Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:

·      I’m in the midst of writing a book: Everybody does it, but what’s exciting are the insights I’ll get to share from some remarkable people I’ve talked to.

·      Purpose and culture often go hand-in-hand: We have to be students. We have to constantly study. We have to constantly come up with those new thoughts.

·      “Customer-obsessed”? Most of us are not. What percentage of your meetings are directly focused specifically on a customer’s need, versus meandering discussions about internal issues?  

·      Pet peeve for the week: Are you marking time? And candidly, most meetings are marking time.

The Big Quotes:

“The role of the leader is to force-multiply the organization that they lead. That is our job.”

“That's my opportunity. That's my opportunity to learn.”

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The Big Themes:

• Old-school/new school: The big search firms have some really good assessment programs, but tie a formalized assessment program into succession planning.
• The CEO sets the tenor of the company: I think a lot of times these CEOs don’t fully appreciate the components that they’re asking for.
• The recruiter’s role: Knowing the company culture, management style, succession planning, and weaknesses for the future market intelligence, that recruiter becomes a more qualified candidate to get to final interview.
• We both love this marketplace: We are consulting with a lot of clients on this exact topic, and we’re certainly seeing a lot more interest.

The Big Quotes:

“Now's the time to really go out and become a brand, a Glassdoor premiere company that really allows for talent to continue to develop that.”

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The Big Themes:

• Servicing large enterprises for 100 years: So it’s just a natural motion to actually have this form factor there.
• Reimagining what you do: Everything has entropy, and they calcify and atrophy, so you forever have got to refresh this. But to do that, you’ve actually got to then deconstruct it.
• De-risking digital supply chains: Don’t just think about the cloud capabilities. Think about the compliance controls that we have built over the past two and half years.
• Living in the future: I was going through our quantum computing capability with them, because we’re going to put that onto our cloud at the end of the year.

The Big Quotes:

“You're liberating my ability to get to all of my data, irrespective as to where it may be, whether it's on premise in the IBM Cloud or in another cloud as well – which again is unique to us.”

“And I guess imitation is the best form of flattery, but the ability to actually write once and run anywhere, again, is uniquely differentiated to us.”

“If you're a technologist, it's kind of like a candy store with the best assets you could ever imagine.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Digital transformation is off the charts: But is the customer experience any better as a result of all this digital transformation?
• Poll this week with my inner circle: Over half said customer service in the past year since COVID-19 is worse – with 14% saying much worse.
• Starbucks experience used to be a place of relaxation: Now you’re greeted with 15 rules before you walk in the door. You get your overpriced coffee, and you waited in line for 10 minutes and you can’t even sit there to drink it.
• B2B Services are improved – particularly with IT consulting services: This reflects better customer experiences where so much is delivered remotely.

The Big Quotes:

“It's that final mile that you go, that they truly are going to remember and create that loyalty that, that in the end, it's going to truly benefit your company.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• It’s all about orchestrating the work: If you really step back and start with our customer’s customer, you need to do different things from different industries.
• How businesses are redefining themselves: Wayne Gretzky says, “Skate where the puck is going.” The puck is coming directly at us.
• Still on this new journey: Really excited about where this is going – especially the way we are building the solutions and taking them to market.
• We’re very passionate about this: If you really want to be able to change the way our customers are interacting with their customers, you really have to get in their shoes.

The Big Quotes:

“So with our solution, they went live in eight weeks and they achieved a 70% reduction in cost and a 1,500 times faster processing time.”

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The Big Themes:

• We’ve been having multi-cloud and hybrid cloud for quite some time: Without a lot of churn or having to rip out some core solutions that they’ve been using.
• Our unique AI, ML capabilities: Ranked highest in the market by lots of outside sources, and really help us to respond to our customers very, very quickly.
• At Google Cloud we can build from the ground up: We’re looking at an industry transformation, but what our customers really want is to understand and transform their business.
• We’re really doing the hard research and the hard heavy lifting: We don’t believe that anybody else can solve it as well as we can.

The Big Quotes:

“The whole way we build solutions from start to finish is involving customers at every step of the journey.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Extremely unique in the industry: It’s not just about verticalizing one aspect of the cloud service – it’s bringing verticalization across the cloud services in a unified and seamless way.
• Tech intensity: That is about having the tools at hand to build a strong digital foundation, to allow you to be resilient and future-proof.
• The digital factory of the future: How do you have a rapid response for the supply chain – bringing together Azure HoloLens, as well as Dynamics 365.
• The end game: What you want to provide for your customers, and then what are the set of processes that you need to develop for that outcome.

The Big Quotes:

“This is a multi-year strategy, because we've heard from our customers that they need us to be a digital transformation partner and to help them continue to rapidly evolve and be future-proofed.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Heading back to the office: The pendulum is swinging back in the other direction, and B2B or B2C becoming artificial boundaries.
• That’s part of our DNA: We’re a company that’s built around the notion of flexibility – and we can talk about it from a fan’s perspective.
• The CIO’s role has changed: My role is a leader first, and a businessman second, and a technologist third.
• Maintaining a culture of care: People really want to be here and they deliver excellence. This is not soft and fluffy – this is really the hard stuff.

The Big Quotes:

“And if you want to talk about culture and relationships and partnerships, this'll be a 14 hour podcast.”

“We call them QuickFlex Walls and they can be assembled and disassembled in minutes, literally, with no tools, literally, and you can move them.”

“We essentially took about 70% of the people in this building and moved them to a different part of the building, and we do that a few times a year.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Turnover in a post-pandemic world. It appears that we’re going to see a higher level of turnover in companies as we come out of the pandemic. A year of forced locked down, a strong economy emerging and a sense of “a need for change” is driving this increase turn over. This is both a problem as well as an opportunity for business leaders today.
• Industry cloud: Market transition or marketing hype? The major tech players are jockeying for position to dominate the emerging position of vertical industry clouds. This is far, far more than simply new marketing nomenclature and positioning.
• Manufacturing is the next big tech market. Reshoring, the Buy American Act, the Berry Amendment have accelerated investment in technology and a pent-up economy are creating a massive sustained resurgence in manufacturing.
• This is also creating a massive opportunity for tech vendors: Many of whom have yet to really understand the depth of the market opportunity that manufacturing represents today.

The Big Quotes:

“We have a division called Thomas Industrial Data – now that we're selling data into hedge funds and private equity firms.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

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The Big Themes:

• Tens of thousands of people working in our vertical business: They have deep vertical knowledge and apply to some of our horizontal products, like ERP and CX.
• General contractors and subcontractors: 88% of users are small- to medium-sized businesses that make up the contractor/subcontractor community. It’s an easy and painless way to go to a pure click technology.
• We announced a partnership with Microsoft: For Oracle and Microsoft, we have exactly these types of scenarios, and we have interoperability among the cloud – both on the horizontal and vertical level.
• Self-healing, self-securing, self-patching: I think when you put those things together, the application is fully autonomous.

The Big Quotes:

“Our [industry] cloud business today is bigger than our traditional [industry] license business.”

This episode is brought to you by BMC Software.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.