Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

For the past 35 years, Ben Rewis has been a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge enterprise technology within large financial-services companies. With a renewed passion for AI, Ben is now advising companies ranging from startups to global corporations on digital transformation and the massive opportunities around innovative uses of AI. A surfer buddy of Cloud Wars Live monthly guest Christopher Lochhead, Ben joins us today to share some compelling ideas on AI's vast potential for both good and evil.

Ben starts out by saying he got into working for a big insurance company, but he eventually relocated from Maine to California to join VISA – where he ran internet eCommerce services. Then, he moved to JPMorgan Chase and started looking at the fraud algorithms associated with real-time transaction processing.

He says as a student of tech, he already sees AI making a big difference in lots of industries – including healthcare, automotive, financial services, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, etc. He says there are going to be 41 billion devices and 79 zettabytes by 2025 – and they are all benefiting from AI.

Ben says he does consulting work for the ag-tech industry. He says an apple tree has 2,000 blossoms and farmers want to cut it from 150 – so you don’t get the little golf-ball sized apples, you get the big, juicy ones. That’s 1,000X transformation – or 10,000X transformation.

Ben says things like miniature drones can be weaponized – and just like nukes they could get into the wrong hands. He says this is the most pressing ethical issue we face around safety, and particularly what war represents for our planet. Ben says there’s a ton of benefit for humankind, but also a ton of risk.

I tell Ben that an IBM executive, John Kelly, visited the Vatican – and the Pope – and he spent most of the time discussing the notion of bias. Ben says that there’s a challenge with ML systems. They’re not like traditional products and can’t be conjoined with another dataset. For example, a computer vision camera producing class one, and another set of cameras producing class two won’t be the same algorithm.

Ben says he loves working with teams that are doing digital transformation – whether it’s a Fortune 100 or a startup. He says he helps teams think through their products and business strategies, and if it’s a big company looking for transformation he is happy to do that too.

He says he found technology and wilderness at the age of 17. He says he found nature to be a really great teacher. Ben says pay attention to what it means for your kids’ kids, and try to the leave the world a better place.

His website is benrewis.com.

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Each month, Charles Araujo joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment known as “Araujo on Transformation.” Charlie is a bestselling author who has three books to his name: “The Quantum Age of IT,” “The Ecosystem Advantage,” and “Performance-driven IT.” He is also an engaging speaker who will entertain and challenge your audience. Charlie has a website called www.charlesaraujo.com, and another called “The Institute for Digital Transformation.”

Charlie says at his core, he’s an IT guy who ran technical operations for a billion-dollar healthcare firm – and then spent his career as a consultant for executives who were engaged in large-scale transformational programs – things like organizational design, operational optimization, and process improvement.

He says throughout the Industrial Age, it was all about producing a mass product for a mass market. The industrial barons of their time didn’t have robots – they had human beings. But they were basically robots. They trained us to show up on time, every day, and repeatedly do the same thing over, and over again.

Charlie says he launched a new digital journal called “Your Digital Future,” and it’s specifically aimed at answering the question of how do digital leaders step into this bold future. And he wrote a piece about why automation fails – and it has to do with the fact that we had to create space in the organizations for them to have a safe path.

Charlie says we all have more information available to us than ever before. He says the idea of secrecy in an organization is almost a joke today – so how do we as a company start transforming our entire business model and our operating model around it?

Charlie says he uses Amazon and Walmart as an example. Walmart was the Industrial Age masterpiece. They built the world’s most amazing supply chain and they should have been unassailable, but what Amazon has brought to the table is the transformation of the customer experience.

He said he had ordered six chairs from West Elm, and they said it would take four months to arrive. When they showed up the two chairs were in the wrong color. And the second time one of those chairs was also in the wrong color. Fast forward to his wife, and she ordered a very extensive flower set from a name-brand florist. The flowers came, and they were very lackluster, but on the spot the agent gave his wife a credit for the entire amount.

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Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight.

Episode 10

In this episode, Sean says Andy Jassy has been an incredible CEO of AWS. He says AWS would be one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world the day it went public. And he understands that it basically works for everybody in the world – except for Jeff Bezos. He says there are a ton of customers making very different decisions if AWS was a standalone entity. But, he says, will the CEO of Kroger compete with Whole Foods? He doesn’t think so.

Sean says Microsoft and Google are doing in the cloud space exactly what retailers, healthcare companies, and banks, etc. They’re saying, “What’s our incumbency advantage, and what are we best in the world at?”

I tell him that Peter Steube, one of our latest Digital All-Stars, has a 10-year trendable data from CIOs and CTOs about the enterprise purchases they’re making. Peter says there is absolutely no question that in the last six months Google Cloud has gone up dramatically – and also Microsoft. Sean says it’s hard to uncouple Google Cloud from the rest of the Google digital advertising business.

Sean says AWS needs to be set free. He says that’s a prediction he’s feeling much better about here in February than he was when he made it in January.

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We're delighted to introduce a new monthly guest on Cloud Wars Live: Peter Steube, managing director of Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), will join us each month to discuss enterprise-IT buying trends among big-company CIOs and IT decision-makers around the world. ETR (www.etr.plus) has developed an extensive database of IT buying tendencies over the past 10 years, and tracks whether those buyers are likely to buy more, hold steady, or buy less from specific IT vendors. Peter's monthly sessions on Cloud Wars Live will come under the handle "Steube on Spending."

In this episode: Peter Steube says ETR stands for Enterprise Technology Research. At the core of his business, he says, they’re data scientists. He says what ETR has been doing in that time period is building an active network, in which CIOs, CTOs, IT executives, and IT decision makers can do large-scale surveys. He says ETR also works on planned evaluations of emerging technology vendors.

Peter says ETR’s primary audience are professional investors, specifically focused on late-stage, publicly-held enterprise tech companies. And he’s proud to say ETR works with some of the largest global hedge funds and mutual funds.

He says in early 2020 they’re on pace for approximately 100 interviews with CIOs. They are fully recorded, transcribed, and housed in a searchable library on the platform.

Peter says ETR has a formula down to two key metrics – the overall number of respondents, and the proprietary metric called the net score. The net score measures the overall health and trajectory of spend. He says contained in this research is 10 years of survey responses – and a lot of cool tools.

Peter says with Thomas Kurian running things, the Google Cloud Platform could change quickly. He says they’re a likely alternative to AWS and Azure, and they seem to be taking a page from AWS’ book. I say to Peter, four or five days ago I saw an interview with Thomas Kurian in which he said, “We’re focused on executing our business plan – and we don’t get caught up in those things.”

You can visit Peter at www.etr.plus, and you can participate in their surveys and receive access to their research.

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Each month, Tony Uphoff, visionary CEO of Thomasnet.com, joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment. “Uphoff on Industry” will explore the innovations, upheavals, and breakthroughs reshaping the the world of manufacturing and industrial markets. Join Tony and me as we discuss disruptive new trends in the digital-industrial world. These include how we design, source and manufacture products. And also the new ways in which industrial companies are getting up to speed on marketing, sales and customer experience.

Episode 10

In this episode: Tony says we have the benefit of having had a ringside seat at a lot of these market transitions. He says it always surprises you how long it takes for them to happen – and then the speed with which they ultimately happen. Tony says he thinks we’re at one of those stages right now, with industry 4.0 and digital transformation.

Tony says if you look at the valuations of a tech company, it’s much, much higher than a manufacturing company. Tesla is an outlier – sure, he says, they’re bending steel just like the others, but they’ve clearly fused tech at the center.

He says a sunflower moves based on the angle of the sun – and that’s what SunBot, a company that captures 90% of the sun’s rays does. It emulates nature, and it’s creating a whole new solar technology.

Tony goes on to say it was his chief technology officer who raised the idea that Thomas should develop a business unit called “Thomas Industrial Data,” to sell datasets into the buyside financial institutions. Tony says when he brought that up, he said, “please call me in a month.” But he was right, because the CTO was able to see that much quicker than anybody else in the company.

He says he lives in a glass house too, and he’s trying to understand what customer success really means. He says if you’re in the wrong hands, and you’re wildly overpromising on something, and you don’t know exactly what it is. But he says if you go to the other end of the spectrum it’s a license to upsell you after you’ve bought the core product or service.

Tony goes on to say that China assembled a 40,000 square-foot hospital in 10 days to assist people for the Coronavirus. They used prefabricated materials, and he is an awe of that.

Tony’s podcast is on all the major platforms as well as https://ThomasNet.com. You can also subscribe to Thomas’ daily email newsletter at at https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/.

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Each month, “Lochhead on Different” episodes will explore the need to differentiate people, products, and services in a world that encourages a lot of imitation. A best-selling author, top podcaster, and former tech-industry CMO, Christopher Lochhead is a student of not only business and technology and marketing but also human nature, human folly, human genius, and very human joy.

Episode 10

In this episode, Chris kicks off with John Doerr of the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins – who famously said the internet was underhyped. He took heat for it – but guess what, John was right. Also, he says Kevin Maney, who co-authored Play Bigger with Chris says the cloud is also underhyped.

He says his buddy Big Ben Rewis is advising a startup called Verdant Robotics. They have sensors on plants that are able to detect moisture levels – a/k/a chill hours – and the more chill hours the better, because trees sleep longer in hibernation when it’s colder.

He goes on to say that Steve Pratt has a company called Noodle.ai, and their mission is to optimize manufacturing and supply chains. Forty-percent of the food on the planet rots. And 40% to 50% of trucks on the road are empty because they are not optimized – and that creates 42 billion wasted miles, and over 97 million tons of CO2.

He says when he was with a company called Mercury that got its start in quality testing it went like this: “Test, test, test. Monitor, monitor, monitor.” Not so for Shadow Inc., which produced an app in two months that screwed up the entire Iowa Caucus.

Chris says that a podcast featuring a husband and wife team called Phelim McAller and Ann McElhinney are following the Harvey Weinstein trial, day by day. They have actors in LA read the pieces, and they stitch things together overnight. He says it’s groundbreaking.

I tell Chris that people are saying this is the end of innovation. And I say that a bureaucrat was running the U.S. Patent Office in 1907, and he said, “We should now shut down the U.S. Patent Office because everything that can be invented has been invented.”

He then turns to the Coronavirus. Corona beer surged over 3,200% globally on Google, and Chris says, “Are those people allowed to vote – or to procreate?” I joke that, “I've got to run because I've got a case of Corona beer that I've to get rid of. I just heard that it's deadly.”

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“Sadin on Digital” episodes explore the fast-changing and high-stakes world of digital business. Wayne Sadin and I focus in particular on what CEOs and boards must do to lead their companies successfully into the Digital Age. Today, we talk 2020. Wayne shares his predictions, ideas and recommendations for boards and the C-suite.

Episode 12

In this episode: Wayne begins with the term “Shadow IT,” which are systems built within organizations and used without approval. He says, let’s do a little history lesson: In years past there were only mainframes. And then we had minicomputers, and they begat PCs, and people could say, “I can do stuff on this. I just need this thing on my screen.” And that turned into, “Why don’t I share that nice Excel spreadsheet with this other person?” And then that other person shared it with yet another person, and before long it gets published as one of the corporate financials.

Wayne says there is a book by Fred Brooks called “The Mythical Man Month,” and it’s one of the seminal works of managing IT. Wayne says it talks about the notion that if I’m building a system for me it takes X effort. And if I’m building for other people, it takes three times that effort. By the way, Fred Brooks was the architect of the IBM System 360 software package – the biggest software product ever delivered.

He says the problem with databases is they are being hit millions and millions and millions of times a day – or maybe billions if companies have an IoT situation. Organizations have machines sending machine messages, he says, and people don’t want to let end users into the database. He says it’s known colloquially as the query from hell.

He says companies moving to a SaaS-based ERP, and a cloud-based ERP can get multiple benefits. Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, and others have what are called “data lakes,” which are structured and unstructured data.

Wayne talks about “horses for courses” – if you’re changing something that touches the general ledger or is ever reported in external financials to investors or customers, you have to have a level of control. It’s not a free-for-all, and the system will magically keep you from doing a stupid thing when you’re making a calculation.

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Each month, Tony Uphoff, visionary CEO of Thomasnet.com, joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment. “Uphoff on Industry” will explore the innovations, upheavals, and breakthroughs reshaping the the world of manufacturing and industrial markets. Join Tony and me as we discuss disruptive new trends in the digital-industrial world. These include how we design, source and manufacture products. And also the new ways in which industrial companies are getting up to speed on marketing, sales and customer experience.

Episode 10

In this episode: Tony believes that 2020 will be the year where industry 4.0 really takes off. The increase he says, of products and services such as robotics, advanced manufacturing systems, additive manufacturing (a/k/a 3D printing), electronic components and sensors, have finally converged.

Tony says that 5G will open up packets of information at volumes we haven’t dreamed of before. He says that 5G connected to additive manufacturing will put small manufacturing facilities closer to a company’s customers.

Tony says that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all manufacturers. But in a different era we would have said, “no, they’re software companies.” But if you actually look at the business they’re in, he says, enabling technologies are allowing us to rethink what is a manufacturing company.

He says a Toyota plant in the Midwest did a $1.5 billion upgrade to every system – including AI and robotics. And here’s the kicker: It created more than 500 jobs.

Tony says Boeing is struggling to figure out who the company is in today’s world. He says they made some really, really bad decisions. And because of that, Boeing’s very large customers are backing up and saying, “Maybe you aren’t who we thought you were.”

Tony says when Steve Ballmer was the CEO of Microsoft, it was all about market share, and about why they were better than the competition. Fast-forward to Satya Nadella, who is now the CEO, and he’s talking about customer behavior and customer needs. And he’s talking about partnering with other corporations like Oracle and SAP.

Tony’s podcast is on all the major platforms as well as ThomasNet.com. You can subscribe to Thomas’s daily email newsletter at thomasnet/insights.

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“Sadin on Digital” episodes explore the fast-changing and high-stakes world of digital business. Wayne Sadin and I focus in particular on what CEOs and boards must do to lead their companies successfully into the Digital Age. Today, we talk 2020. Wayne shares his predictions, ideas and recommendations for boards and the C-suite.

Episode 11

In this episode: Wayne and I discuss how he works with a lot of manufacturing companies, logistics companies, and construction companies, and their technology stacks are 30, 40, or 50 years old. He says some of them are coming up to Wayne and saying, “What do we do to get started?”

Wayne says people who define themselves as buggy whip manufacturers were passed by when the auto industry emerged. But people who define themselves as leather manufacturers switched to driving gloves and prospered. Defining your market really matters.

Wayne says the power of AI and IoT is that you can flip a switch and pay a license, and all of a sudden be in the 21st Century. He says the modern ERP vendor says, “Oh yes, we can write that, we can modify that, and we can show you how to customize that.”

He says Microsoft has done a terrific job in two areas: One is Active Directory, which shows your security environment and your management of privacy, and that’s now connected to the cloud. And number two is Azure Stack, which can take the code into your data center, and act as though you’re in the cloud.

Wayne says 2020 is going to be a terrific year. The economy’s doing well, and his clients are pretty optimistic. Their businesses are growing and now it’s the challenge of keeping up with growth and keeping ahead of competitors.

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Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight.

Episode 9

In this episode, Sean and I discuss Slack. He says Slack has basically been slashed in half – $42 a share vs. $22 a share. Its market cap is $12 billion. Sean says what would these statistics be worth inside Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Google. He says that with some of the assets Microsoft has, LinkedIn plus Slack would be a very good combination. Sean says LinkedIn bought Lynda, a corporate education company, for $1.5 billion, but so far it’s been an accretive acquisition.

He speculates Walmart has the potential to buy one or two very large companies – including FedEx, which he says would be a good acquisition – and maybe Shopify too. He says we’ll see a further investment in Walmart Labs, including new business models.

He then turns to Amazon and AWS. He says he just can’t wrap his head around why Amazon won’t spin out AWS this year. He says he’s seen all the denials from the management team – but it just doesn’t make sense that they don’t want to do this. Sean says how does Walmart feel about cutting checks to AWS? I say that AWS will finish the calendar year with about $38 billion in revenue – placing them among the top seven tech companies.

Sean says he’s not an economist, but his conclusion is that often companies are wrong. They often deliver with confidence and that confidence often turns out to be incorrect. The market almost certainly needs to correct in 2020.

Sean’s podcast is Agile Giants, and it’s on all the major platforms.

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