken to bolster the ecosystem. The number of partners has increased from 40-odd to several hundred with many of the larger partners taking a much stronger position in the ecosystem and investing time, money and effort into building capabilities around the IFS portfolio.

Validating this interest from the larger consultancies is the appointment of John Walsh, Accenture’s chief strategic accounts and global sales officer, to the IFS board. Walsh commented on his appointment saying: “IFS is on an exciting trajectory and I am pleased to join and bring my own sales leadership and expertise to help execute its longer term growth strategies.”

However, the most significant evolution in the IFS partner network has been the launch of Arcwide – a joint venture between BearingPoint and IFS – that has established a dedicated ‘IFS shop’ with more than 250 consultants already. The joint venture has very ambitious plans to grow Arcwide with the aim of having 1,000 IFS consultants on board by 2025.

People

In the same timeframe, Roos has dramatically changed the make-up of his executive leadership team and introduced a collection of industry heavyweights in both operational and boardroom roles.

Craig Conway, the former CEO at PeopleSoft , has sat on the IFS board since 2017 – and his credentials have been complemented by the aforementioned Walsh from Accenture and a number of other key appointments including Jacqueline de Rojas CBE, president of Digital Leaders

Operationally, Michael Ouissi has moved to the COO role and made way for Mark Moffat to join as chief customer officer. Moffat is a former PwC senior exec who adds a new dimension to IFS’ customer outlook while Ouissi’s

Personality

Can a software vendor have a personality? And if so, should it? Well, Roos and CMO Oliver Pilgerstorfer will tell you that it should – but not one that is built on the same principles as many others. As I alluded to at the start of this article, when Roos came to power, IFS was a pretty anonymous business without charm or identity. A combination of radical thinking and marketing know-how created the concept of ‘The Moment of Service’ and IFS has operated under that strapline ever since. It may appear to be a throwaway catchphrase but as you get to know IFS you begin to understand how intrinsic this concept is.

In a previous interview, Roos told me: “Everybody strives for the highest possible customer satisfaction, high customer retention and higher advocacy. To

Perception

Although the adage that ‘perception is everything’ does little to support my previous points, there is no doubt that brand and slick marketing are vital ingredients in the ultra-competitive ERP market. To that end, IFS is one of the best at positioning its brands in such a way that it feels aspirational, contemporary and relevant.

The company launched its makeover at the start of 2021, but it is only now that we are seeing the full activation of a plan that has catapulted an obscure and forgettable logo into a brand with punch. A global conference in sun-soaked Miami to affiliations with sporting events and iconic landmarks – IFS is a brand that is rejuvenated and feels germane, relevant and ambitious.

role provides one of IFS’ strongest leaders with a more rounded and effective view of the entire IFS value proposition. Marne Martin has been with IFS since its acquisition of Workwave in 2018 but now commands a much broader as chief strategic office and president. Finally, long time IFS stalwart Cindy Jaudon – who lead the US business as president for almost two decades – has assumed a a new role in a global customer capacity allowing for the introduction of Dave Spencer, a former SAP and Synity exec, as the new head of the Americas.

The new and slightly reshuffled team is backed up by long-time product leader, Christian Pederson, and former Infor SVP and revenue exec, Simon Niesler.

Akin to a football manager who needed to make a few changes to break into the next tier, Roos has added credibility and proven experience to his senior team and they are now fit to take on the next phase of the challenge ahead.

achieve that, customers need to be served well at all stages. It’s about providing them with the right quality products at the right time and this means produced on time by your manufacturing plant, delivered on time, sending an accurate invoice, having efficient call centers and providing great field service. When all that comes together, we call that the ‘Moment of Service’ and our goal is to enable you to deliver your moment of service.”

Having spent considerable time challenging the strength of this statement, it is apparent that what started out as a soundbite has become a way of thinking for an entire organization. The notion of service and the responsibility to meet customers at the point where it is needed has permeated into every facet of the company and galvanized a culture that really is in the business of serving customers. Very few vendors get to live by the values that they espouse, in IFS we have found one that laid out an agenda, made a commitment and is actually able to live up to that.

Conclusion

When I spoke to Roos in Miami, I asked him if he had already won and if so, what was the motivation for carrying on? Under his leadership the value of the business has increased tenfold, it has a clear identity, has broken through the $1bn sales barrier and won more net new customers in a single 12 month period than in the previous 25 years combined. IFS was crowned ERP Vendor of the Year at the ERP Today Awards and Roos himself was voted the top SaaS CEO for 2022 (The Software Report) – although I think Benioff et al may have something to say about that claim! Surely now would be a great time to bow out and celebrate a job well done?

Roos was as clear with me as he was back in 2019 when we first met. “There is still work to do, I am still up for the job and we will break through to $2bn in revenue by 2025”, he told me.

A bold claim indeed, but then he made a few of those four years ago and look what happened.

THE NOTION OF SERVICE AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO MEET CUSTOMERS AT THE POINT WHERE IT IS NEEDED HAS PERMEATED INTO EVERY FACET OF THE COMPANY

accelerate ambition

Change is happening, right now, and it’s faster than ever before. It brings opportunity, new markets, new revenue streams; new expectations for today’s new way of work. Accelerating time to value keeps you ahead of the competition and ahead of the curve. It’s time to transform vision into reality and transform change into opportunity. It’s time to accelerate your ambition.

Enterprise solutions with IFS Cloud

To learn more, visit

arcwide.com

MOVE OVER FINANCE, IT’S TIME FOR

A NEW VALUE METRIC

BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

Jon Chorley, Oracle’s chief sustainability officer and Jonathan Wright, senior managing director for sustainability services and business transformation at IBM, explain why big business, ERPs and data hold the key to meeting ESG objectives.

Ever since the Greeks minted the first coins in 610 BC there has been a universal metric to measure the things we value. The price tag. The finance economy emerged roughly 2700 years ago when civilizations transitioned from a system of bartering to one of monetary worth. The very earliest price tag came in the form of artefacts like knives, carvings and pottery. Soon after, coins with an intrinsic

This abstract introduction may seem like an unusual preface to a conversation with two global tech firms about sustainability. What do Ancient Greek coins have to do with ESG? And how does the title of this article fit with a narrative about price tags?

In simple terms, the way that we value things is changing and the price we are prepared to pay for them is no longer exclusively linked to their material worth. We can already see evidence that some individuals are prepared to pay more for things that are sustainably produced and businesses are also increasingly motivated to procure goods and services from environmentally responsible vendors.

“The way people think about the environment is quite a bit different than it was several years ago,” said Jon Chorley, Oracle ’s chief sustainability officer. “That’s forcing all businesses to take sustainability concerns out of the closet and bring them into the boardroom.”

Dual cost

Beyond what we pay for our goods, the world is waking up to the idea that everything has an environmental impact: every banana that is grown, every

car that is manufactured, every house that is built –even, every email that is sent. It is impossible to make or deliver any kind of product or service without it having some implication for the environment somewhere in the value chain.

That impact is now being measured, allowing consumers and enterprises more visibility into the environmental cost as well as the financial cost. This notion of a ‘dual cost’ is only in its infancy and current efforts to accurately record all the impacts are woefully inadequate. Estimates are often used to quantify anything that falls outside of Scope 1, meaning we are some ways from having an accurate environmental cost attached to an individual Snickers bar. However, it seems almost certain that the trend will continue and we will start to see more and more examples of the environmental impact, as well as financial cost, being attached to the things that we buy.

This transition has big implications for buyers, sellers and the planet. It also has a direct consequence for ERPs and finance systems – systems that historically recorded financial data but will soon be required to record and measure environmental data too.

“IF YOU’RE BUYING SOMETHING, OBVIOUSLY YOU WANT TO KNOW THE PRICE. BUT INCREASINGLY, PEOPLE AND BUSINESSES WILL WANT TO KNOW THE EMBEDDED CARBON COSTS TOO”

value developed independently in Asia, China, Africa and eventually Europe. Throughout the ages the system has been refined but the principle has remained unchanged to the present day: everything has a dollar value.

Jon Chorley

“Ninety percent of transactions in the world touch an ERP. If an ERP is the system of finance, it’s also going to be the good place to have the system of sustainability,” said Jonathan Wright, IBM’s senior managing director for sustainability services and business transformation.

To understand the role that ERPs will likely play in tackling sustainability challenges, it’s important to expand the concept of dual cost. Ever since the first coins were struck centuries ago, we have only needed one metric to evaluate the things we buy because people were only concerned with tangible cost. However, as humanity has matured, we have become more interested in the environmental cost, as well as the material cost.

“If you’re buying something, obviously you want to know the price. But increasingly, people and businesses will want to know the embedded carbon costs too,” said Chorley.

In the same way that food items have carried nutritional data for more than 30 years, environmental data will soon be displayed on everyday consumables and bigticket items like electronics, cars and houses. As buyers become more socially aware, they will favor products, services and brands that mirror

mean sustainability credentials will become a prerequisite for virtually all businesses and those that address the challenges correctly will benefit from multiple dividends. But it’s important to frame sustainability investments in the right way to achieve these benefits. Too often, initiatives are started from a negative position to eliminate or avoid something, whereas the most effective returns come from investments that are aligned to an issue that is imperative to the business model.

“Work out what’s most important to your business, not just from a defensive position, not just by avoiding negatives, but from a positive position,” said Chorley. “What’s driving the growth of your business, how does that intersect with some of these ESG pressures? Maybe it’s about talent, maybe it’s about new market opportunities, maybe it’s about positioning products in a certain way. Aligning ESG investments and activities with these business objectives helps drive the organization into what’s going to be a new set of measures for success.”

And Wright concurred, highlighting the top and bottom line benefit to aligning ESG investments with business goals and noted the that there is now empirical evidence to support the ESG

“Our research shows companies that embed sustainability in their technology deployments can see up to 20 percent increase in revenue and profitability and up to 20 percent decreases in costs, because there’s a big correlation between carbon inefficiency and processes,” he said. “There’s also a big opportunity in the battle for talent with 67 percent of people saying they want to work for organizations that focus on sustainability - talent will follow those organizations that are sustainability leaders and have a clear agenda.”

Political or private

At the heart of any big challenge is the ownership dilemma. Who’s responsibility

“NINETY PERCENT OF TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD TOUCH AN ERP. IF AN ERP IS THE SYSTEM OF FINANCE, IT’S ALSO GOING TO BE THE GOOD PLACE TO HAVE THE SYSTEM OF SUSTAINABILITY”

Jonathan Wright

is it? Governments, political organizations and NGOs all have a role to play in the sustainability agenda but ultimately it will be big corporations, driven by consumer demand and competitive pressure that bring the biggest changes to bear.

Few subjects enjoy as much airtime as sustainability but, despite the commitments, we are still significantly short of a coherent global environmental strategy. 2025 is a critical date in the ESG calendar with the Paris Agreement holding 196 countries to account through a legally binding accord that pledges to limit the increase in global temperature to no more than two degrees by that date. Other deadlines exist too: 2030 and 2050 are both indelibly marked on the planet’s timeline but these government-led impositions will not provide all the answers and it will be big business, through a combination of regulation and necessity, that play the lead role in reshaping environmental standards.

“I see the biggest opportunity in the way big enterprises use ERPs and technology,” said Wright. “There are some very big transformations taking place around the world and embedding sustainability into those projects can start to make a real difference.”

Chorley agrees and notes that while political and government initiatives have a value, it will be the commercial sector that has both the ability and the motivation to make the biggest impact - not just because they are the predominant cause of climate challenges, but also because their very survival depends on it.

“As much as governments and those kinds of organizations would like to be the leaders on this, it will be the private sector that drives the biggest change,” he said. “It’s those corporations that themselves are at the heart of the problem, but also have the best opportunity to be the cure. If you look at an enterprise, they’re making promises that are material to the valuation of their business and most are committing to a pretty decent way of measuring and tracking their progress.”

However, Wright maintains that initiatives like the annual World Economic Forum convention in Davos and the United Nations Framework Conference Climate (otherwise known as COP) still play a vital role in bringing organizations and leaders together to address the planet’s most challenging problems.

“These types of meetings are actually super important,” he said. “Although it will be big businesses and the globally recognized brands that actually drive the change, no individual, company or country can solve the problem on their own. This is about ecosystems. It’s about partnerships. It’s about collaboration. It’s about pressure through regulation and it’s about action through industry. Davos and COP are incredibly efficient ways of bringing leaders together to collaborate and have meaningful conversations and we are now seeing real action as a result.”

Data quality and bottlenecks

It is evident that countries, companies and individuals have a strong desire to prioritize sustainability. However, there are some hard problems that are preventing, or at least slowing, the transition from intent to action.

One of those challenges is the sheer scale of the issue and an inability to find a good starting point. ESG can seem like an insurmountable challenge but organizations should not think about the whole, and instead should consider how to breakdown ESG challenges into smaller, more manageable pieces.

“You’ve got to break the problem down into bitesized chunks so the problem feels more manageable,” said Wright. “The E, S and G are all separate issues – it’s not just an acronym – this is the future of how businesses will operate but companies can start by separating the components out and then aligning initiatives to specific business cases.”

And Chorley agrees, saying: “At Oracle we have 50,000 suppliers so trying to get all of them on the same track can be a challenge. So where do you start? If you take your top 100 suppliers and trading partners, the companies that you work with most and are more impactful on our footprint, that can then start to have a real impact.”

Identifying a starting point and divorcing each part of the ESG equation will make the overall picture easier to manage. But, even once an organization has determined where and when to start, there is a further obstacle in the form of data and the availability of accurate and reliable information.

“The data challenge is two fold: firstly extracting the data from your own activities and then the challenge of getting data from your trading partners and other

“AS MUCH AS GOVERNMENTS AND THOSE KINDS OF ORGANIZATIONS WOULD LIKE TO BE THE LEADERS ON THIS, IT WILL BE THE PRIVATE SECTOR THAT DRIVES THE BIGGEST CHANGE”

organizations in your supply chain,” said Chorley. “The quality, timeliness and reliability of that data is still open to question.”

Improving information flow and gaining trust in the information is imperative. And ERP vendors and technology companies are making strides to improve how data can be collected, shared and utilized. The biggest barrier to effective reporting for ESG initiatives is the relative immaturity of the processes that are used to record and share ESG data. We have had decades to perfect the way that ERPs collect finance data and organizations like Oracle can close its month-end accounts in a matter of days. However, the flow of ESG data and the connections needed to convert it into meaningful reports is still in its infancy meaning organizations are reporting ESG metrics on spreadsheets and in isolation from the broader activities of the enterprise.

“IBM is building some great innovation with Oracle and we’re investing significantly to get these connectors, to get these APIs, to get these kinds of workflows really defined, because the data is there,” said Wright. “We have just got to get it into the right workflow and then we will see the data really start to make a difference.”

Partnerships will provide the answers

Clearly there isn’t a single (or simple) solution to the complex challenges of tackling climate change. However, what is evident is that partnerships and ecosystems of like-minded organizations that collaborate and co-innovate will provide the solutions the planet needs.

The partnership between Oracle and IBM is just one example of two global tech firms placing sustainability at the heart of their operating models. Oracle may not bang the sustainability drum as loudly as some of its competitors, but as Chorley noted, “We prefer to focus on our responsibilities and help customers than take part in activism. If you look at what we do you will see a responsible player with aggressive goals that we are executing against. What we don’t tend to do as much is public advocacy; we don’t go out and twist the arms of politicians, that’s not in our DNA.”

Companies like Oracle and IBM can put the full weight of their own learnings behind products and

service so that their experiences can inform the design choices they release to customers. Oracle operates data centers, manufactures hardware, develops software and invests billions of dollars into research and development. It is a $250bn global enterprise that can bring the lessons of its own sustainability journey to bear for its customers.

“Our experience can inform the kinds of solutions and products that we take to market and we use all of our own solutions to run the Oracle business,” said Chorley. “We are actually a fairly significant manufacturer as well as a software and services company. We use all of the learnings from our own operations to help customers run their operations in the most efficient, profitable and sustainable way. Sometimes ideas come from outside Oracle, from our customers, and we are able to leverage their experiences to improve our solutions. When those two things come together you have a lot of synergy and can turn these challenges into opportunities.”

IBM also brings a long history of experiences to the table which inform and mold the way it supports customers. For more than a century it has shaped the way businesses interact with technology and, as the ESG-era takes flight, IBM can leverage its knowledge, capabilities and partnerships to create meaningful sustainability solutions.

“IBM has such a legacy by doing the right thing for the planet and that heritage is absolutely critical,” said Wright. “Whether you look at the hardware and the innovation that we’re driving through our power and ‘Z’ compute capability; whether we look at our software for supply chains, for optimizing workloads, or whether we’re looking at your products like Invisi which are helping transform the way we do reporting.

“Then you think about our approach to partnerships, like the one we have with Oracle - they become really important to solving these global challenges. We can bring the technology and innovation together and our consulting teams build a sustainability value case in every project we work on. We really are trying to change the way we engage with our clients to put sustainability at the heart of the transformation journey and partnerships are key to achieving that.”

CAN ERP SAVE THE WORLD?

BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

THERE’S A HYPOTHESIS IN COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPHYSICS CALLED THE FERMI PARADOX THAT PONDERS A SIMPLE QUESTION - WHERE ARE THE ALIENS? THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ILLUMINATES THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE FOR EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL LIFE AND THE MATHEMATICAL PREDICTION THAT LIFE SHOULD BE EVIDENT THROUGHOUT THE COSMOS.

No matter where we look in the observable universe we see the same chemistry, physics and conditions. When we peer into a distant galaxy, billions of light years away, we discover that it is made of exactly the same stuff as our own galaxy including all the elements for life. There is nothing special about earth - the same ingredients are present throughout the universe - so it’s ludicrous to assume the process which created life on earth is an anomaly when the rest of the cosmos is constant and predictable. There must be life out there so why haven’t any super-intelligent aliens said hello to us? There are many possible answers to the conundrum: perhaps the science is wrong and the spark that ignited life on earth was a unique occurrence. Maybe there is life out there but they have no interest in making contact with us. Or is it more likely that all life forms (including ours) destroy themselves before they reach the level of

technological maturity required for space travel and intergalactic communication?

Some cosmologists and theoretical physicists argue that we are somewhere between 100 and 1,000 years away from developing technology capable of interstellar travel (although many believe it will never be possible). These guestimates are very loose because we are considering technology that we can barely conceive of let alone develop - and Moore’s Law simply doesn’t apply to fantastical ideas like space travel.

Given that we have at least 100 years, and possibly 1,000 or more, before we can make contact with our alien cousins - what do you think will be left of the planet and humanity by the time we are theoretically able to spread our intergalactic wings?

The greatest challenge we will ever face

The greatest challenge to humanity is bearing down on us with inextricable certainty and we are blindly ignoring it. At the rate we are consuming the planet’s resources it’s possible to consider humanity’s survival in terms of centuries rather than the billions of years left in the earth’s natural life. The climate crisis is well documented and some action is being taken. However, our current efforts to halt the destruction of our environment amount to little more than using a hosepipe to put out an oil rig fire.

Governments across the world acted swiftly and decisively (although some may disagree) to combat the coronavirus crisis. Actions were taken that many consider draconian and disproportionate but at least they demonstrated humanity’s ability to act rapidly and collectively in the face of a crisis. Whether you agree with the decisions taken or not, or that the pandemic was a mild inconvenience or a source of grave anguish, most will have considered the fragility of their own existence during these shocking times.

However, despite the hardship of COVID-19, it has not posed an existential risk to humanity. On the other hand, the climate crisis threatens our very existence (or at least our great grandchildren’s). It

therefore remains a mystery that we are so reluctant to tackle it with meaningful and lasting action.

Ever since humans developed the means to damage the environment - the only environment we will ever have - we have done so with breathtaking recklessness. It has only been during the last 20 years or so that we have even become widely aware of the destruction we are causing. Like generations of cigarette smokers who puffed on tobacco only to learn of the damage when it was too late, we too have been blowing smoke in the face of Mother Nature and expecting her to love us unconditionally.

Are we the authors of our destruction?

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

While Abraham Lincoln’s often misquoted statement about destruction from within references the challenges that Americans faced in the mid-1800s, the sentiment behind the narrative can be applied much more broadly to humanity itself. As Lincoln suggests, the greatest threat is one of our own making and we have been slowly killing the planet for long enough.

Humans seem conditioned to act only when the crisis is already upon us: the alcoholic who drinks until the doctor says your liver has failed; the smoker who waits for lung cancer before binning the fags; the sunworshipper with melanoma who was desperate for a tan; how bad does the climate crisis have to get before people will act? Sadly, the answer is the same as with my three analogies - not until its effects are overwhelming and irreversible.

How can ERP save us from disaster?

Our development of technology over the course of the last century has done little more than expedite our cataclysmic course - but we now have the means and the knowledge to change that. The only question is, will we?

HUMAN HISTORY IS LITTERED WITH TERRIBLE IDEAS. PUTTING LEAD IN PETROL, FILLING AIRSHIPS WITH HYDROGEN, ASBESTOS ROOFS, PLASTIC BEADS IN DETERGENT – THE LIST COULD GO ON.

ERP vendors have assimilated data to manage the global economy for decades and we now produce huge volumes of data that record sustainability metrics too. However, that data does not sit inside a coherent system of record like finance data does. It is often inaccurate, stored in disparate databases and output on spreadsheets. Data and analytics hold the solution to arresting environmental destruction and we finally have the ingredients and the inclination to take meaningful action.

However, there is a cautionary tale to go with this new-found capability – and that is a long history of inability to find consensus on global issues with a mutual purpose. In fact, other than the frail agreement on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, humanity hasn’t demonstrated any kind of track record of tackling the world’s hardest problems.

Human history is littered with terrible ideas. Putting lead in petrol, filling airships with hydrogen, asbestos roofs, plastic beads in detergent - the list could go on. When we made bad choices it often took us decades to understand the negative consequences - and that was during a period of time when change happened slowly. In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, change happens at a ferocious pace with very little opportunity to interrogate the long-term implications.

The race to alter how we work, what work we do and which materials we need to do that work has never been faster. My concern is that we have developed the means to do all these things but not considered whether those things are going to make the world better or worse. Modern technology allows us to source and distribute the stuff we consume like never before - but are we making the right choices? Who is guiding the way we architect the world? And what safeguards are we imposing to ensure that decisions taken in competitive haste are going to improve the world for generations to come?

Technology vendors are blessed with the tools to change the world but what seems like a good idea today could turn out to be another Hindenburg moment if the appropriate checks and balances are not embedded in their decision making. Collaboration between industries,

governments and technology vendors is possible and that holds the key to solving this crisis.

Consider how far we have come in 30 years - in 1990 we were using IT that barely had the compute power of a modern-day pencil sharpener. Now think how fast technology changes today and it’s possible to dream up a scenario where you imagine what type of tech we could have at our disposal in another ten years from now, or even another 50 years from now. Just imagine what could be possible with the right purpose.

That purpose must be embraced and adopted at scale - not in pockets of isolation. There are examples where companies in the tech sector are doing incredible work to arrest the environmental crisis but sadly it won’t be enough. We need a fully circular economy where waste is eliminated, materials are reused and initiatives are implemented at a global scale rather than confined to headline-grabbing, narrowly focused initiatives.

How we achieve that is for minds greater than mine. What I do know is that we now have the tools at our disposal to completely rethink our impact on the environment. Until recently, our failure to positively influence humanity’s direction was limited by our inability to thoroughly test and implement ideas at scale. For the first 99.99 percent of our existence, we did not have the knowledge or resources to make an impact on a global scale. Whereas during the most recent 0.01 percent of our existence we have developed the means to affect every human on the earth and the environment in which we all live.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to do a lot of our thinking for us. That could be a good thing, but it could also have grave consequences if the technology isn’t aligned with the long-term goals of humanity. Narrowly tasking a machine to consider the most efficient way to build a supply chain (and by efficient, I mean cost effective and beneficial to the enterprise it serves) could have disastrous unforeseen implications for the planet.

If other lifeforms are as reckless with their environment as we have been with ours, the answer to Fermi’s question may be as simple as the question itself.

They’re dead.

AT THE RATE WE ARE CONSUMING THE PLANET’S RESOURCES IT’S POSSIBLE TO CONSIDER HUMANITY’S SURVIVAL IN TERMS OF CENTURIES RATHER THAN THE BILLIONS OF YEARS LEFT IN THE EARTH’S NATURAL LIFE.

SHORT READS

CAPABILITY AND COMPLEXITY

In a previous short read, we quoted Tom Peters who famously said: “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention” – but that sentiment is already feeling outdated. Why should we be confused? Surely, the incredible bounds in technological capability should be making our lives easier and simpler? What is the point of all this capability if it is not making us happier, more productive and better at our jobs?

As we stand back and look at the myriad of opportunities for business leaders, we are overwhelmed by the complexity. Businesses adopted cloud solutions to ameliorate the pain of legacy technology but many have replaced the burden of customizations, technical debt and upgrades with a hairball architecture of applications, infrastructure and IoT devices.

ERP solutions are being augmented with innumerable third-party applications that require integration and maintenance; infrastructure and workloads are shared across multiple providers – doubling, tripling and sometimes quadrupling the management burden; devices are capturing unimaginable quantities of data which often slip into a black hole.

We use words like hybrid, multi and edge to describe modern IT architecture when we could just as well replace all those terms with one: complex. Even core applications are looking over-engineered when compared to contemporary developer standards – look under the hood of a modern ERP solution and the elaborate entanglement is baffling. How many ways can you pay an invoice or record a timesheet?

As this complexity increases, we see companies and employees beholden to technology rather than using it to make things work better. The IT landscape for a mid-sized company will include so many different applications, platforms, solutions and gadgets that in many cases technology is hindering productivity, not helping it.

And yet, if a company does not truly embrace digital transformation then they are certain to be left behind: sur-

passed by competitors using the latest tools, unable to attract talent that demands consumer-grade experiences at work, and passed over by customers who expect the highest digital standards.

In the past, to be successful in business you needed to be good at making something and know how to sell it. That was the simple recipe for success. Today, the life of the widget maker is infinitely more challenging. Products and services are no longer what defines a business or determines its success. A business with a great product that doesn’t have the ability to execute in a digital world will be surpassed by one with an inferior product and a compelling digital strategy. As Bill McDermott comments elsewhere in this issue, “the business model for the twenty-first century is determined by the IT’s ability to digitally connect with the consumer.”

And that scenario presents a significant challenge for enterprise leaders who have iterated their digital strategy over five or ten years and are now knee-deep in a bewildering array of solutions and services from multiple vendors and partners.

Many are turning to companies like ServiceNow to bring some order to the chaos. Through its workflow platform enterprises have a single pane of glass to interact with existing applications, develop augmentations, create experiences, analyze data and execute outcomes. We liken the ServiceNow platform to an artist’s canvas – the paint and brushes are the tools for digital transformation and the canvas is the control tower on which enterprises can compose their digital vision.

We have all been wrestling with the concept of digital transformation for a decade, but it seems that many – in fact most – have come up short with their efforts. The vast majority of CFOs say that their investments in digital technologies have not yielded the outcomes they had expected. Perhaps, after so much trial and error, there may now be a platform on which all organizations can base their digital futures.

Today, the life of the widget maker is infinitely more challenging

BILL McDERMOTT

IS

NOW THE TIME TO CREATE YOUR DIGITAL FUTURE?

WORDS / PAUL ESHERWOOD

PHOTOS / DARREN MILLER

Its rise in popularity and profile is nothing short of astonishing: Bill McDermott’s rockstar status, coupled with the company’s compelling story, has propelled ServiceNow into a limelight few others enjoy.

After serving 17 years at SAP , McDermott joined ServiceNow in late 2019. Since then, the business has evolved from a simple ITSM company to a complex enterprise platform provider. Headcount has doubled to nearly 20,000 and revenues have soared to more than $7.5bn - comfortably making ServiceNow the fastest cloud company to reach $5bn in organic revenue.

In less than four years, McDermott has transformed ServiceNow into a serious cloud services company and carved out an entirely new segment to operate in. “We are a market of one”, he told me as we started the interview.

Dream Big

To understand why ServiceNow has be come such a sensation it is important to consider the role that McDermott’s personality plays in shaping the organization. His forte is not invention - he didn’t start SAP or ServiceNow from scratch. His gift is a talent for converting ideas into action and ambition into reality.

Those ambitions are not bound by convention nor are they constrained by tradition. They are driven by a conviction that anything is possible. His insatiable appetite for success and unrelenting pursuit of ‘the dream’ drive him to accomplish.

These character traits are both essential and daunting: essential if you want to create the defining enterprise software company of the twenty-first century. And daunting for those around him who may not operate at McDermott’s inexorable pace.

He is characterized by many as a ‘salesman’ - the ultimate corporate showman. While this description is ac-

Dermott is a consummate professional with commanding presence. He is an elegant storyteller with an ability to create a picture in your mind so compelling that it dances like a fond childhood memory. He is a catalyst for growth, a paragon of determination and a single-minded winner for whom success comes through a mix of intellect, tenacity and sheer hard work. Those qualities, coupled with a brassbound will, put him into a very rare class of leader.

McDermott talks in terms of exponential thinking - radically disrupting classical concepts by discovering new solutions to problems that have puzzled us for decades. There is no ceiling to his ambitions and he unashamedly sets astronomic targets which few would dare to consider. Winners Dream - the title of his book says it all.

McDermott’s personal story is well told and documented. His aforementioned book charts the quintessential

OF ALL THE EMERGENT CLOUD PROPONENTS, SERVICENOW IS ONE OF THE FEW, IF NOT THE ONLY ONE, THAT HAS MANAGED TO COMBINE THE GROWTH CHARACTERISTICS OF A START-UP WITH THE PROFITABILITY OF A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE.

rags to riches story - an epitome of the American Dream. Whilst I have no intention of recounting his past, it is worth noting from the outset that McDermott remains heavily influenced by his formative years and many of the character traits he exhibits today were molded by early experiences. His values, belief system and determination to win were seeded in his youth and reinforced by

I ask McDermott at the start of the interview why he left SAP and what inspired him to join ServiceNow - his answer is both eloquent and creative. “Why did Brady leave the Patriots? Because he wanted to prove he could win Super Bowls with another team.”

What does ServiceNow and the Austin Motor Company have in common?

To appreciate the full weight of the ServiceNow proposition, it’s important to put aside your current understanding of digital transformation and start the conversation with a completely new perspective. Most people fundamentally confuse digital improvement with digital transformation and they are not the same thing. Digital improvement is the process of making something incrementally better with digital technologies. Digital transformation is the practice of radically disrupting an existing problem

or challenge through an entirely differ-

In the early 1900s the motor car revolutionized personal travel. The Model T is famous for bringing motoring to the masses, but it is less well known that its design was hideously flawed. Drivers were presented with a bewildering array of levers and pulleys that performed a variety of baffling tasks: the accelerator was on the steering wheel, there were two clutch pedals, a reverse pedal and just two speeds, pedestrian or break-

Despite these technical challenges, the appetite for motorized propulsion was a global phenomenon - similar to the current clamor for digital transformation. But, for almost a decade, anyone who could afford a car was forced to accept the appalling complexity of an early Benz or Ford.

Cadillac hit on an idea that was to revolutionize the motor car industry. For commercial reasons the idea failed but a little-known UK manufacAustin seized on the Cadillac concept and made the first mass production car with conventional controls - the 7. Austin took the broad concept that countless manufacturers had been grappling with and reimagined the idea with user experience at the heart of its design. Austin’s template was licensed to other manufacturers around the world and that basic layout of controls remains the universal standard up to the present day.

McDermott told me: “Our customers now view ServiceNow as the ‘standard’ platform for digital transformation.”

The tribulations of the embryonic motor car industry are very similar to the challenges that the enterprise tech sector has been dealing with since the turn of the century. In the twenty years that we have been wrestling with digital technologies our collective efforts have increased the complexity of doing business, not simplified it. Human experience in the workplace is mired in a perplexing mishmash of disconnected apps, interfaces and notifications. IT architecture is less integrated now than ever and the number of levers and pulleys that we are using to control our digital solutions has spiraled uncontrollably - we’ve built a Model T when we needed an Austin 7.

“AND THAT’S REALLY THE ESSENCE OF WINNERS. THEY HAVE A DREAM. AND THE DREAM ISN’T DEFINED BY OTHER PEOPLE’S VIEW OF YOU OR THE LIMITATIONS THEY PUT ON YOU. THE DREAM IS YOUR DREAM.”

The art of exponential thinking

ServiceNow presents a fundamentally differentiated solution to a problem that others have sought to solve with iterative improvements to existing ideas. The traditional technology vendor’s approach to meeting the challenges of a digital world has been to repackage a pre-existing concept - of course, contemporary ERP suites are infinitely improved when compared to legacy solutions of the 80s and 90s. But it’s still the same basic solution. It’s still the same fundamental design just re-engineered for the cloud with a new badge and shiny sticker. It’s still a Model T.

To solve old problems we need new ways of thinking. As McDermott told me: “You’ve got to go from linear thinking to exponential thinking. Everything is possible with exponential thinking. We have to think of new exponential ways of solving old problems and I see a very clear path to make ServiceNow the control tower for digital transformation.”

That concept of exponential thinking perfectly illuminates the difference between digital transformation and digital improvement. McDermott doesn’t talk in terms of making things better. His vision is on an entirely different vista to making small iterative improvements - better is not good enough to solve the challenges of the twenty-first century. When we discovered that putting asbestos in roofs was a bad idea, we didn’t make it better by putting less asbestos in. We totally changed the way we thought about the problem and came up with an entirely different solution. That’s the essence of exponential thinking and it’s at the heart of the ServiceNow playbook.

What is ServiceNow?

From a user’s perspective, let’s think of it in terms that are familiar to us: take the way that the smartphone has revolutionized our personal lives by providing a simple, single pane of glass to manage all the apps that we use to check social media, monitor our health, order food, call a cab or buy household goods. Behind the sleek glass screen on your iPhone there is an iOS platform that harmonizes the experience and hides the complexity of hundreds of unique applications, created by thousands of different developers. Al-

though built on a common framework to particular standards, the apps are all different but your experience of them is similar. You interact with them through a simple and prosaic interface and behind the scenes they are connected through the platform to allow single sign-on, a unified payment gateway and a common user experience.

That’s essentially what the ServiceNow platform does for business users by creating a new layer - a layer of simplicity and action - that sits above traditional applications and offers the user a unified experience with all the complexity abstracted away. The platform can integrate with virtually any back-office operation and allows users to ‘connect the dots’ between siloed systems creating a coherent workflow that delivers an end-to-end process for almost any business objective.

Innovation in a box

Beyond user experience, connecting siloed systems and legacy applications, ServiceNow’s potential is - to coin a phrase from McDermott - exponential. Consider just a few totally separate but equally challenging problems which transcend virtually all domains: like recruiting and onboarding, meeting ESG targets and building direct to consumer channels.

Take the process of recruiting a new employee - a process that is traditionally confined to the HR function and managed in some sort of HCM application. That traditional HR system will be suitable for a significant part of the process but its limitations are revealed as the onboarding workflow moves through the organization. Can the HCM talk to procurement to ensure that the new employee has their laptop on day one? Can that process extend to the IT department

to ensure that their laptop is correctly configured? Is the legal team looped in to ensure that contracts are signed? Has facilities management issued access permissions? Is the HR team able to map out a complete journey for the new employee which starts with their application form and ends with them sat at their remote desk ready to work? And, most importantly, can the HR team visualize that process as it flows across the organization through a single lens?

Mapping and managing that end-toend process for the new recruit delivers a seamless onboarding experience for the employee but the benefits of this workflow evolution are felt in even greater measure by the HR team that is executing the process. How did the HR manager design and accomplish the onboarding process when it cuts across so many different functions within the organization? On the ServiceNow platform - using citizen developer tools to create a journey that didn’t require any re-engineering of existing back-office processes, just a new workflow layer built on top of all those disparate systems to join the dots.

This is just one example of a process that is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of organizations around the world - and the same logic can be rolled out across virtually every major challenge faced by today’s CEOwhether that’s sustainability, access to talent, new revenue models, operational efficiency or customer engagement.

Worried about your ESG commitments but unsure how to turn aspirations into action? No problem, ServiceNow allows enterprise leaders to execute by creating a silo-defying mesh across multiple objectives and delivering visibility, metrics and evidence to support ESG objectives.

Need to spin-up a new sales strategy or deliver a different service because your customer base has moved or a new market has emerged? Easy, take Disney as an example: when the pandemic hit, its entire business model had to be flipped because people couldn’t go to a theme park or cinema. That’s the kind of problem that can’t be solved with small additive changes. Using the ServiceNow platform, Disney stood up a streaming service and onboarded 115 million

“YOU’VE GOT TO GO FROM LINEAR THINKING TO EXPONENTIAL THINKING. EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE WITH EXPONENTIAL THINKING.”

subscribers in a matter of months.

The ServiceNow platform allows sales teams, marketing departments, procurement specialists - whole companies in fact - to conceive and execute on new ideas in a timeframe that has never been possible before. As Josh Bersin commented in a previous ERP Today article, “ServiceNow can build and deploy enterprise software faster than almost any I’ve ever seen.”

Application tsunami and a system of action

It is predicted that 500 million new ap plications will be created by the end of this year - that’s more than has been de veloped collectively in the last 40 years. The no/low-code application tsunami is going to permanently disrupt how soft ware is created and deployed - and in turn - will radically transform how in dividuals work. These new applications will be designed to span the gaps in workflows, bridging the voids between traditional systems of record and the ‘ac tion’ layer that is needed to execute in a data-driven digital world.

Many organizations may be unaware of these ‘voids’ and struggle to identify process inefficiency. But fear not, Ser viceNow has tackled that problem too with a new strategic partner. effectively a process mining platform that can ‘X-ray’ an entire company’s IT landscape and process architec ture to reveal sub-optimal design and intuitively recommend opportunities to create more performant workflows. Just imagine the potential benefits to a global enterprise that has hundreds if not thousands of processes covering all of its operations - at a stroke, Celonis is able to identify the weak spots and suggest improvements which can be made using the ServiceNow platform.

“We are taking this relationship with Celonis and applying automation that truly moves the needle for organizations. We’re delivering the ability to understand how work flows across people, processes and systems,” said McDermott. “Our engineering teams have created a seamless product experience that’s going to make it easy and simple for customers to get insight into processes across multiple enterprise systems, converting that insight into action.”

Competition with ERP vendors

From the outset, McDermott’s narrative has sounded more like co-existence rather than a full incursion into Oracle and SAP territory. But, as we predicted back in October 2022, ServiceNow is getting more bullish on its ERP credentials and that poses a threat to traditional application vendors.

Whilst McDermott and ServiceNow still state ‘others don’t have to lose for us to win’, that sentiment is weakening as CIOs face ever-greater pressure on their IT budgets. McDermott himself talks about ‘doing more with less’ and enterprise leaders are up against much harder choices in the tough economic climate of 2023. Should they invest tens

of millions of dollars in a new ERP solution, or can they make do with what they have by breathing new life into a dying asset? ServiceNow promises to do just that by making old ERP tech more palatable - even if that is just in the short term - until businesses are ready to take the cloud ERP leap.

“ServiceNow doesn’t compete against the systems of record, nor do we intend to replace them. We integrate with ERP

proach not only unlocks value from our platform but also from other systems. Layer in our world-class low-code platform and we’re helping companies unlock real innovation at a pace they can hardly believe.

“We aim to partner with the leading software companies to make technology work better for every employee, every customer, every business partner. Where there is complexity, we simplify. We’re helping companies significantly reduce their accumulated technical debt so it’s easier to re-platform to the latest generation of ERP systems when they’re ready.”

A staggering percentage of enterprises still run their ERP suites on-premise. Whilst workloads have moved to the

“WE’RE THE FIRST COMPANY THAT EVER BROUGHT A SOLUTION IN A BOX THAT CAN TAKE ALL THESE ISLANDS OF AUTOMATION AND CONVERGE THEM INTO

cloud quicker, many customers run applications in a pseudo-cloud labored by an ERP system that was originally designed more than 20 years ago.

Very few of those customers have failed to consider modernizing their ERP estate but the sheer effort and expense of upgrading forces many into a state of retreat. Despite the emergence of modular cloud ERP, where customers can implement in phases and spare themselves from a big bang project, the fact remains that most ERP projects are expensive, time consuming and risky.

This ERP conundrum has created an incredible opportunity for ServiceNow - one that McDermott has grasped with both hands. Whether you are lagging

strategy.

“In short, we are not rewriting ERP software into our platform. We are collaborating with the broader ERP ecosystem to build the operational blueprint of the future.”

The identity challenge

Typically, with software deployments there are good, bad and ugly examples. But, in searching for a failed or distressed ServiceNow project - I found none. This is backed up by what McDermott told me during our interview, “In my first 100 days I traveled the world meeting customers and I was expecting to hear the laundry list of things that we could be doing better,” he said. “But the only thing I heard was that the team is fantastic. The platform’s unbelievable. And the reason is, the platform itself has been designed at such a sensational level of quality and the engineering pride in the company is so fantastic that nobody would put a piece of code in that platform that is not world class.”

The main challenge that I can see for ServiceNow is its long-term positioning: is it an IT play where CIOs will be searching their coffers for more investment dollars or is ServiceNow a broader

business proposition that circumvents IT budgets and speaks to the heart of the CEO’s office?

ServiceNow started life in IT service management and, simply because it’s a tech product, it feels like another claim on under pressure IT budgets. But I don’t see it as a pure-play IT investment. ServiceNow is a business value proposition that cuts across traditional boundaries and presents a new paradigm for CEOs to weigh-up. The evolution of the Now Platform has pushed way beyond ITSM and reaches into virtually every aspect of modern commerce.

Customer experience, operational efficiency, go-to-market strategy, governance and risk, environmental assurance, automation and more, can be curated on the Now Platform providing enterprises with a modern canvas on which they can compose their digital futures.

McDermott’s ultimate dream

McDermott has enjoyed a stellar career but at the age of 62, ServiceNow will probably be his swan song. He has worked relentlessly to create shareholder value, build purposeful brands and make a substantial impact. His aspirations are on a scale that few would dare to articulate. “We’re projecting $8.5bn in subscriptions for 2023 - then we are going for $15bn by 2026,” he told me. But his empyreal dream cannot be expressed in a number. It won’t be defined by a share price. Bill’s Big Dream is to leave a meaningful and indelible marker on the world by creating a brand that cuts across domains, spans the boundaries between business and consumer and institutes a standard that is as familiar to civilians as it is to CEOs at the world’s biggest companies.

If McDermott can realize the ultimate dream, ServiceNow will become the platform that we all use to manage how we work - having a direct impact, not just on thousands of companies, but on millions of individuals.

Creating the defining enterprise software company of the twenty-first century may sound like a dream, but in McDermott’s world dreams become reality. It will be an incredible accomplishment and a fitting culmination to a life’s work. Kathy would be proud.

“I SEE A VERY CLEAR PATH TO MAKE SERVICENOW THE CONTROL TOWER FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.”

INSIDE THE SOFTWARE AUTOMATION

R L E V O

U T O I N

RIDING HIGH ON LOW-CODE SOFTWARE

“HELLO, WORLD!”

Policy-as-Code in the mix

We have used the term ‘policy-based access’ above with special care. We now have an opportunity to build IT stacks that oversee tiers of applications, data transport layers and services that are architected to behave in ways that we can define and manage as an ongoing software-defined control mechanism. Even where automation is prevalent, prolific and perhaps even randomly non-specific, this is the world of Policyas-Code (PoC).

The popularization of enterprise-grade software application development tools designed to empower so-called ‘citizen developers’ has burgeoned over the last half-decade. It is a growth pattern that has run in parallel with the rise of robot process automation and the general trend to create autonomous controls to oversee database management and deeper system health.

With great power...

While the sum effect of the software automation revolution has been quietly reshaping the way we think about struc turing software teams to deliver enter prise applications and data services for modern business, a new responsibility has emerged at both a technology and business level.

In terms of technology, if we’re pro lifically automating, we must also be ho listically managing - and that means we need to create policy-based access con trols that manifest themselves at every tier of the modern automated IT stack. Nobody wants the wrong low-code/nocode apps accessing the wrong systems, integrating the wrong data channels and delivering the result to the wrong (unapproved) users.

In terms of business, there’s an equally impactful new responsibility. Users never

previously tasked with self-determining IT system functionality are now being asked to innovate and create. Previously they just turned up for work, used some apps and occasionally went to the coast for a weekend. Today, they have to create the next killer app or risk being usurped by someone else with more creativity. So where does this whole chapter in the information revolution get us and how should we travel the road ahead?

Advocated and advanced by infrastructure software company Progress , among others, PoC is a means of applying a manageable codification layer to an organization’s security and compliance stance. But more broadly, PoC is also a means of extending business policy into a more software-defined realm and applying it to the way IT systems, datacentric workflows and application components are able to operate. In a world of automation short-cuts, this is not an antidote, it is more akin to vaccination and the liberal use of digital sanitizer.

As Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta has stated before now, “When it comes to the effective use of Policy-as-Code, organizations need to elevate themselves to a position where they can operate with policy that is both human-readable and machine-enforceable. It’s about providing a common language that can be used across teams (both between dif-

ensure

ferent IT teams - and between business and IT teams) to ensure solid, secure and effective operations.”

Having previously expressed his awareness of the fact that there has always been a traditional gap between what any organization’s IT policy is vs. what is actually implemented, Gupta and team say that the Progress Chef platform is there to help bridge the gap and form a new policy-based approach to IT operations.

“In the new automation arena, we’ll all need to travel with our eyes wide open,” says Kerry Kim, principal product mar-

The computer’s source code compiled, the programming language syntax checked out as compliant and the program performed its basic system sanity check. Except, today was different. This time, the code was laid down by a software bot, via a toolset function in a low-code platform, or via a no-code visual interface that enabled a businessperson to create the now more wholly automated piece of programming.

BY ADRIAN BRIDGWATER

“It’s about providing a common language that can be used across teams to

solid, secure and effective operations.” YOGESH GUPTA / PROGRESS

keting manager at OutSystems . “Next generation use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) opens up exciting new possibilities for software development. But they also come with new risks. Not all forms of automation and AI are alike. It’s important to understand their capabilities - and their limitations - in order to use them to their best advantage.”

Profound power, profound risk?

Kim proposes that the same can be said for low-code tools. They enable a much larger, more diverse audience to innovate with software. But the risk of this newfound power isn’t just bad software - corrupted data, security breaches and legal jeopardy from exposing customer data are very real possibilities.

“Customers serious about accelerating their velocity and improving agility need to prioritize platforms that don’t compromise on their security and governance models. Using AI not just for speeding things up, but also for identifying security vulnerabilities is a great example of innovation enabling these initiatives. Finding the right balance between productivity and safety is critical to a customer’s success,” says Kim.

He advises that not all low-code tools are alike. So then, going forwards, it will be important to look for high-performance low-code platforms that offer AI assistance, visual programming and reusability for improved productivity, while also offering real-time monitoring and code analysis to ensure security and manageability, and reduce technical debt.

But even with the cautionary caveats expressed so far, do we really have a handle on low-code automation for the medium and long-term? At what point can we say that the low-code and indeed no-code cognoscenti has engineered enough steering controls (and indeed breaking power) into the platforms they now present to us in the automation revolution vortex? The answer might just lie in our past.

A brief history of connectivity

For Joe Drumgoole, senior director of developer relations at MongoDB , we need to look back to our recent IT engineering history. This should remind us that the traditional model of software in the 1990s were large monolithic applications linked together with technologies like CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) or COM (Component Object Model) with its ‘D for distributed’ DCOM extension.

“The vileness of both of these approaches gave birth to a modern API-first approach to building systems starting with web services and finally righting the ship with a pivot into REST [the modern architectural style much-loved for its uniform interface]. Initially, this APIfirst approach was used to drive mobile adoption, but even in 2002 companies were starting to see the integration possibilities in this new technology. Roll the clock forward to 2023 and we see that a modern business is just a large collection of SaaS cloud services tied together with REST integrations,” explains Drumgoole.

The implications of this coalescing connectivity revolution were (and still

are) clear i.e. if a business was built in the last 15 years, it very typically will have had an integration team writing all this ‘glue code’ full time. But, it was boring, repetitive detail-oriented work. This then was the genesis of low-code.

“As low-code has proliferated we have seen the emergence of low-code hubs. These tools provide a consumer front-end to this twisty-turny maze of back-end connectivity,” Drumgoole continues. “But it’s no accident that these tools model themselves on the original low-code tool, Excel. However

everyone misses out on the critical issue in this rush to ChatGPT-ize the world, but you can’t build enterprise systems without defining the ‘authority model’ of that enterprise.”

What we mean by authority model here is crucial to answering our central question: it’s all about who decides what matters and what gets automated. In other words, as we set about applying automation to our business, just what parts of which workflows and human workplace functions are we feeding into the machine - and how will we know if we’re being commercially prudent and operationally safe?

Speaking from experiences drawn from working with as diverse a customer base as any, MongoDB’s Drumgoole suggests that the real challenge

“These tools provide a consumer front-end to this twisty-turny maze of back-end connectivity.”

JOE DRUMGOOLE / MONGODB

“Finding the right balance between productivity and safety is critical to a customer’s success.”

KERRY KIM / OUTSYSTEMS

of low-code and automation in general is to allow the capturing and encoding of the complexity of how organizations work when people are not watching. This could be a sweet spot that we’ve yet to really work out, but it presents us with some superb discussion points for the future.

A double-edged sword?

As we chart our progress forwards with automation, lower-code systems, software accelerators and all forms of autonomic self-managing IT systems, the weight of opinion generally flows in one largely positive, upbeat and amplifying direction. But thankfully, there are enough industry analysts and commentators to provide a little balance. Chris Haas, director of product for App Engine at ServiceNow suggests that low-code/ no-code applications have historically been perceived as a double-edged sword, but when used correctly, the first cut can be both the deepest and sweetest.

“It’s a double-edged blade because both IT and business teams using these technologies have to attempt to balance real innovation with app sprawl,” said Haas. “Successful low-code experiences need to create boundaries of governance that can help remove one edge of that sword while sharpening the other for innovation at scale. Especially in an era of IT talent gaps, developer shortages and hiring stalls, low-code is becoming more essential than ever to give employees

the tools they need to streamline business processes.”

Almost amusingly perhaps, the real heart of the matter here may not come down to the applications, the so-called citizen developers now getting their hands on shortcut software tooling, or the increased breadth of connections now being constructed across modern organizations’ IT stacks. It might just come down to data. How we as humans get access to different information sets and what we do with them could be what really impacts the surge in current

damentals of the software development life cycle, such as testing and DevOps. It is widely agreed that low-code platforms which don’t include these capabilities are not suitable for the enterprise, hence why he says his firm has concentrated on these areas with the Appian Platform for process automation.

It’s all just visual

automation and decides who comes out of the next phase alive.

“The heart of the issue is not the proliferation of apps themselves, but rather the data those apps are permitted to access and expose to users,” said Malcolm Ross, deputy CTO at Appian. For Ross to say this, as a C-suite executive at a firm quite indubitably known for its low-code prowess, might well speak volumes. He reminds us that data management in large enterprises has never been easy - and that the boom of digital technologies and tools has created exponentially more data, which means it has become increasingly fragmented across the organization.

“The goal ahead of us is two-fold: we need to unify that data for better decision-making, while strictly enforcing role-level security controls over who can see what,” said Ross. “But there is an approach that delivers both - and it’s known as a data fabric. This is an essential step for accelerating the pace of business transformation with ensuring data governance.”

In addition to the data issue, Appian’s Ross states that the increased pace of business technology delivery enabled by low-code requires adherence to the fun-

Perhaps we all just need to calm down a little, remember where we started and think about what low-code and automation really mean at their core. At its most elemental level, this is basically a form factor and process that we have seen before. In many ways, this whole low-code discussion is really just a case of enterprise software vendors talking about their own visual development environment. This is the opinion of Francis Carden, VP for intelligent automation and robotics at Pegasystems

“I think our industry needs to more carefully control and define what lowcode is,” says Carden. “Low-code platforms make it easier for apps to get built with more people involved, in near realtime, all the time, to achieve the best results. But we need to remember with some caution that we don’t now just go from the as-was way of building apps (professional coders) to citizens (lowcoders) - it’s not about just one or the other, but a collaboration of these and personas across the enterprise.”

“The heart of the issue is not the proliferation of apps themselves, but rather the data those apps are permitted to access and expose to users.”

MALCOLM ROSS / APPIAN

“Low-code is becoming more essential than ever to give employees the tools they need to streamline business processes.” CHRIS HAAS / SERVICENOW

EDITORIAL ANALYSIS

Perhaps it should have been more obvious. Proponents of low-code/ no-code software platforms and process automation tools are unlikely to admit to being complicit in the great technology automation innovation swindle.

Nobody was going to hold their hands up and say, “Well, now you mention it, yeah…it is always a concern that we’re putting too much onus and responsibility in the hands of businesspeople and non-technical folk. But quite frankly, software engineers have had just about enough of zany user requirements, so perhaps they should all get a taste of their own medicine for a while and we’ll all see you at the end of the decade to ask you if you’d like to be more reasonable in terms of your software functionality expectations.”

Nobody has said that and nobody is likely to say that, so we had to say it out loud. Not to be deliberately incendiary and contentious, but just to make sure we really do preserve some balance between business and technology departments going forwards.

“Many seem to believe they can just implement low-code and let employees freely run with it to get stuff built. After all, that’s the point of low-code, right? Absolutely not – low-code is not an excuse to cut corners. C-suite leaders like CIOs, CEOs and CTOs need to have an active role in ensuring the downstream teams are creating visible guardrails that ensure whatever’s being built - especially by citizen developersis continuing to be built effectively and compliantly,” says Carden.

Everything starts as a risk

The resounding message from Carden and team is that everything needs to be considered a risk - until it’s obviously

whether automation itself put too much responsibility in the hands of the business function to innovate and solve problems, opinion on that whole predicament is currently comparatively scant. Although this issue may surface in the weeks and months to come, the industry is still somewhat more preoccupied with agreeing on why low-code has come to the fore, who we empower it with, when it should be used and what its key deliverables should look like in any given successful deployment.

BUZZPHRASE BONANZA

If we have successfully been able to talk about both sides of the argument for automation, then let’s hope some of the key control caveats tabled here become functional software tools and procedures, rather than some software buzzphrase bonanza that we might liken to the political rhetoric we hear every day on television.

Carden reminds us that software application developers used to be locked in a room with a business requirements specification for months (sometimes years) only to one day emerge and appear with the apps. Anything that was misconstrued poorly, and not interpreted by the coders correctly, led to a not-fit-for-purpose rating, stress and poor or late ‘go-lives’ for the deployment.

So how do organizations ensure that low-code doesn’t go completely off the rails? The Pegasystems VP says that the highest echelons in an enterprise need to be more involved from the outset to ensure trusted partners and processes.

not. “Low-code platform vendors must not shy away from proving that this is the basis of their products or better. Though we used to put a lot of trust in professional coders, with only some, if any, verification, the future of low-code apps requires us to instill verification of all personas across the low-code model,” concludes Carden.

For all its automation and point-andclick drag-and-drop efficiency, low-code software application development appears to throw up questions related to responsibility, process compliance and data governance unless it is handled, executed and above all managed diligently. Although we asked at the outset

We’ve heard about ‘AI assistance layers’ that will be used to corral and control how automation should be used diligently. We’ve heard about ‘boundaries of governance’ to control where and when automation can be applied. We’ve heard about the need for an ‘authority model’ as a means of providing decisionmaking power over how automation can be accelerated. Plus of course, we’ve heard about policy control throughout and the use of softwaredefined as-code platform tools to make this achievable and more closely aligned with the digital DNA of cloud computing composability. With all these insurance layers built into the fabric of automationand with an inherent understanding that it will always still be a case of garbage in equals garbage out (yes, we know data quality for both apps and MLOps for AI is of paramount importance) - we may just be safe enough to increase the automation overdrive up to 11 and see where it takes us.

“Many seem to believe they can just implement low-code and let employees freely run with it.”

FRANCIS CARDEN / PEGA

SHORT READS

DON’T BRING A HAMMER TO AN AUTOMATION FIGHT

In the very first issue of ERP Today, back in April 2019, we wrote that “AI and automation will be the most transformative technologies that we ever invent”. Four years later we are starting to see the realisation of that prediction as point solution RPA matures into enterprise-wide hyperautomation.

The rate of evolution has been stunning: from a misunderstood technology that conjured images of terminator-style robots tapping on a keyboard, to a coherent enterprise imperative in less than five years. Any business that still harbors doubts about the importance of automation is at risk of the same fate as those which failed to respond to the first digital revolution in the late 90s.

Like many emerging technologies, its first incarnation was a pale comparison to the sophisticated and intelligent tools we have today. Small wins are still possible with isolated RPA but the real opportunity lies within an automation platform that seeks out, identifies, tests and executes automations across the enterprise.

For several years, the phrase ‘digital transformation’ has been incorrectly attributed to virtually all efforts to modernize IT systems. The term is grossly overused and confounded by many who believe moving applications to the cloud or implementing a new CRM constitutes transformation. It doesn’t. That’s just a slightly better way of doing the same thing you have been doing for the last 50 years.

To truly change and extract the maximum value from your IT investments, there must be a fundamental shift in the underlying operating model which is digitally optimized at every level. Modern automation platforms provide this opportunity and they represent the final piece of the jigsaw for any digitally ambitious organization.

The impact that automation will have in the next five

years will be seismic. Whilst the internet and cloud revolutionized shopping, watching a film and calling a taxi, automation will disrupt every conceivable type of business within virtually every vertical. Professional service firms, manufacturers, banks and retailers – the next phase of change brought on by automation will be more radical than anything we have witnessed before and only those that grasp the opportunity now will be here in a decade to tell the story.

The internet gave birth to companies like Amazon but it hasn’t killed every retailer. Uber was possible because of the cloud but there are still plenty of yellow cabs in Ney York. Whereas previous disruptive technologies gave rise to a few superpowers in isolated industries, automation will quickly become a prerequisite for any company that simply wants to stay in business. It will be impossible for companies to compete if one adopts automation and the other doesn’t. For that reason, understanding how automation works and starting your automation journey should be the number one priority for every enterprise on the planet.

To put some context around these bold statements, consider a previous revolution in automation from 60 years ago: imagine two volume car manufacturers, one using human panel beaters to build its vehicles and the other using advanced robotics on a modern assembly line. That is the kind of comparison we will see very quickly between contemporary businesses that automate and those that don’t.

No matter which industry you are in, if you don’t develop an automation strategy you will be the company holding a hammer while your competitors execute an optimized digital experience for employees and customers alike. .

There must be a fundamental shift in the underlying operating model

ERP TODAY VOICE

50 YEARS OF SAP. KLEIN SAYS,

We’re just

getting started

50 years ago five former IBM executives started a new conversation by forming a company called Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung. Since then, new protagonists have emerged, markets have shifted, share prices have fluctuated and products have evolved, but one thing has remained constant. SAP is the market leader….by a mile.

WORDS / PAUL ESHERWOODPHOTOS / KURT REBRY

CHRISTIAN KLEIN

he Fortune Global 500 tells a compelling story - the world’s biggest companies trust SAP to run their operations. On top of these enterprise credentials more than 400,000 other businesses rely on SAP technologies for finance, procurement, sales, HR, planning and supply chain management. A blue thread runs through the heart of global commerce emanating from a small town in Germany called Waldorf and stretching out to all four corners of the world.

I used to doubt SAP’s claim that it touched more than 85 percent of world GDP: having spent so much time researching SAP, the only surprise is that figure isn’t higher. Ninety-nine of the world’s 100 largest companies are SAP customers - and for those who think they are all legacy clients, 85 are already running S/4HANA.

SAP generated €30.8bn in revenue last year€12.5bn from the cloud. Most notably, S/4HANA cloud revenue was up by 90 percent to more than $2bn with a staggering $34.2bn of total cloud backlog committed. By any measure, SAP is the dominant force in enterprise technology and there are no signs it has any intention of letting that title slip.

When discussing SAP’s results and recent performance, Klein told me: “2022 was a very successful year for SAP. We met our guidance across the board with our cloud revenue rising 24 percent, up five percentage points from 2021. We achieved all of this despite our exit from Russia, our divestiture of Litmos, and the macroeconomic volatility around the world. To be frank, I think we’ll look back at 2022 as one of the most important years in our history. Our cloud transformation is now in full swing and we have created a highly resilient business with recurring revenue of 79 percent. This is a reflection of the strength of the strategy we introduced just over two years ago.”

Legacy

We often talk negatively about legacy. SAP itself has been described as a legacy technology company and the term usually characterizes a set of circumstances, a product or service that is from yesteryear, and as such, should be consigned to history.

SAP’s legacy is somewhat different. Put simply, there is no ERP without SAP. There is no Oracle or Workday. In fact, without SAP there is no enterprise tech industry - its legacy has paved the way for virtually every brand in the industry (save for IBM which can lay its own claim as a pioneer) and SAP’s rich heritage defines the sector as much today as it did decades ago.

“Our legacy is our gift. When you have 400,000 customers to learn from it’s a huge advantage,” said Klein. “SAP has customers in more than 25 different industries so we can always test our assumptions, benchmark our roadmap and challenge our strategy against the depth of install base and industry knowledge from our customers. Of course, it’s challenging to move such a large install base from one environment to another - but that’s the challenge that we have at SAP and one that we are ready to take on. It’s our biggest challenge but also our greatest gift.”

That legacy is about to turn the final page of its long history when Hasso Plattner, the founder and chairman, steps down from his role in May. Plattner has been an ever-present force at SAP for more than 50 years and his departure from operational responsibilities represents a significant endorsement of Klein’s leadership - despite Punit Renjen’s proposed ascension to the position of chairman, it is undoubtedly Klein’s credentials that have paved the way for Plattner’s retirement.

Klein told me: Hasso’s legacy at SAP, like that of his co-founders, is unique. SAP’s five founders set out to

redefine business software and in doing so, forever changed the way the world runs. It’s their innovative thinking, pioneering spirit and unwavering drive that laid the foundation for the rise of SAP - and with Hasso Plattner chairing our Supervisory Board since 2003 and his role of chief software advisor, he obviously has played a key part in our success.”

Klein’s leadership

Write a list of your dream dinner party guests and a German tech exec with a penchant for detail and numbers is unlikely to make the cut. It’s easy to stereotype and make assumptions but Klein dashed all of mine during our meeting. I’ve interviewed enough CEOs to know the ones who are feigning a persona because they have been media trained and those who are genuinely at ease with the situation. Klein presented a calm and measured personality, unfazed by my photographer’s instructions and eager to tell his story in pragmatic language uninhibited by corporate PR.

His authentic and relaxed approach set the tone for a two-hour conversation that covered lessons learned on the football pitch, the demands of parenting young children and the monumental task of reshaping SAP into a cloud-first business that would meet the challenges of the next 50 years.

When he inherited the CEO role, the scale of the challenge ahead was seismic. SAP was not a cloud company in 2020. It had cloud assets, but it was a million miles away from being a cloud-first business. Its flagship ERP product had not followed the same adoption curve that previous SAP products had enjoyed, its customer base was largely on-premise and, most fundamentally of all, there was a disconnect between its narrative and its customers’ experiences.

Klein told me: “There’s certainly not a lack of workload! The challenges are complex, the stakes are high but if you walk into the office with the right mindset you can deal with whatever is in front of you.”

Klein was just 39 when he assumed control; one of the youngest CEOs of any major tech business. SAP had been the dominant player in the ERP market for decades and had grown through a series of acquisitions under McDermott’s tenure. Those acquisitions had bloated its market cap by $100bn and created an organization that included best of breed solutions for every aspect of an enterprise’s operations. But, along with its successes, SAP had been subject to criticism for the lack of integration between its products, for the hulking nature of its solutions and the sheer complexity of running a large-scale SAP estate.

“Every strategy has its time and Bill’s tenure was dominated by a lot of important acquisitions which created a lot of value,” he said. “My tenure is definitely more around how do we bring this together? Not like we did in the last 50 years - that would be a mistake. It’s about turning SAP into a cloud company and helping our customers become intelligent, sustainable enterprises.”

When Klein assumed full control of SAP, global commerce was being played out on a transient landscape where business models and entire industries were being reshaped almost as quickly as new technologies could be conceived and deployed. His first

three years as CEO have been some of the most turbulent in living memory and yet he has managed to reverse SAP’s fortunes, quell analyst’s angst and convert SAP into one of the fastest growing cloud companies in the world.

When you consider how hard transformation is within a typical ERP customer and compare that to the scale of transformation that SAP has achieved, it’s a staggering achievement accomplished under the most challenging of circumstances.

SAP’s transformation

There’s a phrase in enterprise software that I don’t much like but perfectly describes SAP’s journey over the last five years - dogfooding. The process of consuming your own product and eating what you serve to others. When Klein took over as CEO he realized that root and branch change was needed - not just in the product portfolio but also in the way the company was set up to meet the needs of a new generation of customer.

Klein started by rebuilding his executive board: Thomas Saueressig was promoted to head of product engineering, Juergen Mueller became the new CTO, Scott Russell ascended to global head of customer success and, more recently, Sabine Bendiek and Julia White were hired from Microsoft to lead people, operations and marketing. SAP’s executive team look like the poster children for modern enterprise and Klein now sits at the center of a powerhouse team that has the youth, experience and determination to understand and execute a strategy that is fit for modern commerce.

“There was leadership change because we need people thinking beyond the point of sale,” Klein told me. “The way we are structured internally is very different now and we are with you every step of the journey. We reorganized our teams so that technical, sales, delivery and customer success all work together and are incentivized around a common goal.”

As SAP began its own journey of cloud moderni-

zation it learned some valuable lessons - some of which may have been difficult to swallow. Implementing a large-scale SAP ERP solution is no small task and as SAP went through the process itself the pain of bringing all the elements for a successful transformation together became apparent.

During our interview, Klein told me: “I gained a lot of experience during SAP’s own transformation. It was impossible to serve our cloud business model with just a technical upgrade so we then started thinking about how we could better serve our customers who also wanted to make a similar journey. That was the point of time when I put a few people into a room almost day and night and said we need to make it easier for our customers.”

Despite a reinvigorated executive board, it has not been all plain sailing for SAP. Its head of cloud, Brian Duffy - an 18-year veteran of the firm - has recently announced his intention to depart while Luka Mucic who has served for 27 years, most recently as CFO, will also leave the business. While Plattner and Mucic’s departures have been well orchestrated, Duffy’s

The issues can be succinctly summarised in just one sentence: how do you build a sustainable business with reliable supply chains in the cloud?

CHRISTIAN KLEIN

decision to find new pastures was unexpected. I asked Klein if these key displacements were destabilizing and he was emphatic in his response.

“Definitely not,” he said. “Luka has enjoyed an impressive 27-year career at SAP. I want to say a heartfelt thank you for his unique contribution to SAP and for the great partnership. The impact Brian has made on the business is clear. We thank Brian for his contribution to SAP’s success in his distinguished 18-year career and will miss his leadership, his insightful perspectives and his partnership. Our search for a new leader of the RISE with SAP organization is underway and we look forward to making an announcement in the future.”

Sustainability

No other tech company has banged the sustainability drum as loudly as SAP, or for as long. Ninetyseven of the world’s top 100 green companies use SAP technologies to power their sustainability efforts. Today, sustainability is a core component for virtually every business - big or small - new or old - tech or industrial - everyone has a narrative, but few are as compelling or complete as SAP’s pursuit of green commerce.

Klein told me that sustainability could no longer be separated from other business objectives and that SAP was the only technology company with the scale and scope to address the world’s greatest challenge. Its sheer reach into global enterprises and supply chains means SAP collects and analyzes more commercial data than any other organization. That blue thread which runs through the heart of global commerce has the potential to morph into a green ribbon combining the data of half a million businesses and supply chains to provide actionable insights for enterprises around the world.

SAP’s sustainability portfolio includes SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises - a comprehensive platform that allows businesses to design sustainable products and services underpinned by a holistic view of data, process and regulations by industry. It also partners with the world’s biggest consulting firms like Accenture, EY and IBM to co-innovate and combine industry expertize to create frameworks like SAP Responsible Design and Production which helps organizations gain greater visibility into the environ-

mental impact of their design choices. While many assert that sustainability is a key tenet of their DNA, few can support those claims with the kind of credentials that SAP brings to the table.

“We have taken action on our biggest carbon impacts with data centers and car fleets, and we already made very important decisions on how to move to carbon free operations in the years to come,” said Klein. “But the bigger challenge is how can we help our customers become more sustainable? How can we use SAP technologies to give our customers the visibility they need? When it comes to ESG, our customers tell me, ‘I have a lot of good intentions, I have potential actions, but I have zero transparency.’ We realized we needed to expand our data model and embed sustainability metrics in every process because when you can give customers the transparency, it’s the foundation for taking the right action.”

RISE with SAP

When Klein announced RISE with SAP back in January 2021, the market was split: was it just a clever commercial proposition or was it an industry-first that would revolutionize the way tech was sold and consumed? Three years on and any questions regarding its substance have been answered in spades by the volume of customer transformations it has facilitated.

Mega deals with Microsoft and IBM have captured the headlines but there is also a plethora of other companies, global enterprises and net new trailblazers, that have signed up to RISE to facilitate the S/4 journey.

RISE promises a single handshake deal that provides a pathway to the cloud for any customer, irrespective of starting point or complexity. Delivered on a subscription basis (hence, sometimes called Transformation-as-a-Service) it positions SAP as the responsible party for the end-to-end transformation of a business independent of any third parties that are also involved in the process. In addition, SAP completely reorganized its internal structures so that every team in the end-to-end process was aligned with incentive plans pointing everyone in the same direction.

Klein told me: “As much as I like the sales forecast calls, we now have delivery calls where we go

A blue thread runs through the heart of global commerce emanating from a small town in Germany called Waldorf and stretching out to all four corners of the world.

we with the business process redesign? Where are we with the back to standard? How many modifications can we get out? Where are we with the platform adoption, and finally the cutover to S/4.”

A single point of contact for SLAs and clear line of sight to the responsible party for business transformation, application services and infrastructure is a breakthrough proposition for customers. SAP had been searching for a compelling carrot to lead its install base to S/4HANA for nearly seven years and RISE delivers that and more.

SAP’s guiding principles for RISE, in fact its north star for all customer engagements, has four simple components: use Signavio to understand and redesign processes; partner with hyperscalers and move workloads to the cloud; migrate to S/4HANA while maintaining a clean core; augment the solution and build innovations on BTP.

In addition to this simple four step plan, RISE also delivers a raft of other business benefits which includes one of SAP’s most important but often overlooked offerings - SAP Business Network. This new combination of product, services and platform has been in the making for years but it wasn’t until last year’s Sapphire that the moving parts coalesced

into what could be one of the most significant contributions by SAP to the global economy since its inception.

“The Business Network is a big differentiator because now when you are connecting companies, we can not only help with the commerce side of things and with supply chains, but also it has a big role to play in ESG,” said Klein. “If you are a car manufacturer and you want to reduce carbon, then you have to look outside of your own enterprise. You need to analyze the whole value chain and measure the endto-end impact. With the Business Network customers will be able to build these reliable supply chains and measure their sustainability across the entire value chain.”

RISE may well have been originally conceived as an accelerator for cloud and S/4HANA but as the proposition has evolved it has developed into a template for twenty-first century commerce encapsulating the full spectrum of cloud, applications, supply chains and sustainability.

Commenting on recent successes driven by the RISE proposition, Klein said: “RISE with SAP is at the heart of our strategy and one of the most successful offerings in our history. It is much more than a technical lift and shift to the cloud for the installed base - it is a true business transformation offering.”

Conclusion

For five decades SAP has been many things to many people. Its forefathers created an industry that supports millions of jobs and provided the foundations for global commerce to flourish. Many of the business process blueprints that we take for granted were conceived by SAP in the 1970s and today it is creating new standards that will become the code for commerce in the digital age.

S/4HANA will power the finances and supply chains of the world’s biggest companies. BTP will provide the platform and architecture that companies use to construct new business models and innovate. The Business Network will be the foundation for a global consortium of intelligent enterprises that design, manufacture and sell the produce that citizens, companies and countries depend on.

Above all else, SAP will be the company that provides the technology to convert aspirations into action - both in terms of business performance and sustainability - creating the next generation of industry leaders with the tools and insight to drive global commerce and a green agenda. In short, SAP was and still is the brand that defines an industry. In Klein’s own words, “ We are just getting started .” Here’s to the next 50 years.

Let’s create something that changes everything.

Let’s create something that changes everything.

Let’s create something that changes everything.

Today, what business needs most is creativity.

Today, what business needs most is creativity.

So let’s create a plan for the future and build a platform to get us there. Smarter operations with cloud and AI. Intelligent assets that know your business. Automated systems that make work less work. Cloud management that requires less management. And new ways for business to do business.

Today, what business needs most is creativity.

So let’s create a plan for the future and build a platform to get us there. Smarter operations with cloud and AI. Intelligent assets that know your business. Automated systems that make work less work. Cloud management that requires less management. And new ways for business to do business.

Let’s create. At scale. Right now. Together.

So let’s create a plan for the future and build a platform to get us there. Smarter operations with cloud and AI. Intelligent assets that know your business. Automated systems that make work less work. Cloud management that requires less management. And new ways for business to do business.

Let’s get started with IBM and Oracle at IBM.com/consulting/oracle

Let’s create. At scale. Right now. Together.

Let’s create. At scale. Right now. Together.

get started with IBM and Oracle at IBM.com/consulting/oracle

Let’s get started with IBM and Oracle at IBM.com/consulting/oracle

SHORT READS

NEVER DON’T GIVE UP

What story does this tattoo tell? Sure, it’s funny that the poor lad started out with a vision for something meaningful and ended up with a permanent reminder that he should have paid more attention at school. But does that diminish his efforts? If the execution isn’t faultless, does it render the endeavor moot?

Four years ago, I hatched a plan to launch a print magazine for a digital industry. The concept seemed counterintuitive, but I was convinced there was an opportunity. I wrote a short business plan and created a list of potential advertisers. It reminded me of my first business venture back in 1996 when all I had was a telephone and a list of names and numbers on a call sheet.

One by one, I called Oracle, SAP, Workday , ServiceNow , Deloitte and Accenture with a pitch that explained why print wasn’t dead and why they should buy some adver tising. When I reached the end of my list not a single company had expressed the slight est bit of interest and I was almost ready to give up.

Out of the blue, I got a call from the CMO at IFS. He had seen one of my many LinkedIn posts about ERP Today and wanted to know more. I was stunned that someone seemed interested and excitedly rattled through my pitch. He booked the back cover on the spot – and the rest, as they say, is history.

That single moment changed everything and gave me the confidence to knock on some doors again. Slowly I started to get some traction: first with Oracle, then SAP and soon after with the partners. Fast forward to today and ERP Today has partnerships with virtually every technology vendor, all the global consultancies, we host the industry’s biggest event in the UK (coming soon to the USA as well), and we create more than four million touch points between our partners and audience each year.

So why am I telling you this? Is it just to blow my own trumpet? Well, a little maybe, but the real reason I am telling this story is because there’s an important lesson to be

learned about facing adversity, accepting limitations, and still pulling through.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing; much like the illiterate, inked illustration of my story, my execution hasn’t always been faultless. I’ve fallen out with people when I’ve let my passion get the better of me. I’ve taken blunt positions when I’ve allowed my emotions to interfere with judgments. And, I’ve taken setbacks personally which have impacted me away from work.

But, I have maintained a clear vision; my eyes have been firmly on the prize and I told myself from the start that the path to success is often turbulent. Most importantly, I entered this knowing that even if it wasn’t perfect, it was worth pursuing.

Success in the face of adversity isn’t down to skill. It’s a mindset. If you believe in something and can articulate your passion it’s possible to overcome most things – and that clarity of vision and unwavering commitment is what is required to transform the way that we work and the purpose behind our endeavors.

Change is difficult to achieve. You may not end up exactly where you expected and you will certainly face challenges along the way. But you must retain a strong belief in what you are doing. You must be kind to yourself when things don’t go to plan and you should allow yourself the freedom to make mistakes and not let those bumps derail you from your mission.

We all have a lot of changing to do. Virtually every aspect of our lives has been disrupted over the last few years and the future is more uncertain now than ever before. But that disruption has also presented us with a golden opportunity to make changes that will begin to undo the mistakes of the past and build a better world for generations to come.

Sustainable business practices and a fair and equitable world for all are tantalizingly within our reach. It won’t be easy, but it is possible if we aim for progress over perfection. Never don’t give up.

PAUL ESHERWOOD

If the execution isn’t faultless, does it render the endeavor moot?

JIM HANNAN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT KOCH INDUSTRIES, AND KEVIN SAMUELSON, CEO AT INFOR,

BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

EXPLAIN WHY AN UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP WILL LEAD TO BETTER OUTCOMES FOR ERP CUSTOMERS.

WHAT DOES A PAPER COMPANY KNOW ABOUT ERP?

QUITE A BIT AS IT TURNS OUT

When Koch Industries bought Infor, I feared the brand would slowly but inevitably disappear from the ERP landscape. Koch is an industrial conglomerate with interests that span oil, paper, mining and energy, to name just a few. If you live in the USA, your daily life will be touched at some point by a Koch product: whether that’s the napkin you use at breakfast, the glass in your windshield, the fertilizer used to grow food, or the petrol that powers mobility.

Koch is a $125bn revenue behemoth with a diverse portfolio of interests, strong political ties and a track record for plowing its own furrow, often against the tide of social pressure. On face value, I couldn’t see why the acquisition made sense for Infor customers or how the Infor brand would retain its independence inside America’s second largest private company.

At Infor’s NYC headquarters, I spent the day with Jim Hannan, president and chief operating officer at Koch Industries, and Kevin Samuelson, CEO at Infor, to find out what the deal meant for Infor customers.

Infor the innovator

Infor is a brand that I have long admired. It may not make as much noise as some ERP vendors, its CEO doesn’t have the same swagger as others I could mention and it rarely hits the headlines when signing a new customer. But, ever since I interviewed Charles Phillips on my first assignment for ERP Today, I have been fascinated by a company that has defied an entire industry by doing ERP its own way.

Whether Infor was owned by private equity, considering an IPO or on the brink of being acquired, it has always maintained a unique position - a position that is consistently underscored by taking bold decisions ahead of market convention.

Consider the four biggest levers in ERP modernization: cloud, industries, implementation and experience. Infor was first to the party on all four of these topics when it developed its in-house design agency more than a decade ago, launched micro vertical products in 2010, went all-in on AWS with the first multi-tenant cloud offering in 2015, and developed its 60:30:10 methodology to ease the heartache of ERP projects.

In addition, Infor OS is the most mature of all the application platforms and was the first to embrace a microservices architecture with accompanying data lake and AI-powered analytics baked in. When you look at Infor’s track record of technical firsts, you start to build a picture of a company that consistently innovated ahead of the curve.

When I interviewed Phillips in 2018, he said this: “Our competitors are talking about experience, but we started that conversation with the first integrated design agency. They

“CONSIDER THE FOUR BIGGEST LEVERS IN ERP MODERNIZATION: CLOUD, INDUSTRIES, IMPLEMENTATION AND EXPERIENCE: INFOR WAS FIRST TO THE PARTY ON ALL FOUR OF THESE TOPICS.”

OF ALL THE ERP VENDORS, INFOR IS THE ONLY MAJOR FORCE THAT IS PRIVATELY OWNED AND THAT PRESENTS A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO THINK ABOUT ITS PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND CUSTOMERS IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAY.

Scan the QR code to listen to interview highlights

are talking about cloud, but we built our applications for the cloud rather than retooling on-premise apps. We made a decision not to get into the infrastructure business which means that all of our focus and budget is spent enriching our applications. Infor leverages Amazon’s huge investment in infrastructure services while our competitors are effectively competing against that.”

Given Infor’s history of bucking trends and making big bets before everyone else caught up, maybe the deal with Koch is another example of progressive thinking outside the box and I just need to be schooled-up? Whenever I have interviewed Samuelson in the past, we have always returned to the same nagging question: how do we make ERP better for customers? Maybe he has found the answer in an unlikely partnership.

What is Koch Industries?

From the outside looking in, Koch may appear to be an ageing industrial entity but, in reality, it’s a progressive hotbed of innovation and radical thinking. Since 1961, it has outperformed the  S&P 500 by nearly 26 to one. How did it create such dramatic, long-term growth especially when so many

other large enterprises failed to adapt to change and ultimately ceased to exist? The answer to its success lies in its Principle Based Management philosophy underpinned by the idea of ‘mutual cycles of benefit’.

Koch’s economy-defying success is rooted in the application of proven principles of human progress. Ideas such as mutual benefit, comparative advantage and creative destruction have provided a platform to innovate and transform on a huge scale, ultimately creating a business that has defined its own version of success.

Its principles predicate an entire business model and are instrumental in shaping the company’s decision making and investments. They also directly influence customer relationships by considering ‘the mutual benefit’ of each engagement through a broad value lens rather than a narrow sales window.

“The overarching principle that drives our customer relationships is mutual benefit,” said Hannan. “You can simplify that and say we’re looking for win-win partnerships that are more than transactional. This is how we view customers in every one of our businesses.”

Koch may be 100-years old and rooted in industrial activities, but it is also an incredibly dynamic and diverse investor in technology. Recently it has made significant investments in battery technologies and, through its Disruptive Technologies (KDT) subsidiary, is at the sharp end of innovation in healthcare, FinTech, cyber security and energy transformation.

Koch still makes most of its money by refining oil, milling paper and other heavy industries, but it is also an investor in more than 50 venture-stage companies that are transforming industries and shaping the future with clean energy, smart and sustainable building materials and artificial intelligence to power cutting edge healthcare tech.

KDT’s philosophy sets out a bold agenda: ‘the continuous process of iterating, improving and destroying current business models and platforms’. Although Infor is owned by the parent company, not the subsidiary, when you consider its acquisition against this context of disruptive and radical innovation, the move doesn’t seem so obscure after all.

Infor’s transformation

Infor may be in the business of helping its customers adapt to digital commerce, but it also needed its own transformation. Infor and Koch share many common business principles but embedding the Koch methodologies into the fabric of the company has taken some reorganization and realignment.

“A lot of what Kevin has been doing is transformation, in terms of the organization, how we’re thinking about customers and how we improve that experience,” said Hannan. “We’ve had a lot of changes and the team has been adjusted to bring people with different capabilities into different types of roles. Those changes are starting to harden and we are seeing the team gel around the transformation.”

“WHEN YOU CONSIDER ITS ACQUISITION AGAINST THIS CONTEXT OF DISRUPTIVE AND RADICAL INNOVATION, THE MOVE DOESN’T SEEM SO OBSCURE.”

Those changes are already delivering benefits and Samuelson highlighted Koch’s durable outlook as one of the key elements of the partnership, noting the considerable benefits as well as the challenges of shifting to a long-term mindset.

“The things that we can learn from one another continue to multiply,” said Samuelson. “One of the reasons Koch has been so successful in so many different industries is its ability to shift from short-term thinking to long-term thinking and while everyone says they want that, it’s actually a lot harder than you might think.”

I asked if longer-term thinking could come at the expense of rapid innovation, but Samuelson was keen to point out that playing the long game and not being shackled by the quarterly cadence of an earnings call actually means more strategic bets can be placed, often with higher returns.

“I think innovation is actually more pronounced when you’re thinking of long timescales,” he said. “When you’re not so concerned what happens in any individ-

Infor’s products have been centered on industries for 13 years and it developed hundreds of niche components that sat inside broader industry categories. For example, within food and beverages, you would have found solutions that were fine-tuned for bakers, dairy farmers, drinks manufacturers and breweries. That strategy was a first for the industry and gave Infor a unique lens into the inner workings of industries that otherwise had to choose between vanilla solutions from other publishers.

I had always pondered how long Infor would be able to maintain the level of R&D needed to keep hundreds of separate products lines up to date and whether the strategy would be refined to have more focus. Samuelson explained that the strategy had been optimized recently to focus on the verticals where it could make the biggest impacts.

“If you think about our history, it was a mile wide and an inch deep,” he said. “We had a lot of products, but let’s be honest, our future is really on a very small number of industries so we have doubled-down on those.”

Today, Infor focuses on three main category verticals: discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing/distribution and services. Within those categories there are products that are

ual quarter, you’re more comfortable making big investments that have bigger returns but might take longer to mature. That’s something public companies just aren’t willing to do.”

Infor is now much more aligned across its teams to ensure that customer engagements are predicated on a measurable benefit rather than a sale. “When we start a journey with a customer, the team that’s going to deliver the outcome and maintain the relationship comes together from the beginning, in a way that that they’re accountable across functions are capabilities,” said Hannan. “Not just to sell the product but to also get it installed and get it running.”

Infor’s product differentiation

This article focuses on Infor’s ownership structure, its relationship with Koch and how that impacts customers. However, it is important to take a brief look at Infor’s product strategy to see how Koch’s ownership might influence it.

optimized for automotive, aerospace and defense, high-tech, industrial manufacturing, distribution, retail and fashion, food & beverage and healthcare.

The strategy is already paying dividends with Samuelson keen to highlight the shift in its revenue split with a much bigger focus on new customer wins. “We’re winning a lot of new customers in the industries that we are strong in,” he said. “New business is growing in the mid 30 percent range and it’s slightly ahead of our cloud upgrades. It’s become a much bigger growth engine for us than it was before and that’s a function of the strategy we have put in place. By focusing on a few industries, the most compelling products and putting all the wood behind the arrow in those areas, we are starting to see real growth across the board.”

Why does all this make sense?

Infor and Koch’s partnership has created a new paradigm in the

“WHEN YOU’RE NOT SO CONCERNED WHAT HAPPENS IN ANY INDIVIDUAL QUARTER, YOU’RE MORE COMFORTABLE MAKING BIG INVESTMENTS THAT HAVE BIGGER RETURNS.”

ERP industry - one that is long overdue and has the potential to transform how ERP companies sell and deliver their services. Infor may be lagging behind some of its competitors in terms of scale but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for through differentiation. Its CEO has been on a mission to make ERP more palatable for as long as I have known him and in Koch, he has the backing to place big bets to achieve that.

From a customer’s point of view, who do you want to be in business with? A vendor that is be -

ferentiation for decades. For 50 years, the ERP industry has operated with an unwritten hierarchy that places vendors first, implementation partners second, and customers last. That’s how the industry works and there is no getting away from it. Genuine satisfaction rates for ERP customers are lower than virtually any other industry. And I use the word ‘genuine’ because even disgruntled ERP customers are often prevented from expressing their views due to draconian legal agreements.

I believe there is such a good opportunity to get to a point where customers see Infor’s approach as different.” This desire to ameliorate the pain of implementations and create an ERP brand that is regarded as ‘different’ is a lynchpin of the Infor strategy. Adopting Koch’s philosophies and infusing them into a focused and innovative product, delivered by an organization that takes accountability for the lifecycle of the solution could provide the formula for a truly differentiated ERP offering.

“What makes us quite unique is we also have a very large services business,” said Samuelson. “If you truly believe that you want the best outcome for customers, taking accountability through the process is really important, and I think that’s pretty different with Infor and the rest of the industry.”

The concept of being different is something that Infor has grown comfortable with over a decade of bringing firsts to a market that has consistently churned out anything but dif-

The partnership between Koch and Infor has the potential to catalyze the type of change that many ERP customers have been looking for. A long-term partnership with mutual benefit at the core and a vendor committed to each stage of the ERP journey, from sale, to implementation and beyond.

I asked at the start of this article, what does a paper company know about ERP? Perhaps the questions should have been, what can an ERP vendor learn from a paper company? Infor has always been an innovator and demonstrated true differentiation in a market where that is a scarce commodity. In Koch it has found a parent that understands its customer base and will continue to foster innovation by encouraging experimentation and radical thinking.

I started my journey to NYC skeptical that a marriage between Koch and Infor could work. I left believing that every ERP vendor would benefit from taking a leaf out of Hannan’s playbook.

“IF YOU THINK ABOUT OUR HISTORY, IT WAS A MILE WIDE AND AN INCH DEEP. WE HAD A LOT OF PRODUCTS BUT OUR FUTURE IS REALLY ON A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF INDUSTRIES.”

Our first edition is a showcase.

We have profiled many of the brands and leaders that are at the sharp end of digital transformation. Our aim is to give you a preview of what’s to come, however, future issues will be far less focused on CEO profiles and will dive deeper into specific topics. Our print magazine is designed to entertain and educate in equal measure and our editorial style always tries to find the intersection between people and technology.

NEXT ISSUE

EDITORIALS

In the next issue we will be covering the topics below. If you would like to contribute, please say hello.

FEATURES

+ BENIOFF AND SALESFORCE?

- IS THE PARTY OVER?

+ XEROX AND IBM

– TWO BRANDS THAT DEFINED AN INDUSTRY

+ DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

– HOW FAR HAVE WE REALLY COME?

+ HEALTHCARE TECH

- ORACLE’S RACE FOR DOMINANCE

+ Hyperscaler review

– three choices or four?

+ Financial Services transformation

+ Industry clouds – vapourware or deep domain innovation?

+ EAPs are the new battle ground for apps vendors

+ How low can you go?

Low-code applications review

+ Cloud cost control and the rising burden of multi-cloud

+ Human centerd transformation

– what does it really mean?

HR TECHNOLOGY

will be embracing employee experience, talent marketplace and more in 2023

HR analyst Josh Bersin sees much for the sector and HR tech market to be optimistic about this year.

Human resources technology spending grew by almost 35 percent over the last three years and nearly every company is looking to spend more. A recent study by Sapient Insights found that more than half of all organizations are increasing their HR tech budgets, and fewer than 15 percent are cutting back. There is a good reason for this. Over the last decade, historic amounts of venture capital have gone into this space, all focused on making work more productive, giving employees better information and tools, and helping HR departments better manage skills, recruiting, engagement and retention.

It’s time for a major realignment: category consolidation

As a result of all this growth, companies now have too many tools. In fact, according to OKTA , the average employee now uses 88 different systems. Companies have dozens of systems for learning, recruiting, benefits and multitudes of tools for collaboration, document sharing and even feedback. As the economy slows, buyers are simply saying ‘slow down’, and this will force the HR tech space to become more rational.

During the 2008 slowdown, we saw similar cau-

tion, and what we can expect is what I call ‘category consolidation’. Rather than buy ten tools for corporate training, ten for recruiting and dozens for other applications, vendors start to run out of money, investment dries up and the larger vendors buy the smaller ones. I expect this to happen next year.

The winners will be larger vendors with strong recruitment platforms (Eightfold, Beamery , iCIMS , Phenom ), those with strong learning platforms (Cornerstone, Docebo , Microsoft ), those with strong career systems and AI platforms (Gloat) and major players in employee experience ( ServiceNow , Oracle , Workday , and Microsoft).

The human capital management (HCM) vendors ( ADP , Workday, Oracle, SuccessFactors) are all likely to be consolidators, and they are each trying to compete. Consider Workday’s recent acquisition of survey and assessment vendor Peakon (for a very high multiple). Workday simply decided it was faster and easier to buy its way into employee listening than to try to build it itself. I expect we’ll see more of this in the year ahead.

Get set for next-gen HCM

In parallel with consolidation, get ready for next-gen HCM. Most companies replace their core HR platforms every seven to ten years or so, and when there’s a disruptive change it can sometimes happen faster. Well, disruption has arrived.

Most core HR systems are designed as massive data management and workflow-based transaction systems. They manage payroll, employee recordkeeping, organizational hierarchy and all sorts of historic data about people.

The problem they have is they were all designed around hierarchical job architectures, with workflow, security and reporting aligned this way. While this is often the way companies operate, more and more companies now operate as ‘project teams’ and ‘cross-functional teams’, rendering much of this hierarchy less important. How do you model a company filled with projects and teams in your core HR system? There’s little or no information about it at all.

Cisco once found that the company

had more than 4,000 different teams operating around the world. When they looked in their core HR system they realized that none of these ‘teams’ were really represented. This means that most of the important things Cisco managers wanted to do, such as select a team, start a team, set goals for a team, manage a team, understand the skills of a team, decide a bonus for a team, had to be done outside the HCM platform. So the real utility of this class of system has declined.

Coming next are a new wave of HCM platforms that focus on team enablement and management, let the company set up many teams and manage them in many ways, support conglomerate companies and companies with dif -

embedded in recruiting and sourcing, and beginning to incentivize people based on skills.

I believe that the talent intelligence concept is taking off across HR, as well as more use of artificial intelligence (AI) in recruiting. In the last year we’ve seen that AI has proven itself in recruiting far more than in any other part of HR. I believe there will be a lot of consolidation in a crowded market.

And we’ll need AI’s help in supporting another seismic shift in modern HR: the rise of internal mobility and the internal company marketplace. The reason the internal marketplace concept is taking off is why Airbnb does so well; it facilitates a way for people to move to where they and the CEO wants them to go without significant investment. In the past, you designed a career path and told people here’s your career pathevery two or three years you’ll get a promotion, and we’ll take care of you from pre-hire to retirement.

That’s not how careers work anymore, and we need ways for people to move around companies that are intelligent, beneficial for them and that we can leverage for the strategic change and reorganization 21st century business is defined by. And the right career path is more likely to be discovered by AI than invented by managers sitting around a meeting room.

HR-led change

ferent overlapping organizations, and offer native support for goals, projects and mobility that crosses hierarchical boundaries.

Today new tools like Darwinbox, ADP Next-gen HCM, HiBob and the new release of SuccessFactors are designed for this. Oracle and Workday have yet to release such features, but we have to believe they will be coming. What else can we expect in 2023?

I expect skills tech to continue to play a big factor in all our lives. In every company skills tech is not only a part of the learning infrastructure, it’s part of the talent mobility and talent marketplace infrastructure, and increasingly being

The last trend I want to call out is more of a business trend than a tech one, though it will need technology to make it work: the rise of the career pathway. A career pathway is a branch to a new career based on skills as opposed to a current career. I expect a huge growth in organizations re-training people in danger from automation to address gaps in the skills base or working with external parties to re-skill employees into a completely new occupation.

There’s more to look out for in 2023, from new directions in learning and development content, performance management and the rise of the Metaverse. I hope you agree that for all the strong headwinds the economy is facing, HR remains an amazing place to make the difference for a company.

“I believe that the talent intelligence concept is taking off across HR, as well as more use of artificial intelligence in recruiting.

In the last year we’ve seen that AI has proven itself in recruiting far more than in any other part of HR”

All change! How are the Big 4 responding to increased demand for business process design and change management rather than tech implementations?

BY CHRISTINE HORTON

Tech investment today isn’t being driven by feeds and speeds, but on the business outcomes that customers want to achieve. Technology is no longer at the heart of transformation; it is a business enabler. At the same time, most ERP software today comes out of the box as standard. The upshot for global systems integrators (GSIs) is that there is now very little technical work for them to do for clients – unless it’s developing extensions.

Put simply, there is little or no technical complexity for them to manage.

“As infrastructure complexity is being abstracted by the cloud and development is being led by citizen developers leveraging lowcode or no-code platforms, the complexity the GSIs used to manage is reducing,” says Steven Dickens, senior analyst at Futurum Research.

This has changed the game for those firms. Previously engaged in technical assignments, the lion’s share of their work is now focused on business process design and change management – which of course requires completely different skills and delivery model.

There have been some corresponding operational shifts within the ‘Big 4’ consultancies in 2022 – EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC – as they react to changing market needs. We’ve seen the launch of new divisions and even a break-up of the business in the case of EY. But how are the likes of the Big 4 adapting to these particular changes to how they engage with clients – and what do they mean for customers? We spoke to some of those firms to find out how they are steering their businesses into 2023 and beyond.

Precipice of ERP transformation

Lisa Caldwell, EY Americas business consulting leader, believes that many organizations today are on the

precipice of significant ERP transformation.

“The biggest change we have seen is the move away from outdated thinking that pegs ERP as a technical exercise,” she says.

Caldwell maintains that technology has now matured to the point where firms are moving towards an enlightened approach that connects ERP to better business outcomes.

“Outdated thinking paints ERP as a cost center, a tool to be purchased and deployed. In reality, it can be an important value creation vehicle that empowers an organization’s stakeholders with a reliable and credible single source of truth. Now, leaders must begin thinking differently about the data behind an ERP. How can we get our ERP information into the cloud to generate greater visibility across the business? How do we use it to create more agile, joined-up applications? Answering these questions allow firms to capture and collate data from across the organization, then use these insights to build speed, flexibility and resiliency into their operations as a whole.”

At the same time, a study by EY and Oxford Saïd Business School confirms the need for strengthened change management and people-focus when it comes to transformation. It found that organizations that put humans at the center of their business strategy by investing in the adaptive skills of their workforce are 260 percent more likely to succeed in organizational transformation.

“Ultimately every transformation has a people impact,” says Caldwell. “Employees need resources to continually evolve and adapt their skill sets over time to adjust to new technologies and processes and to stay current in their profession. Such efforts benefit both the individual and their professional development but also the company, which reaps the rewards of in-

“AS COMPLEXITY HAS BEEN ABSTRACTED BY THE CLOUD, THE COMPLEXITY GSIs USED TO MANAGE IS REDUCING”

STEVEN DICKENS / FUTURUM RESEARCH

creased productivity and enhanced employee morale.

“Developing approaches that involve active listening, rethinking your talent strategy, creating new career paths, investing in individualized learning and actively seeking to create a groundswell of enthusiasm and involvement from the grassroots will be the transformations that best succeed.”

Interestingly though, it seems employees are also growing more resistant to change - in 2016, the Gartner Workforce Change Survey showed 74 percent of employees were willing to change work behaviors to support organisational

Demand for change management

Looking to another of the Big 4, Todd Lohr, head of technology consulting at KPMG US, confirms the company is evolving its business to meet the changing needs of clients, particularly when it comes to transformation.

“While technical implementation is still a part of what clients are looking for, we’re seeing an even greater demand for wider transformation and change management support. After doing the hard and rewarding work of a functional transformation, our clients want to ensure their technology can readily adapt to market conditions, regulatory changes, new technologies, and process improvements.”

Lohr says that’s why KPMG created Powered Evolution, an on-demand service to help clients “optimize their functional transformation.”

“We’re also forming strategic alliances with key technology providers, working together to utilize each other’s skill sets and expertise to solve complex business challenges,” he says. “Our approach to alliances enables us to advise clients on the best solutions for their business, and we work closely with the technology providers on implementation to provide a

“Our alliance ecosystem is designed with a global view and to help address today’s top issues, trends and priorities, while also monitoring the market and emerging technologies to identify new alliances and

Next generation of technical consulting

Jag Bandla, principal and leader of Deloitte’s AIOPS.D business argues that the current generation of consulting services actually go beyond just business model and change management. They can extend into pro -

TO NEXT GENERATION ERP,

viding services faster, better and more accurately by enabling digital and cloud-based ERPs and light RPA (robotics process automation) for clients.

“RPA can certainly allow clients to perform single tasks faster on/in their ERP ecosystems, while there are still the same number of steps required to get things done,” he says.

In fact, Bandla says the next generation of technical consult-

According to Dickens, the pace of transformation is only likely to increase, especially as complexity shifts and Line of Business executives become more comfortable with no code tools and process orchestration software, from the

“The challenge will be ensuring that data, and the insights from that data, keeps pace, and the complexity of data silos is collapsed,” he explains. “While line of business execs can take the lead, this leaves a lot in the hands of the underlying cloud providers.”

A potential shift of power to the cloud providers will see them with a stronger hold over IT than ever before –which could cause issues for consultancy firms.

“The Big 4 will be uncomfortable with this dynamic as they currently control the C-Suite and bring in vendors piecemeal,” agrees Dickens.

Ultimately, says Caldwell, there is an increasing need to ensure that change, including the ability to adapt and manage change, is ingrained

“By building this into the company’s transformation structure from the start, organizations can ensure they are providing their people with the skillset they need to manage both the technical and business aspect of the

It’s a cliché of course, that the only constant is change. But the ongoing transformation efforts of organizations do demand partners with the right skills help them navigate those changes. The Big 4 clearly recognize this and are evolving their own businesses

“MARKET SIGNALS FROM DELOITTE CLIENTS SHOW ROBUST DEMAND AT THE INTERSECTION OF ‘OPERATE’ AND ‘AUTONOMOUS’ TECHNOLOGY”

JAG BANDLA / DELOITTE

Robert Enslin

All paths lead to

automation

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have worked tirelessly in the pursuit of social and economic progression. It’s time for us to take a break.

At least that’s what Rob Enslin and UiPath believe as they ramp-up their mission to rid the world of monotonous, labor-intensive, low value work. As I began the interview in a swanky Dublin hotel, the South Africa-born exec confidently told me that UiPath is poised to play a lead role in shaping the future of work by unleashing the power of automation across the enterprise.

“Automation has the potential to solve the hardest problems that companies face whilst improving employee experiences,” he said. “With the power of the UiPath platform behind them, organizations such as Uber , the U.S. Army and EY are changing how repetitive work is completed which drives huge efficiencies, improves processes and allows

people to focus on higher value tasks.”

Enslin is a former SAP president who has served in the upper echelons of enterprise technology for more than three decades. His recent appointment as co-CEO at UiPath follows 27 years at the German software giant and a fouryear spell at Google Cloud. He joins the company’s founder, Daniel Dines, in a shared capacity at the top of the organization and brings a wealth of expertise that will help transform UiPath from a provider of isolated RPA solutions to an enterprise-wide enabler for hyperautomation.

“UiPath is becoming the strategic partner for companies that want to optimize their processes and digitally transform,” said Enslin. “Our Business Automation Platform can discover, capture, test and execute automations across the enterprise and we are transitioning from a company that just sold RPA to one that delivers automated business outcomes for our customers.”

UiPath history

UiPath was formed in 2005, in a small Bucharest office when a group of engineers hatched an idea. The concept was simple but far reaching: give every person on the planet a digital robot to liberate humanity from the grind of repetitive work. The theory proved popular and the company grew rapidly, acquiring thousands of customers around the world that wanted to automate elements of their back office functions.

Its early guise operated in silos to perform repetitive tasks quicker or more accurately than a human. It offered some benefits but its effectiveness was limited to narrow chores rather than broad outcomes. Early adopters bought standalone bots that were plugged into disorganized systems to speed up data entry tasks - although it worked and made these routine assignments more palatable, to describe early RPA as digital transformation was a disservice to a term that is itself confounded by many.

UiPath has been the market leader in automation for as long as automation has been a thing. But a sharp decline in value as a public company and a big shift in its go-to-market strategy poses fresh challenges for new co-CEO, Rob Enslin.

WORDS / PAUL ESHERWOOD PICTURES / MICHAEL WESCHLER & JOEL CHANT

“Our Business Automation Platform can discover, capture, test transitioning from a company that just sold RPA to one that

ROBERT ENSLIN

“Our RPA solutions have historically been utilized at a department level where they solved an isolated problem. It wasn’t really transformative, but it did deliver efficiencies. As customers start to look more holistically at their digital transformation objectives, they realize that they need an end-to-end solution, and that does start to really transform how a process works and starts to drive outcomes that can be measured.”

Originally called DeskOver , the cohort of engineers started a mission to help companies minimize repetitive tasks with digital robots. The principle was misunderstood by many but enough forward-thinking businesses latched on to the idea and the company got a foothold. By outsourcing automation libraries for point solution RPA applications, DeskOver found early success in an industry that was largely unheard of. In the years that followed, it rebranded as UiPath, raised significant funding and ultimately floated on the NYSE in one of

the biggest software IPOs of all time.

That short history underlines the prodigious job that Daniel Dines has done trailblazing the automation cause. He has taken UiPath from a startup to a company that consistently ranks as the number one automation platform on all major review sites and partners with the world’s leading consulting brands to deliver global automation solutions. UiPath has offices in 40 countries, serves more than 10,000 customers and generates predictable recurring revenues in excess of $1bn.

However, despite the success and recognition, UiPath’s value has faltered as a public company. Its revenue model historically relied on the acquisition of new customers with relatively low contract values. While the spread of revenue and the impressive number of users initially won favor with the markets, the company lacked the experience and depth of product to convert line-item sales into package-solution customers.

I asked Enslin what motivated the move from Google and how he appraised the opportunity with UiPath, especially given the fall in value that the company had experienced since it went public.

“I wanted to work with a founder and when I looked at how far they had come, and I read the Gartner reports, I was blown away with what Daniel had achieved. It was a tough time in some respects because software valuations were being hit hard and we were on the back of the pandemic, but the potential at UiPath was exceptional and I knew I could add some real value. I spent a lot of time with Daniel, I had a lot of discussions with customers, colleagues and friends, and the energy around the product and the brand was really compelling. I wanted to work in a meaningful company where I could make a real difference and all the fundamentals were there. Yes, the valuation had taken a hit, but the business was heading in the right direction: we

and execute automations across the enterprise and we are delivers automated business outcomes for our customers.”

have great market share, the product is the best out there, the culture is amazing and we are sitting on a bunch of cash. UiPath can be a generational company that changes how we think about work and I have the experience and motivation to make that happen.”

Enslin’s assessment is consistent with my personal take - UiPath is not alone in suffering at the hands of the markets. Many tech stocks have tanked recently but the underlying opportunity remains sound and Enslin joins the company at a time when its product has matured, its market is more defined and, above all else, customers are crying out for solutions that return instant results. Whilst the journey towards packaged automation solutions and a platform-play started before Enslin’s arrival, he brings the scale-mentality that he learned at SAP and refined at Google which can take UiPath from RPA market leader to a

they have not fundamentally changed the human condition. They have simply afforded us more time to become consumed with other digital travails.

Looking back through history, people came together in the agricultural revolution to move humanity from a subsistence living to one of plenty. During the industrial revolution we built machines to increase productivity and now, in the digital age, we have developed the tools to create utopia. Yet we remain slaves to the notion of work, akin to those who came before us and worked on farms and in coal mines. Throughout the ages and despite bounds in knowledge and capability, one thing has remained consistent. Humans turn the wheels.

As farmers, industrialists and now digitally-enabled workers - the reliance on people has not abated. Despite the supposed benefits of the technological revolution, we have not managed to

The evolution from RPA to hyperautomation

Hyperautomation takes the raw concept of RPA (which is the narrow application of automation) and supercharges it with mining capabilities, machine learning and artificial intelligence to deliver more coherent outcomes across processes and workflows. It can be applied to virtually any business object where a chain of interdependent actions occur in sequence or as a consequence, with each stage of the chain being controlled, managed and executed by software rather than a human.

This leap forward in capability has the potential to radically and permanently alter the nature of work whilst freeing human capacity from the shackles of repetitive digital labor. The benefits at an individual level are obvious and the collective advantages promise exponential opportunities for innova -

global powerhouse that sits at the center of digital transformation efforts.

As Enslin emphatically told me, “I know how to scale and the opportunity at UiPath is unprecedented.”

Enslin brings the scale-mentality that he learned at SAP and refined at Google which can take UiPath from RPA market leader to a global powerhouse that sits at the center of digital transformation efforts.

Why will automation change the concept of work?

In order to understand the impact that UiPath and hyperautomation will impose, it’s important to think more broadly about the purpose behind the technology.

You may not realize it, but we are transitioning as a species. That transition is not defined because we can stream movies, make video calls or order goods over the internet. Those types of benefits arising from the first wave of digital technologies have improved our existence, but

relieve ourselves from the drudgery of work. One could argue that instead of reducing toil, the digital age has, in fact, increased the burden. The tasks may have changed, but human effort is still inextricably linked to the vast majority of economic output. We have simply swapped a plough for a keyboard.

As Enslin succinctly put it, “there’s still a lot of ‘cut and paste’ work that goes on and automation can fix that at a stroke”.

For the first time in our existence, we have the ability to change the fundamental concept of work. For centuries it was entirely centered on manual labor. Industrial automation put an end to that kind of employment and we shifted to a service-oriented economy fueled by computerization. For the last 50 years, people have been employed to sit in front of a screen and furiously type, print and file. Now there is an opportunity that can free us from the mundane and prosaic nature of digital work. That opportunity is called hyperautomation.

tion, creativity and value.

Enslin told me that UiPath was now part of a much broader conversation focused on enterprise transformation rather than detached instances of RPA and that its Business Automation Platform brought together all the tools for enterprises to truly modernize the way they operate.

“With our platform, customers can get all the benefits from RPA like reducing errors and driving efficiencies but now they can also think about using automation as a driver for transformation and new opportunities. Our customers are innovating at pace, bringing new services to market and building their operating models around automation and the UiPath platform sits at the heart of those conversations.”

Step change in approach

UiPath may be at the center of customer transformations, but it too is embarking on its own period of evolution. The shift in its product portfolio has big im-

Enslin brings the scale-mentality that he learned at SAP and from RPA market leader to a global powerhouse that sits at the

plications for the way its sales and goto-market teams are organized which will require significant re-engineering. Its move towards packaged solutions, in more complex environments, often with multiple partners and with a far higher price point, necessitates a different sales beast to get deals done.

“The challenge is not the expansion of new customers, but the expansion of automation within customers we already have,” said Enslin. “Our shift towards programmatic solutions and platform pricing will make it much easier for companies to consume the full spectrum of our technology and extract maximum value from their investment. It will also inevitably lead to larger deal sizes and that has implications for the way we structure our teams.”

Mining for opportunities

There is no company in the world that

can claim its operations are as performant as possible and many have implemented digital technologies in such a haphazard fashion that their IT landscapes are slowing productivity rather than increasing it. The amount of technical and process debt that exists in most organizations is staggering and the biggest problem of all is that the hairball architectures are so complex it is almost impossible for a human to untangle.

This is where mining tools play a vital role in helping companies understand what their processes are, which ones are efficient and which ones need re-engineering. Process, task and communication mining applications can investigate structured and unstructured data to identify weak links and suggest opportunities for automation. Process mining tools analyze data and event logs from business applications to understand the end-to-end process and the scope of the system. Task mining tools review the work people do on their desktops to recognize how assignments

are executed. And communication mining tools interrogate unstructured data in emails, text messages, even voice conversations, using AI and neuro-linguistic programming, to understand and trigger process improvements.

The discovery tools within the UiPath Business Automation platform can be applied to virtually any process or operation (even hidden or unknown processes) and build a digitally-optimal solution which can then be automated.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform essentially contains three action layers that can be separated as ‘discovery’, ‘automate’ and ‘operate’. Within the

discovery layer, the mining tools mentioned above seek out opportunities for automation and present the potential for optimization back to the business.

The other two action layers feed into the UiPath Automation Studio and include an integrated test suite which allows users to constantly monitor, test and validate automations and reduce redundancy over time. The continued development of this integrated automation suite sets UiPath apart from its competition and provides customers with a compelling, easy-to-use and demonstrably valuable tool to build highperforming and optimized solutions

refined at Google which can take UiPath centre of digital transformation efforts.

across the most complex of business operations and processes.

Value creation

Hyperautomation’s silver bullet is its ability to demonstrate a return on investment in a way that few, if any, other digital technologies can. While an ERP

to remain flat or reduce slightly, which will lead to more pressure to prioritize investments that will have the biggest (and fastest) impact.

According to the Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, the top three automation priorities in 2023 are: lowering operating costs (42 percent), greater efficiency (41 percent), and improving customer satisfaction (41 percent). Another top challenge cited by survey respondents is the difficulty they have building metrics that tie investments to financial outcomes. Automation vendors are heavily focused on this problem by using both process and task mining technologies to scope automation opportunities, moving to fact-based documentation, planning and design.

UiPath’s ability to demonstrate value to customers, before a single dollar has been invested, through its discovery and mining tools will play a key role in wrestling under-pressure budgets away from

“We think of it as true value engineering,” said Enslin. “We drive the outcomes from day one with every customer and

considerable experience at building big and scaling. 27 years at SAP provides the lens to visualize UiPath’s journey from a seller of RPA to a strategic and integrated partner for transformation. Enslin’s network and reputation elevate the brand while his experience with large-scale programmatic solutions puts UiPath into a different orbit altogether. Its alliances with the world’s most influential consultancies propel UiPath into conversations that it would not otherwise be part of and opens up immeasurable opportunities to extend its footprint, giving UiPath a seat at the table when big enterprises make big investments.

The value proposition is clearly defined and offers a direct line to a return on investment. Coupled with this easily-quantified benefit is the speed at which automations can be implemented. Time to deploy and value have always been hot potatoes for the enterprise tech industry as many of the traditional vendors have been far less able to demonstrate dollar-spent for dollar-returned, and definitely less able to give accurate timeframes to get solutions working.

realization can be hard to quantify. With automation, the return is simple to measure and directly linked to every dollar invested.

Productivity gains, error reduction, increased compliance and cost savings are all calculated and measured. And then there is the new revenue opportunities that automation can deliver through increased customer satisfaction, new routes to market and innovations made possible by additional human capacity.

In a worldwide September 2022 survey conducted by IDC, 72 percent of respondents expect 2023 to be a recession year and this will herald a more conservative approach to IT spending with a sharper focus on value. Half of the respondents expected IT budgets

our teams do analysis in the discovery phase to identify the benefits and then measure the value over time. We are seeing savings of millions of dollars for customers through productivity and efficiency gains and the value doesn’t stop there. Customers are becoming more agile, they are able to innovate quicker and see a return on their investment in record time.”

Conclusion

UiPath has been the market leader in automation for a decade and Enslin’s appointment as co-CEO strengthens that position considerably. Although he still thinks of himself as an engineer at heart, it won’t be his technical nous that drives UiPath forward - it will be his

As the interview draws to a close, I asked Enslin to reflect on our conversation to summarize the UiPath strategy and set out what we can expect to see in the next stage of its progression. “We are ready to re-accelerate growth and human achievement by putting the full weight of UiPath technology behind our customers,” he said. “Our move to platform pricing and focusing on outcomes will be a game-changer for UiPath and the organizations that we work with. Daniel and I have a shared vision of how to create a generational company and we are poised to play our role in modernizing the enterprise and helping customers achieve their digital transformation objectives with products and services that deliver measurable value in rapid time.”

In today’s harsh economic climate, enterprise leaders must evaluate opportunities that can deliver value and outcomes in weeks rather than years and that pushes automation and companies like UiPath up the priority list. Doing more with less is something that every business is coming to terms with, and UiPath promises big wins, fast.

Throughout the ages and despite bounds in knowledge and capability, one thing has remained consistent. Humans turn the wheels.

Intuition engineered— human insight at superhuman speed

We can engineer every aspect of your business— technology, processes and experiences—to anticipate customer expectations and act instantly. Find out how at Cognizant.com.

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ORBIS N ON SUFFICIT

WHY WE SHOULD BE CAUTIOUS ABOUT THE INSATIABLE DEMANDS OF MODERN ENTERPRISE.

IS ANYONE ELSE BORED BY THE NUMBERS? DO YOU FIND THE RACE FOR CLOUD DOMINANCE A BIT DULL? ARE VENDOR BOASTS REMINDING YOU OF A RECENT TIME IN HISTORY WHEN GETTING RICH AND GRABBING MORE PLAYED OUT PRETTY BADLY FOR MOST OF US?

Fundamental market dynamics dictate that big tech companies must sell more to satisfy shareholders but the persistent desire for growth is taking its toll on workers and the markets are finally realizing that not every cloud business has a future. The earnings call is an established measuring tool for publicly quoted companies with all the major tech vendors (apart from Infor) putting analysts and media people through the ritual of quarterly bragging sessions. These calls start with the headline numbers – how much has top line revenue grown? How much did annual recurring revenue increase in the last quarter? And continue with more bluster on the number of net new customers, the growth in average contract value and details on backlog (stuff that has been sold but not yet delivered). Once the aggrandizing is over, a carefully scripted set of questions is put forward by analysts which provide the vendor with yet more opportunity to recount their successes and flaunt their progress.

THE RACE FOR CLOUD SUPREMACY

BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

In short, the earnings call provides vendors with a two hour opportunity to extol their own virtues and tell the world how well they are doing. However, I am yet to hear a major tech vendor talk sensibly about how the relentless push for more is impacting its workforce or articulating a strategy to support and nurture its people.

Having sat through countless earnings calls from all the major cloud and tech vendors I have become immune to the swagger and now find them rather dull. The market mentality is focused on growth – that’s what everyone looks for on an earnings call and until very recently that’s how the markets graded a particular stock. If a vendor demonstrated 40 percent growth it could expect to wake up to good news from the markets whether or not it was delivering value for its customers, creating a great place to work or operating profitably. The market cap of the major players was measured on a binary scale – more, more and more was the only metric that seemed to matter, until recently.

However, over the last few months there has been a correction to the way that stocks are valued and it is high time that cloud vendors took notice and started to think about alternative metrics to demonstrate their prowess. Yes, the markets are being impacted by global challenges like rising inflation, supply chain pressures and war – but these macro forces aside, the markets are realizing that unchecked growth which is not supported by profitability, a sustainable business model and rational planning will not deliver the long-term future that was once predicted.

Until recently there was only one trajectory for enterprise tech vendors – and that was upwards. For the remainder of 2022 and possibly beyond, we are likely to see that momentum slow for many, and for some, it could be the end of the road altogether. In my opinion, it will be the tech companies which place greater importance on their people that manage to ride out the uncertainty while those which fail to address the fundamental challenges faced by workers will see the sharpest declines.

The second gold rush

The scramble for cloud superiority and corporate wallet share has created a land-grab mentality amongst many cloud vendors. Fearful of missing out on ‘the greatest growth market the world has ever known’ and beholden to insatiable shareholder expectations – the dominant players in the cloud market have been filling their boots and the expectations are being felt by all of us.

Whether you are on the frontline selling cloud, in the background managing cloud, or riding along on cloud coattails (like we are) the incessant pace and unrelenting expectations must come at a cost, eventually. Where that cost will bite the

hardest is yet to be determined but the toll is already evident in workplaces across the globe and responsible employers must arrest their rapacious need for more sales if it comes at the detriment of wellbeing.

During the mid-nineteenth century gold fever spread around the world like wildfire. The term ‘fever’ was used because those who were seduced by the possibilities of unearthing riches from the ground became ‘feverish’ and oblivious to anything other than lining their pockets. There is a strong argument that ‘cloud fever’ is having a similar impact today.

The Gold Rush in the 1800s had many benefits: an explosion in manufacturing followed as mining machinery, hydraulic equipment and timber products boomed. The abundance of new raw materials led to a surge in agricultural development, often coined as ‘green gold’. And transportation and infrastructure services were transformed – examples include the building of the canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the development of The Pony Express for mail services and the first transatlantic railroad that connected the east coast with California.

Whether you are on the frontline selling cloud, in the background managing cloud, or riding along on cloud coattails (like we are) the incessant pace and unrelenting expectations must come at a cost, eventually.

However, while the ‘rush’ had many positive implications there was also an underbelly of death, discrimination and destruction that followed in its wake. Hundreds of thousands of people died in mining accidents and disputes. The environmental impact was devastating as rivers were damned, soil became polluted and forests were stripped bare. It also led to widespread bigotry, inequality and injustices as the rich got richer and the poor, well you know what always happens to the poor.

Similarly, there are many benefits to the explosion of cloud technologies that have the potential to solve the world’s hardest problems. But there is equally a growing number of concerns connected to the claim modern working practices are having on individuals. Do we really want to look back on the cloud revolution to realize that instead of benefiting from all this new technology to make our lives better, the planet greener and society fairer – we actually spent all our time trying to grab more?

Looking for problems that don’t exist, yet

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining – and believe me, the sun is shining brightly if your game is selling cloud software and accessories. Public cloud end-user spending is set to rise to a dizzying $500bn this year and that is just the value of the infrastructure spend (IaaS, PaaS and DaaS). Factor in how much money is going to be pumped into cloud applications and you can add another £150bn to that total,

“WHETHER YOU ARE ON THE FRONTLINE SELLING CLOUD, IN THE BACKGROUND MANAGING CLOUD, OR RIDING ALONG ON CLOUD COATTAILS (LIKE WE ARE) THE INCESSANT PACE AND UNRELENTING EXPECTATIONS MUST COME AT A COST, EVENTUALLY.”

maybe more. Then consider how much ecosystem spend this creates and you can probably double the number – it’s mindboggling that companies are set to spend the same on cloud as the combined GDP of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

So what’s the problem? Cloud vendors are making hay, the ecosystem is booming, customers are benefiting from new innovations and everything appears rosy. Well, it is for now – but there is a fundamental concern at the back of my mind that just won’t go away. How long can this pace be sustained before someone or something gives?

The pressure to grow

The pressure to deliver growth has never been greater – if your cloud business is only expanding by 20 percent you may as well pack up and go home. The market is demanding 40 percent – even more in some cases – but the world and its workers can only tolerate that level of

forward just a few years and people were left scratching their heads when they realized we had all been asleep at the wheel.

The cloud industry isn’t storing up dirty secrets in the same way the financial sector did and there isn’t an impending crash on the horizon. But there are latent ingredients in today’s cloud market that point to an unsustainable trajectory and a likely impact for those wrapped up in it.

The world is not enough

The ‘world is not enough’ is paraphrased from an ancient Satire called ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’. The term was later used by King Philip II of Spain when he ascended to the Portuguese throne to underline the fact that Portugal was not the only conquest he had in mind. It was also used in a Bond film with slightly less significance.

The idea that we (as people, citizens and workers) should push ourselves to do more and strive forward is part of human nature – progress is in our DNA. But how we measure that progress must be aligned to the values that we hold as a civilized species. In the past, human endeavors were easily tracked to a humanitarian benefit: the agricultural revolution moved people from a subsistence living to one of plenty. The industrial revolution gave us machines that increased living standards. The digital revolution appears to be driving many of us into an early grave.

Corporate narrative changed after the financial crisis of 2008, and for good reason. We learned that greed could have severe implications for people when banks and financial institutions were revealed as gluttonous no-gooders. Millions of people around the world lost money, businesses went bust and institutions were wiped from the landscape. While there’s no direct comparison between Lehman Brothers et al and today’s cloud glitterati – the elements in the market and the dynamics between consumer, worker and provider are very similar.

The financial crisis had been brewing for decades but we missed the signs which were hiding in plain sight. Yuppy culture started in the 80s when hedge fund managers drove white Lamborghini Countaches and success was measured by how much cocaine was consumed on a lunch break. These brash, pinstriped executives moved numbers on a spreadsheet and at a stroke made a fortune or lost it. Huge bets were placed and when the bets went wrong, they bet some more to recover losses. We never questioned how or why because life was good: we could all access finance, interest rates were low, employment was high and the standard of living was on the up. Scroll

Just like the prospectors from the nineteenth century, millions of modern-day workers are caught up in the cloud rush. The implications for us may not be as severe as they were for gold miners from 200 years ago but surely we have learned that there is only so much in the tank and people can only give so much. The demands and expectations that are being placed on workers, managers, board members, companies, supply chains and the broader environment have never been greater and the expectations are still increasing.

One thing is for sure, not every major cloud vendor will still have a seat at the table in 20 years’ time – so what will determine the successes from the failures? Given that the merchandise itself is more of a commodity than a unique offering it is unlikely to be dictated by product superiority. Other factors, not currently valued by many, will influence the long-term future of these global powerhouses – chief amongst which will be the ability to provide a supportive, rewarding and fulfilling environment for workers.

How will you remember the cloud era when talking to your grandchildren? By telling them how technology revolutionized science, tackled sustainability and created a more equal and benevolent world. Or by boasting about how much compute you sold?

Mining within 3D and ESG

BY GIACOMO LEE

I LIKE TO COMPARE IT TO GOOGLE MAPS, WHERE YOU CAN ZOOM IN AND LOOK AT THE GRANULAR DETAIL

Think process mining, and

think of Celonis. Co-founded in 2011 by co-CEO Alex Rinke, alongside Bastian Nominacher and Martin Klenk, the startup began as a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich, and within one year joined the SAP Startup Focus program. By 2015, Celonis was the first company from the program to sign a reseller agreement with SAP.

Today Celonis boasts partners such as IBM , Accenture , ServiceNow , and Red Hat , and hosts an annual Celosphere event to showcase the latest updates to its execution management software. On the eve of Celosphere 2022 in Munich, Germany, Rinke exclusively talked with ERP Today about how one of the company’s latest platforms - Celonis Process Sphere - can aid with supply chain disruption. Last August saw Celonis secure $1bn at a $13bn valuation to tackle supply chain challenges, with Process Sphere doubling down on the company’s thesis. The business calls the solution the industry’s first ‘Process-MRI’, giving a visual, threedimensional overview of processes. The business calls the solution the industry’s first ‘Process-MRI’, giving a visual, threedimensional overview of processes.

In nice timing with COP27, Celosphere ‘22 also saw Celonis announce it was partnering with leading business sustainability ratings platform EcoVadis . Under the partnership, Celonis

Execution Management System will integrate EcoVadis ratings and offer tools such as a carbon calculator.

Supply chain and ESG - these topics as discussed by the co-chief exec remain hot as we go into 2023, a year which will likely see Celonis continue to chart an independent path in enterprise tech.

Giacomo Lee (GL): The big talk from Celonis, including through your partnership with IBM, is supply chain management. What do you predict for supply chains in 2023?

Alex Rinke (AR): I’m not a microeconomic expert, but I think this economic condition is going to sustain for some time. In this situation, businesses that can adapt quickly and run and execute well, [we] can separate from those that can’t. These crises usually weed out the businesses which aren’t innovative enough.

For a long time, supply chain was about getting everything cheaper and faster, usually from China, as long as the quality was OK. Now obviously, everyone is worried about what’s going to happen with China. So people are configuring their supply chains to be more local, to be more sustainable, to be more strategic. Plus companies need to reduce emissions within the supply chain. So there’s a confluence of factors that’ll make the supply chain topic very relevant for a sustained topic of time.

GL: How does the EcoVadis collaboration work with this platform? And what does this partnership offer the enterprise space in terms of ESG and sustainability?

AR: We can show you which of your suppliers don’t have great ratings (on EcoVadis), who work in risky product categories. We can surface that to you in the system, so there are infinite possibilities with the more data you add. That’s why we’ve partnered with EcoVadis and other companies to add sustainability data to this.

GL: How can your updates help with supply chain management?

AR: We’re basically launching a complete reinvention of the core technology. It’s going to increase the value and potential of process mining, so it’s a very meaningful step not just for the company but also the whole industry.

In reality, business is many organizations and processes interacting with each other. We want to be able to represent the entire event for the entire business and its multiple processes.

With Process Sphere, it’s a new way for customers to mine (and gain) an entirely new perspective on their businesses. It’s like moving from 2D to 3D.

GL: Yes, the Process Sphere UX reminds me of the New York subway map, design wise. How important is design in all this, especially as you aim to attract all kinds of enterprises with this release?

you’re likely to

THESE CRISES USUALLY WEED OUT THE BUSINESSES WHICH AREN’T INNOVATIVE ENOUGH

WE DON’T BUY INTO THE IDEA THAT RPA IS A GAMECHANGER FOR THE ENTERPRISE STACK. IT’S JUST TOO BRITTLE

AR: It offers an end-to-end view across the whole spectrum. If you think of the IT sprawl, this sits on top of everything and offers an integrated view of how all processes work together, where time is lost, where you’ve spent too much effort. It can drill down by supplier, material, regions. I like to compare it to Google Maps, where you can zoom in and look at (the granular detail).

GL: You started out in ERP, with SAP as one of your earlier customers. What would you say about the evolution of enterprise technology in the lifespan of Celonis? RPA seems to be in trend, for example.

AR: It’s really important to break down what’s happening to enterprise technology in general. We moved into integrated systems for finance, sales, marketing, supply chain, all these different processes running on one system. It was very successful in the 1990s and 2000s, until cloud came along and brought down cost and raised speed. So companies run cloud technology, with a sprawl of different applications.

The problem here is you don’t have an integrated view of your processes. That’s what we do. And we think that a huge part of the automation space is going to be contained by process mining with execution management on top of it.

When you think about RPA, this is a very brittle technology that’s only automating small tasks within individual processes. It’s a very old-school stack. So we don’t buy into the idea that RPA is a gamechanger for the enterprise stack. It’s just too brittle.

GL: Are there other hyped technologies you’d describe as brittle?

AR: There’s always hype in our industry. But I think RPA was an extreme case (laughs). You have tens of thousands of UI bots, and they’re automating away - it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

GL: What can an independent com -

pany like yours offer in the enterprise space?

AR: We’re still building a company, firstly. And if you think of this IT sprawl of many different applications, you need a platform (as an overview).

ServiceNow is a very similar idea, but they are backbone. We’re focused on process data, enabling the ServiceNow platform to focus on enterprise workflow.

GL: How far have you come since inception, and what’s next?

AR: We started the company a little over 11 years ago in Germany. Our initial idea was to bring the concept of process mining from research in academia into the real business world. We sort of stumbled across this by accident while in college and immediately saw

the phenomenal potential it had for businesses everywhere.

Now we’re by far the market leaders in this industry, and still pioneering in this space. We have almost 3000 employees, with customers in the US, Europe and Asia.

Obviously I can’t talk about everything, but we want to maintain the very high speed of innovation, and we want to bring process mining to more customers and maintain the great partnerships we have with ServiceNow and others.

GL: Is such progress possible in this troubled market?

AR: We want to make the most of the opportunity in this inflection point where people are realizing that the way they used to run their business for the last 20 years, it’s not the way they’re gonna run it for the next 20 years. They have to be more data driven, they have to be more efficient, more sustainable. And they have to do it all with mounting pressure from supply chains and inflation.

Pressure usually makes us think outside of the box. The great ability we have is to change and adapt, and here Celonis can play a big role.

PEOPLE ARE REALIZING THAT THE WAY THEY USED TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS, IT’S NOT THE WAY THEY’RE GONNA RUN IT FOR THE NEXT 20

SERVICENOW IS A VERY SIMILAR IDEA, BUT THEY ARE BACKBONE. WE’RE FOCUSED ON PROCESS DATA

Where the biggest names in enterprise tech tell you what they really think, Live!

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erp.today/live Candid conversation. Compelling content. Live!

SANJIT BISWAS

PHYS CAL OPERAT ONS

THE FIRST FRONTIER FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

WORDS BY PAUL ESHERWOOD

PHOTOS BY JOEL CHANT

here are some very compelling examples of established markets being transformed by a single innovator. Think about what  Amazon  did for shopping, what Netflix did for movies and, in the b2b space, what  ServiceNow is doing for backoffice workflows. The IoT industry is more than 40 years old, but until recently most companies that strapped a device to a physical asset got little more than some binary data with almost zero value. Samsara, a new entrant to the enterprise tech space, is poised to change that.

Although most enterprise applications can trace their roots back to materials planning software and the need to support manufacturing operations, the overwhelming majority of investment and development in enterprise tech has been geared towards white-collar workers in back-office environments.

Billions of dollars have been pumped into

transport network that has hundreds of moving parts spread across countless geographies?

It is the physical component of the enterprise where there is the most potential for technology to have an impact.

Add to this the current macroeconomics of supply chain disruption, soaring energy costs and a concerted effort to drive sustainability and it becomes clear that for organizations in all but a few industries, it is the physical component of the enterprise where there is the most potential for technology to have an impact.

One tech vendor that has seized the budding opportunity for this underserved market is Samsara – a relatively new company that floated on the NYSE in December 2021, just six years after its inception. It raised more than $800m in the IPO and was valued well above its high estimate at nearly $12bn. Trading under the appropriate

ciencies; in an invoicing procedure or in a global

three issues.”

IT IS THE PHYSICAL COMPONENT OF THE ENTERPRISE WHERE THERE IS THE MOST POTENTIAL FOR TECHNOLOGY TO HAVE AN IMPACT.

Background

Sanjit Biswas is an academic and an engineer by trade. He founded his first business straight out of MIT and later sold it for more than a billion dollars to  Cisco . That company,  Meraki , designed and built the original concept of WiFi (before it was called WiFi) and popularized a ‘Free the Net’ movement in San Francisco which delivered access to the internet for citizens and businesses. Today, Cisco Meraki is used globally by the world’s biggest organizations for resilient and secure cloud-enabled networks.

After selling up and taking a short hiatus from work it wasn’t long before Biswas went back to the drawing board and started to look for inspira-

life isn’t for them. What inspires a billionaire to go back to the drawing board and start over? What lessons can be carried forward from previous experiences? And what pillars do you build a new company around when you have a blank canvas to start from?

“We have the capability to make physical operations more efficient, safer and sustainable.”

Samsara has grown rapidly from a start-up to a public company with a huge valuation in a very short space of time. There are some sharp lessons in the market for any new entrant to consider and designing the blueprint for an enduring brand is very different today than it would have been 20 or even ten years ago. Founders who wish to build a

applications the technology could have. I’m an engineer at my core and I love the idea of solving problems and using whatever knowledge and expertise I gained along the way to basically try to have some impact – that’s what motivates me.”

The topic of motivation is always one that I am keen to explore whenever I meet an exceptionally wealthy individual who decides that beach

company – look at the likes of Oracle and SAP –they are 40 or 50 years old and see the impact they have on the world today. We invest and plan for a longer term future so we can have the same kind of impact in years to come. These are all things we took away from our previous journey. And now we have thousands of people focused on a single mission built around these fundamentals.”

“WE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO MAKE PHYSICAL OPERATIONS MORE EFFICIENT, SAFER AND SUSTAINABLE.”

I’ve heard the same story several times before but not often with the same level of quiet conviction. Biswas is an understated man, untypical of a tech CEO and that makes a refreshing change. I often think that it’s very easy to be undone by your own success when building a fast-growing business – there have been plenty of examples over the years – but that’s not a concern with Biswas and Samsara. His considered nature and thoughtful responses leave me feeling that the story is authentic and the future is bright.

IoT market and customers

Before we get into the Samsara playbook it’s important to make a distinction between the application of its solutions and the chequered history of the IoT industry. First off, some of this isn’t new stuff – ever since Coca-Cola put a sensor on a vending machine in 1982, we have found more and more homes for smart sensors to collect data. The principle of putting IoT devices on physical assets is a mature concept and estimates range from 10 billion to as many as 35 billion such gadgets are currently in use. That figure is projected to rise to as many as 75 billion by 2025 but the plain fact is that no one really knows exactly how many are in circulation – and that is inherently the problem.

By far the biggest criticism of the IoT industry by the early adopters of connected technology was they simply collected too much unusable information. Millions of tiny gizmos were strapped to lorries, elevators, cranes and diggers – even coffee machines – and they all collected binary data that was largely geared towards identifying breakdowns. Whilst knowing if or when an asset was likely to fail did deliver some benefit, the reality was that most machines are pretty robust and the quantity of data collected just to prevent the odd breakdown simply didn’t justify the tsunami of superfluous information. Worse still, all that inordinate data sat in a silo which was disconnected from the broader enterprise. As a result, millions of IoT devices have been switched off or lie redundant – not because they couldn’t collect data, but because the organizations collecting it didn’t have the tools or resources to interpret and act on it.

“You can think about IoT

from ten years ago like a huge bucket of Lego bricks with no instructions. They had the potential to be built into something special but you had to be a sophisticated engineer to piece it together. Customers who first used IoT devices didn’t have the time or resources to assemble everything into a useable form. That’s where Samsara is able to step in and provide these applications on a platform where customers can just plugin and get the visibility they need.”

Whilst some of the hardware is the same, it is the way that it is connected through the Samsara Connected Operations Cloud that changes the game completely. Encompassing video-based safety features powered by AI, vehicle telematics, equipment monitoring, site visibility, infrastructure workflows and an app that has a developer community – the Samsara Connected Operations Cloud delivers a holistic platform that can conceivably connect, monitor and optimize virtually any physical asset or process. Samsara has taken a collection of existing technologies and packaged them into a compelling cloud-enabled solution. But it wasn’t always that way, Biswas told me candidly.

“We deployed our first beta product for a cheese-making company in the hope that we could help prevent their fridges from breaking down. But it turned out our hypothesis was wrong – the fridges never broke down. Then we worked with that customer to understand what the weakest point in their supply chain was and discovered there was a far better way for us to use our technology.”

That customer now deploys Samsara technology across its fleet of chilled distribution trailers, it uses wireless sensors to give real-time data when cargo doors are opened, it utilizes vehicle and asset IoT gateways to provide to-the-minute GPS data and benefits from smart tools to predict when failures may occur and then uses the same intelligent technology to automatically backfill routes that have been disrupted.

“One of our core values is that we build for the long term…like embedding customer success in everything that we do, around building our culture and creating an environment for teamwork and collaboration.”

Another company that has seen huge benefit from Samsara technology is Dohrn, a US warehouse and logistics company that epitomizes the sweet spot for this solution. Remember my earlier comment about a straight line to ROI? Dohrn saved $500,000 in year one by optimizing fuel efficiency and a further $200,000 on cellular data charges by adopting Samsara’s built in WiFi. That’s the kind of immediate return that is very rare when investing in enterprise tech.

“I’M AN ENGINEER AT MY CORE AND I LOVE THE IDEA OF SOLVING PROBLEMS AND USING WHATEVER KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE I GAINED ALONG THE WAY…”

Conclusion

The IoT industry has promised much and delivered very little for several decades. There has been a real sense of a solution for a problem that didn’t really exist – or at least it was only part of a solution for a problem that hadn’t been fully realized. Whilst the concept of connecting assets in physical operations has always had merit, it wasn’t until these disjointed touch points could be harmonized in a single ready-to-go platform that any value could be realized from the data.

Samsara’s proposition follows a path that many other very successful enterprises have adopted. It’s not usually the inventors that change the world, it’s the people who know how to put the invention to use that leave a lasting impression. If you think about the most successful global brands – they didn’t invent their markets, they took an established concept and made it better. In a similar fashion, Samsara has collected up some incoherent tech that has been kicked around for decades, augmented it with their own cloud platform and harmonized it into a solution that is fit for modern commerce. Instead of selling the hardware, the platform and the applications as separate commodities, Samsara is able to bring an end-toend solution to the market that has some really interesting use cases and delivers the holy grail for enterprise tech vendors – visible ROI. Biswas’ timing is brilliant – if not also a little fortuitous – as global economics are demanding that organizations change how they operate, especially in low margin, energy sapping industries. The emphasis is on how we move things around the world in an efficient, safe and sustainable way and Samsara has a solution that makes investment into optimizing these processes very compelling.

It’s no surprise to see several ex-ServiceNow people in the Samsara fold. While the two propositions are very different there are similarities in the respective missions. ServiceNow has tackled the way that work flows across a back office, connecting disparate systems and providing a canvas to coalesce previously disjointed data points. If Samsara can emulate half the success that ServiceNow has enjoyed with a mission to do the same for physical operations, there will be a bright future ahead for this unique company.

SAMSARA IS ABLE TO BRING AN END-TO-END SOLUTION TO THE MARKET THAT HAS SOME REALLY INTERESTING USE CASES AND DELIVERS THE HOLY GRAIL FOR ENTERPRISE TECH VENDORS – VISIBLE ROI.

SIGNING OFF THE MIDMARKET MOMENT

BY SCOTT RUSSELL

If you’re reading ERP Today, you know that ERP was critical yesterday and it will re main so tomorrow. In fact, with the vola tility of economies, consumer behavior, shifting markets, politics, access to raw materials, shipping and more, the ability to trust timely data and get it into the right hands has never been more crucial. From the CFO on down, one needs to know what’s going on, what’s going wrong, and share that informa tion within the organization’s network. But the value delivered by ERP systems has too often been available only to large organizations, or they required changing applications once a certain company size threshold was attained. My corner bakery doesn’t require an extensive, multi-pronged system to manage its sales, de liveries, and inventory. It was big companies in industrial sectors who were early to install these heavy IT systems. But what about companies in that sweet spot between small business and large enterprise? Those growing companies that span industries from tech to consumer products to professional services? This market includes over 200,000 businesses in the US, that deliver some of the most innovative and exciting products and services on the market today. Every large company was at one point a mid-market company. But those organizations have traditionally been so focused on sustaining growth – and turning a profit – that successfully implementing an ERP system that underpinned its core processes and grew along with the needs – took a back seat. The standard options were often too complex, expensive or time-consuming to even consider.

It’s a double whammy, because in addition to lacking the time and being extra averse to disruption, these future leaders often have limited IT resources. Yet they still need the technology benefits that make them smarter about gamechanging topline and bottom-line issues and opportunities.

I’m based in New York, and I talk to customers and partners around the country every day. Of course, SAP is working hard to move traditional ERP customers to the cloud because of the added benefits, from security to agility to the network affect to data access across systems. But mid-sized businesses also want reliable cloud ERP that’ll grow with them and not dis-

rupt their ability to scale. The cloud is revolutionizing ERP. No longer does an organization have to spend years implementing an onpremise system with myriad customizations. A new era of ERP, with the decades of learning and industry best practices baked in, combined with the agility, quick time-to-market and community of user experience, is upon us – where companies on the cusp of major predictability and speed within a proven, cost-effective and scalable platform. SAP GROW is our commitment to that – with the offering that fits this market segment – complete with solutions, adoption and acceleration services, learning and com-

I recently met with a mid-market customer in the Midwest, a leading designer and supplier of bathroom products and furniture. The competition in that space is incredibly fierce, but so is the demand for their products. In the face of this rapid growth, they implemented a cloudbased ERP from SAP. They are effusive about the results: a centralized system for everything from product data and prices, to naming, and they are managing customer requests on time with the complete view of their stock, warehouse capacities, and delivery status updates.

As the old saying goes, if the CFO is happy, everybody is happy. The time has come for democratized access to ERP. The agility of the cloud and introduction of new low-code and no-code technologies that help non-developers customize applications to fit their needs without a long or expensive consulting engagement, is making ERP flexible, which used to be an oxymoron.

The ERP of today – and tomorrow – will bring scale and growth for mid-market organizations with offerings designed for the price, agility and quick return on investment they need, enabling success in ways once thought impossible. And as for my corner bakery, it’s a comfort to know they can focus on bringing cookies to the next corner neighborhood, not the ERP.

Scott Russell, executive board member, customer success, SAP

The time has come for democratized access to ERP

Orchestrate your customers, people and assets with composable enterprise software from IFS. Deliver your Moment of Service™.

Orchestrate your customers, people and assets with composable enterprise software from IFS. Deliver your Moment of Service™.

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