Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:

• Innovation inspired by disruption: From early 2020 today, the world looks completely different. Boards of directors and other leaders are responding by interrogating the way they've always done things and looking for new, more agile systems.
• RISE gives customers a team behind them: One of the biggest things SAP has heard is that customers love that the RISE program makes clear what everyone on the team's responsibilities are, including SAP, its hyperscaler partners, and the customers themselves.
• Finding differentiation thru technology: Brian says that every company needs to be a tech company, and to lean on the cloud to help them reimagine and differentiate their business to stand out from competitors.

The Big Quote: "What we want to allow customers to do is focus on the build, focus on the innovation, focus on the things that are going to really differentiate themselves from the competition, as opposed to focusing on the run."

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Retail supply chains and OODA loops: Fighter pilots are trained to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act when engaged in fast-moving environments. Retail business leaders should adopt the OODA approach for supply chain planning.
• Sustainability is key to supply & demand chains: We should not be looking at sustainability in a vacuum, but rather as integral to the efficient production of goods.
• Invest in connecting IT and OT: Let's talk less about carbon-neutral data centers and more about optimizing physical processes, which improves quality, saves money, and lowers emissions. (NB: keep an eye on strong cybersecurity!)

The Big Quote: "If I've observed and oriented and have the tools to decide, then in a supply chain environment, I can act. I can take the shot and I can win the engagement. And that's what companies have to be thinking about in the modern supply chain."
 

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Differentiate in the market: Reflect on business operations. Make decisive moves and decisions, and act in an agile fashion for the future.
• Supply chain transparency is essential to stay ahead of the curve: Integrated processes from the quotation down to cash management to facilitate those processes are crucial. Companies need to be able to explain the delay and provide alternative solutions to deliver quality outcomes to customers.
• Sustainability and getting to a circular economy: Embed sustainability throughout the processes and data models natively. Infrastructure complemented with additional applications, like the sustainability control tower, brings all of the ESG KPIs together to measure the progress, product footprint management, and carbon footprint into an auditable session.
• The foundation of success for the future: Bring together vertical and horizontal integration to how companies solve problems and establish industry networks to optimize supply chain and for sustainability purposes.

The Big Quote: "The new normal is about constant crisis management. That’s the reality we need to face, and you need to be prepared. That’s the reason why an agile enterprise architecture is essential – software is a key ingredient to succeed."

Connect with Thomas on more ways to drive sustainable supply change in the digital revolution.

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• The Yext promise: Josh describes the platform as a place for "ingesting data, structuring it, and then delivering it as in the form of answers everywhere that it's needed."
• Keeping public data in sync: Yext customers want to help their consumers easily find information like hours of operation, product availability, and more, wherever they're searching. Yext helps structure that data, then automatically syncs it across various websites.
• Working across multiple clouds: Part of the reason that Yext and Redis work so well together is that both can operate in multiple clouds. Redis serves as a back-end system for Yext anywhere it has a point of presence.

The Big Quote: "As a SaaS platform, we're continually evolving. If a new place appears where consumers are looking for data, we will build an integration with them. If a new use case comes up, we will be able to satisfy it. And we're always adding new features."

 

This episode is sponsored by Redis.

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The Big Themes:

• The stats, yet with so little scrutiny: Machine, also referred to as bot-related ad revenue, was $81 billion in 2022 with projections to increase to 100 billion in 2023.
• Machine or bot accounts inflate financials: If Twitter or Facebook decided to take down all of the fake accounts, they would have to restate their earnings.
• Dealing with a completely different mindset: Companies and executives realize they will be judged by their ability to harness technology to transform their businesses.
• Thought of the day: We are now hitting an inflection point based on the unbelievable power of cloud infrastructure, applications and tools and the agility that it gives these companies. What is technology enabling us to do to dazzle the customers and make more money?

The Big Quote: "I think the part that analysts are probably missing that links directly to the market is, I think you need to go upstream as an analyst and understand how companies are deploying modern technology today, as a part of your analysis of their financial performance."

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Three tips for the precarious present: As the coronavirus continues to evolve and spread, Wayne says that business leaders need to be realistic about people returning to work (or not) and think creatively about how best to move forward.
• The CXO Lounge at Cloud Wars Expo: Wayne previews this unique feature of next month's conference, a dedicated space for conversations, debates, and jam sessions between and among C-level execs and Acceleration Economy Analysts.
• Looking beyond a potential recession: This year, the tech industry is going to invest $20 or $30 billion just in innovation. So while it's good to think about a downturn in spending, leaders need to have courage to make key investments now.

The Big Quote: "Have the courage to invest in technology. Invest in your manufacturing, your supply chain, your fulfillment, your customer during a slowdown... There's going to be opportunities at the end of that that we can't even envision today. Be ready to seize them. And the cloud gives you that opportunity."

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Balancing conflicting responsibilities: Christian's first story takes place during an operation by the Marine Corps when he was a young platoon commander.
• Reflecting and preparing for big life changes: The second lesson Christian learned came to him after he left active duty, and was struggling with the loss of community and camaraderie.
• Staying vulnerable and open to input: Lastly, Christian recounts a period in his business career when he got himself trapped in tunnel-vision on a project—and the results were quite bad.

The Big Quote: "I don't always want people to hold my hands. When I make a mistake, sometimes I want somebody to go, you made a mistake. There's something really powerful about direct and even near-immediate feedback, when delivered with good intent, with the purpose of correcting something that maybe needed to be corrected."

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• ERP as a Service: In the past, business transformations and ERP transformations took years to complete. Today, customers need to get up and running on new platforms much more quickly—so Infosys developed an ERP as a Service offering, a bundle that simplifies and accelerates the process.
• Industry cloud solutions: Part of how Infosys guides clients through business transformation is through industry-specific "templates" that help customers envision what their new processes will look like.
• Clients save 30 to 40% on TCO: Infosys helps its customers get up and running on S/4 HANA cloud more quickly, but also at a reduced cost thanks to increased efficiencies.

The Big Quote: "We are very thrilled to take the partner-managed cloud approach for RISE with SAP. We're seeing a lot of successes and clients are loving it. Clients are saying that the whole adoption of S/4 HANA cloud is simplified even more with Infosys ERP as a service."

This episode is sponsored by Infosys.

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The Big Themes:

• The trap of vanity metrics: certain statistics you hear all the time, like "we have 96% customer satisfaction," are not telling the full story. These metrics are easy to come by and make us feel good, but in the end they do not really help us.
• Metrics that actually matter: in a digital transformation, the stats that you need are those that tie back to business objectives. This means revenue improvements, cost reductions, and working capital improvements.
• Trust but verify: Raven Intelligence can help with choosing a vendor or partner by helping you verify the metrics you're hearing from salespeople. It's important to confirm the source of the stat, and its relevance to your business and goals.

The Big Quote: "You hear a statistic like 'on-time delivery.' But how is that defined? Because if on-time delivery is 96%, and it's based on a date that's moved eight times... Well, it's easy to have an on-time delivery for a moving target. And so in those types of cases, when you hear numbers like that, you always want to sort of peel back the onion."

 

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Massive changes to cloud marketplaces: Amazon and Google Cloud are transforming the ways that companies buy software through their cloud MPs, and DoiT is helping customers respond to those changes
• Growth requires agility: the standard locked-in discounts of the past aren't working for software companies anymore, so DoiT is taking on the lock-ins with cloud partners and delivering flexible, growth-oriented benefits to ISV customers
• Trusting customers to know what they need: DoiT’s ISV Program and products like FlexSave, GTM Funds, and Agency selections, reflect its belief in trusting customers to know best what they need

The Big Quote: "It's this fundamental shift from the old way of thinking, which was 'if I spend a million dollars, will you give me 5% off?' And this new way of thinking is, 'because I'm spending a million dollars with you, how can you help me grow?'"



This episode is brought to you by DoiT.

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