Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:

• Events evolved: As attendees adapt to hybrid shows, understanding what changed enables people to leverage both in-person and online benefits of industry shows.
• Get creative, opt for flexibility: Hospitality resources may be short-staffed, travel could be affected, or speakers might not be able to attend in person. Event organizers can help vendors increase visibility by going online, conference speakers into the event, and holding virtual meetings.
• Do your homework to lay the proper groundwork: Outline plans on which vendors to see, sessions to attend, and how to divide and conquer with other colleagues attending. Have you thought of social media to amplify your presence as a leader?
• Bring it home and take it forward: Vendors look at the opportunity to connect with customers in high-quality conversation and seek feedback to achieve solutions and understand experiences while engaging with business leaders.

The Big Quote: “It’s those pure insights that are equally as important to watching and making sure that feature function during a software demo is what you need…certainly the vendor relationship is important, but the experience of your peers is going to speak volumes about if that is real.“

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Three priorities for hiring: Pat says that the best hires (1) are able to do the job well, (2) help diversify the organization in terms of background, ethnicity, etc., and (3) are a good fit culturally for the company and the role.
• Recruiting today is too passive and too focused on ops: To find the right person for the role you need to fill, companies need to embrace active recruitment done by a talent attraction leader.
• The most successful companies combine recruiting ops with talent attraction: Hard data about candidates is important to help HR managers make their assessments, but you also need a talent attraction leader who understands soft skills, culture, and other factors like that in order to find the best possible hire.

The Big Quote: "You've got a brilliant sales leader focused on customers, customer success, big-deal strategy, how to develop account executives, how to attract them... If you take that person out and put in their sales ops person, that's the same analogy as what's happened to recruiting to talent acquisition leadership over the last several years."

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The Big Themes:

• A new POV on recent Microsoft announcements: Wayne talks us through his understanding of some key points made by CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood on the company's latest earnings call, and how CIOs and CTOs should interpret them.
• Microsoft's full-stack offering is key competitive advantage: Purportedly lowering costs for customers is part of how MSFT is working to stay ahead of AWS and others, and the gamut of services they offer is essential to their efforts.
• The win-win-win of embracing WFH: It's time for boards to accept that WFH is here to stay—sustainability is important for the world and our future, ESG is good for corporate perception, and employee satisfaction is critical to both businesses and workforces.

The Big Quote: " When you talk about lowering the customer's bill, I don't think [Satya Nadella] is trying to lower the dollar spent with Microsoft. He's trying to raise the value of what you get. If I spent $1 and got a server, what did I get? If I spent $1 and got a place to run a modern, secure application that's automatically on my phone, what did I just get for that dollar? Yeah, I think Microsoft is saying I'm gonna give you a lot more for your money, because of our unique approach."

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The Big Themes:

• Some background on SAP Fioneer: Falk and Mitch explain how the partnership came to be and offer details about how the two organizations work together while maintaining independence.
• What makes SAP Fioneer unique in the market: by building the backbone for "the end-to-end business process," SAP Fioneer is more than a point solution or even a vendor, it sees itself as a partner to customers.
• Looking to the future of financial services: Falk and Mitch each share what they expect to be the next big trends and transitions in FinServ, from making a cashless economy more accessible and equitable to AI to the metaverse.

The Big Quote: "It will be more and more important that these systems integrate with each other, speak the same language. This is where you get the economies of scale. This is where you standardize, automate and harmonize your landscape. And if you're able to do that, you will be good for your customers. And what's good for your customers is actually then good for your business, as you can imagine." - Falk Rieker
 

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The Big Themes:

• Introducing Task Force Tribute (TFT): Inspired by a group of military veterans in Chicago who walked 13 miles to honor 13 service members who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, TFT comprises a small group of people who are traveling 7,054 miles together, to all corners of the country, one mile for every service member lost during the Global War on Terror.
• Creating a virtual memorial to those we've lost: During the cross-country trip, TFT will be raising awareness around its intent to collaborate with leading tech companies in the U.S. to build what Christian calls "the first highly inclusive and encompassing virtual war memorial."
• How listeners can get involved: Christian suggests three actions to take. First, just spend some time learning about the effort and following the journey. Second, make a donation of $70.54, or any amount, to help support the trip and the memorial. Finally, anyone who is a military member or family of a military member, reach out to the TFT team to share your stories.

The Big Quote: "So many people don't want to talk about this kind of stuff, because they don't want to talk about themselves. We want to make it clear that this is an opportunity for our military members to talk about the other great women and men that they served with, and the great examples that they saw, and candidly, and provide a ground truth, if you will, to the history that they were all part of making."

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The Big Themes:

• Project success depends on preparation: About half of enterprise software and digital transformation initiatives fail, and Raven Intelligence data points to the fact that many companies simply don't have their ducks in a row before getting started.
• Inside the Readiness Tool: Bonnie explains that the tool is both free and easy to use. Anyone on the project team can complete it by answering 14 questions about stakeholder support, team leadership and roles, change management, and planning and prep.
• The benefits of assessing readiness: The tool will provide a score, one through 100, that will help companies gauge where they are on the spectrum in terms of readiness. It's essentially a litmus test for, should we start this project now?

The Big Quote: "You'd be surprised how many customers go through the motions—they select a software, they select the partner, and they truly aren't ready internally to start the project. And lo and behold, they choose a great software, they choose a great partner, and it still fails."

Curious about your transformation readiness? Try the new, free tool on the Raven Intelligence website.

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The Big Themes:

• The buyer-seller relationship has changed: Customers are claiming more power than ever before, and Jonathan says that companies need to earn the title of "strategic partner," not just throw it around.
• Telco is transforming around 5G: While recent years have left many telcos in turmoil, the advent of 5G technology is getting the industry its "mojo" back, according to Jonathan.
• Banks are moving to the cloud: Recent geopolitical upheaval has raised a ton of questions for the banking industry, but at the same time, Jonathan says banks are ready for a "generational leap" in technology.

The Big Quote: "I think that's quite fundamental, because that focus on enabling our customers through technology and through partnerships, is key to trust between us. And trust is the foundation of our relationships with our customers."

This episode is brought to you by Oracle.

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The Big Themes:

• The embrace of vertical approaches is bigger than go-to-market: companies are looking to software not just to address functional problems, but to solve business challenges and transform business models
• Massive internal reorganizations are coming: in addition to new and surprising partnerships like Microsoft and Oracle on multi-cloud, Tony expects both customer and vendors to deeply evolve their structures and operations
• Merger of supply and demand chains is a key example: Professor Luyi Yang in his fireside chat at Cloud Wars Expo talked about "demand distortion events," and the need to knock down silos to better serve today's customers.

The Big Quote: "Oftentimes, market transitions are sort of so obvious, they're happening before your very eyes, and then you wake up and you go, 'Oh, I should have paid attention to this.'"

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The Big Themes:

• What CXOs need to know about hybrid cloud: Wayne walks us through a number different, equally valid hybrid cloud models and explains key security implications when moving to hybrid cloud
• Look out for "fake cloud" models: CXOs need to be on guard against terms like "virtualization" and "hyper-converged," tactics that might make sense for their company but which are definitely not cloud
• The pros and cons of becoming a software creator: amid all the talk about co-creation models between cloud vendors and customers, Wayne offers some critical advice based on his past experience working on both sides

The Big Quote: "If you get something listed in the Microsoft Store, or the Oracle store, or the Google Store, or the IBM store, and it is a solution for a problem others have and your software is good, your scalability of that product is almost infinite."
 

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Great software alone isn't enough: For success in a digital transformation project, choosing the right partner to help implement software is just as important as choosing the right software itself.
• Partner-project fit: The most important factor to consider in picking an implementation partner is project fit, and making sure that the team members assigned to work with you are well versed in the software, in your industry, etc.
• Why being a "preferred partner" matters: Bonnie estimates that the top 25% of software vendors get around 80% of the opportunities and projects.

The Big Quote: "To the extent that you can tell them something they did not know... or you have a level of expertise or intelligence that competitively they could take advantage of, if you can be that person to them, that trusted advisor, that's really key."

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