Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:

• The creativity that each one of them had: Telling their own story – and a lot of them used real-life stories and data, and so much more.
• They’re very polarizing: You can’t really put human management together and feel that’s a warm environment – that definitely has a lot of tone to it.
• More companies are trying to be strategic: In order to be competitive and to meet customer expectations, they’re having this drive to be from the customer’s point of view.
• There’s lots of ways to engage with us: We’ve been running this event for over 10 years, and it’s a fantastic way to network with the Microsoft ecosystem.

The Big Quotes:

“So how do you build those skillsets and some of those big questions of how you can become adaptable.”

“I think they are going to move up to the top of the list and compete higher.”

“As a young leader I guess is to lead with empathy, and lead with human awareness and kindness.”

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The Big Themes:

• That’s what Silk helps with: We’re helping customers take those applications, and more importantly the databases underneath them – and successfully deploy them to the public cloud.
• Performance and cost: We always describe it as two sides of the same coin. You can have all that performance, but it’s going to cost you the world.
• The platform works as a very clever system: It uses a two-tier architecture that splits performance and capacity into independent dimensions.
• The crown jewels of the database space: When it comes to moving it and putting it into someone else’s cloud, you really need to be absolutely sure that you’re going to get everything you need.

The Big Quotes:

“I'm in a very privileged position to be able to talk to lots of CEOs and CTOs of very large companies.”

“It's essentially like a t-shirt size methodology, but most real life work clothes don't fit into the easy small, medium, or large categories.”

“I just think that everyone needs to keep an eye on what's happening in this database space.”

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The Big Themes:

• They want a player that’s crushing their quota year-after-year: Everybody’s going after that person. To get a search agency that’s going to make you a priority and only recruit for you is not realistic.
• They’re experts in their field: They’re sales recruiters, and that’s all they do. They’re engineering recruiters – and that’s all they do.
• Equity is always going to be a big issue: I think we’ll continue to be a driving force for change in the future.
• Candidates are just getting multiple offers, multiple calls: They’re getting tired of getting all the recruiting phone calls and interviews.

The Big Quotes:

“Did that person resonate with me? Do we share common values? You know, are they going to help me get to that next level?”

“They’re going to have more resources. They’re going to have more tools. They’re going to have more investment put into making that organization or that team successful because that’s their business.”

“They want to be with companies that are going to make their job easier.”

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The Big Themes:

• Microsoft has said that for every $1 of software they sell, partners make $9: The opportunity for channel partners in this time of cloud growth is huge.
• It should mirror the customer base: Software vendors should make it easy for customers to know who their partners are.
• Effective onboarding and training programs: These ensure that partners have the domain expertise to work any given software and ongoing programs.
• A level playing field: Not cherry-picking partners for customers based upon name brand or because they fund the top sponsorships.

The Big Quotes:

• “This is really a summary of the last three years of research.”
• “Just because somebody was great one year doesn't mean that they're going to be great the following year.”

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The Big Themes:

• Taking a victory lap: When you look at those lists, these are technology companies that have figured out how to partner and work within the industry.
• New Carnegie Mellon masters program: I believe the first masters level joint business degree is to help students prepare to be a product manager.
• The enemy of my enemy is my friend: But the other part of that is true as well. There’s a lot of moving pieces on the chess board right now.
• Rockefeller breaking up Standard Oil: After the breakup, he got significantly wealthier. Could the same happen with Amazon and AWS?

The Big Quotes:

“I think that the other thing that's going to be interesting as I kind of look into the back half of 2021 and 2022 is I do think we're going to start to actually see a lot more innovation around healthcare.”

“The vaccine rollout is nothing short of a miracle.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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Oliver Bussmann is a world-renowned expert specializing on the intersection of technology and business with particular expertise in financial services, and is now CEO of Bussmann Advisory AG. Having been both a CIO and a COO, Oliver has held senior positions at UBS, SAP, Allianz, Deutsche Bank and IBM.

I had a great chat with Oliver Bussmann, who's a strategic advisor and board member for corporations and software companies, as well as startups in fintech, payments, and blockchain. Having been CIO at not only one of the world's top software companies – SAP –but also at some leading financial institutions – UBS and Allianz – Oliver shares compelling insights on digital transformation, new business models, the impact of technology on strategy, and the ongoing battle for talent.

The Big Themes:

• State-of-the-art technology: How they connect to the ecosystem, so there are two worlds coming together.
• Bringing data into the cloud: There’s a price tag to that too. It’s not only an efficiency play, by the way, meaning which application you want to test drive.
• It’s a never-ending story: The next one is already waiting around the corner. You have to adjust how you work together, and the level of collaboration has changed dramatically over the couple of years.
• My weekly newsletter: In total almost 40,000 subscribers. I have a huge community of a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn.

The Big Quotes:

“The most important asset that you have is your people. And how you take your people, your organization on that journey, get them excited, motivated, help them to learn more new skills and capabilities.”

“And we are at the beginning of a marathon. It's not a sprint.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Why isn’t big data producing big insights? In our last episode we tee’d up the idea that while we have seen extraordinary advances in big data, data analytics and data science, it’s harder to find examples of extraordinary insights of the use of big data.
• How should business leaders factor human judgement: In his latest book, “Noise,” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning economist suggests that the issue is about human judgement and not data.
• The era of augmented intelligence: We are seeing some remarkable advances in AI and ML learning — and there are wide ranging implications for business, politics, and society.
• Many companies are rethinking what “return to office” means: As major companies announce return to office, employees have seen the benefits of remote work.

The Big Quotes:

“We're spending a lot of time watching artificial intelligence takeoff in the industrial marketplaces and manufacturing marketplaces.”

“So this is a human element and there is an X factor oftentimes in human interactions that is very difficult to articulate.”

“And this is a truly extraordinary time. We are at an inflection point where the enabling technologies and our ability to understand how to use them.”

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The Big Themes:

• Wake-up call for boards and C-Suites: What do we hear from victims? “We didn’t think we’d be a target.”
• In our emerging acceleration economy: Firms can’t afford the lost time, the lost revenue/added costs, the hit to reputation a successful attack causes.
• Firms must do six things well: Robust prevention, quick detection, defense in depth, keeping secrets secret, effective repair/restoration, and not keeping your eggs in one basket.
• Manage systemic risk, not just cybersecurity: If someone can waltz in and unplug the firewall, are you secure?

The Big Quotes:

“There's a John Chambers quote that I've used before. There are two kinds of companies: those that have been hacked, and those they don't know that they've been hacked.”

“And if you're an executive and you had trouble understanding that, listen again, because nothing I said is very technical.”

“If your systems are cruddy and 15 years old and not connected, you might be in a full-time hygiene mode.”

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The Big Themes:

• Fundamental and important to the model: Data lakes, data hubs, data warehouses, data marketplaces – that’s a lot of data.
• Snowflake has popularized the concept: Other vendors are latching onto it – you could argue it is kind of revolutionizing that whole model.
• Google announced Dataplex: A data fabric for integration, and they also announced an analytics hub for data sharing and analytics, and sharing insights into the data stream.
• A definition of cloud computing: Still holds up to the light of day after 13 years – including databases and data sources across an enterprise.

The Big Quotes:

“So my working headline here is, ‘What is a data cloud?’ I've been hearing the term ‘data cloud’ a lot recently.”

“I think that plumbing is involved, but it's less about plumbing and more about business strategy.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Where these two circles intersect: You could offer a core set of applications, and the ability for you to pick and choose some of these other applications that are available.
• We set up Lifion to build our Next Gen HCM: We had to build it not for just the up-market U.S. space, but we were also targeting U.S. HQ at MNCs and international companies.
• The numbers may vary: I’m just going to use that standard rule of thumb we follow is the 80/20 rule. Enterprise software is about 80% of the use cases.
• How do you operationalize that mission: I think the way we’re coming into the market is we are saying, “We all want to be there, and we truly believe that this is a tool that can help you get there.”

The Big Quotes:

“Now, the best part of working within the ADP ecosystem, is we can truly leverage some of these third-party applications via our marketplace.”

“We probably do not give enough credit to some of the products that have come before us. They have been the ones who have done it for a while.”

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