Futurum Tech Webcast

In this episode of the webcast, I'm joined by Shameem Smillie, the Director of Global Contact Center Solutions at Mitel for a conversation around connection, personalized customer experiences, and what 'meaningful connections' mean in a digital world, what the future of work looks like in post-pandemic times — and some practical ways businesses can think about strengthening their communication skills.

Let's face it, the last year has been a slog. Almost a year ago to the day, for many of us the world shut down, our companies shifted almost overnight to remove work, kids shifted to remote learning, and we hunkered down. And in case you've not noticed, it's largely been cloud solutions and collaboration applications/platforms that have made this shift possible.

We kicked off our conversation talking about the rapid shift involved globally as organizations and their workers shifted to work from home and how navigating work, family, obligations regarding children and beyond have played a role.

Shameem shared with some of her thoughts on a change in the demographics that has embraced technology, how the BandAid solutions that were initially put in place by many organizations in the early WFH days are now being evaluated (and often replaced), and how her expertise in customer experience helps her be especially attuned to meaningful moments of conversation and the things organizations can do to empower and facilitate them.

Our conversation touched on:

• Remote work is here to stay
• Consumer appetite is for faster, more personal interaction and the businesses rising to the top are those that understand that and put good communications first
• What businesses seem to have struggled with the most as they adapted to a WFH, distributed workforce
• What kind of adjustments companies are going to need to make as we gradually ease back into a more normal of doing things
• The tangible ways that businesses can strengthen communication skills
• What the foundational technology is, the must-haves, in order to get communication technology and communications skills where they need to be so as to deliver not only the optimum in customer experience (think contact centers) as well as the optimum in employee experience.

Shameem also shared some great customer use cases, including touching on some verticals who have experienced hyper accelerated growth over the course of the last year, and how they've navigated a sudden pivot in their work, collaboration, and communication style, and their experiences and success stories that we can all learn from.

If you're looking to up your communication game and focused on how to create more meaningful digital communications in a remote (or hybrid) world, this is a conversation that I think you'll enjoy — and benefit from.

If you'd like a deeper dive into this topic, download an ebook developed by Mitel that I was thrilled to participate in, Mitel's Now of Work. The ebook features insights from a group of well-known industry experts and focuses on the integrated solutions for remote, hybrid, and in-office workforces that are the future of work, and how using streamlined communication for better collaboration, understanding best-in-class practices around security and compliance for tech solutions is the path to a future of work that is personified by meaningful communications that are both collaborative and hassle free.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast I was joined by my partner and fellow Futurum analyst, Daniel Newman, for a conversation about cybersecurity. Security breaches are frequent, inevitable, can have a big impact on customer trust, can also impact corporate profitability, and quite often can cost a CISO or CIO his or her job.

From the Microsoft Exchange Server attack this past week, to the SolarWinds attack of the last few months – both at the hands of state sponsored actors, one suspected to be of Russian origin and the other Chinese, to well-known cybersecurity breaches like Equifax, Target, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Marriott, what we're seeing in the industry is a massive difference in risk between organizations that take effective cybersecurity precautions versus organizations that don't.

With the financial impact of a data breach in 2020 averaging about $3.86 million, not taking into consideration what is often millions of dollars in fines, cybersecurity and the inevitability of a hack is something that needs to be addressed at the highest levels in the organization. Cybersecurity must be a board-level concern and resonate on down through every level of the organization, from the CEO and CIO/CISO and beyond.

Cybersecurity must be a foundational part of business strategy and more training and more processes isn't always the answer — technology will likely play a big role here as well in the months and years ahead.

In our conversation we touched on what we do with data and the problems with the status quo. Think about it for a moment. When it comes to data, we:

• Decrypt it to use it
• What happens when the administrators or our data repositories leave?
• When the data relies on the public cloud, how do we ensure the container or the virtual machine operators are operating in a trusted way?

Are process and certification and compliance standards enough?

We don't think so. Yet, anyway. This is the first of several conversations we'll have on this topic as we are also working on a research brief on the topic of Confidential Computing, which is all about how to manage and more accurately and safely secure data that is in use, and protecting data in use by performing computation in a hard-ware based Trusted Execution Environment. Confidential Computing is in the nascent stages, but we're certain we'll all be talking much more about this in the months to come.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, host Shelly Kramer joined by fellow analyst Fred McClimans for a conversation about some cybersecurity news you may have missed during the week when unexpected weather across the south, horrifying power grid problems and beyond have captured the attention of the nation.

The conversation started with a quick overview of Clubhouse, the current darling of social apps. In a nutshell, Clubhouse, an invitation only social audio app, is powered by Agora, a Chinese-based software company. Other companies using Agora's software include Bilibi, a $53Bn Chinese video-sharing app with 170M plus users and considered the nearest thing China has to YouTube, New Oriental Education, a $33B Chinese ed tech firm and Yalla, a $5.6 billion Chinese-owned app called the Clubhouse of the Middle East. Note the theme: Chinese connections to Agora.

So, Agora. And Chinese connections, and cybersecurity — that's what the conversation comes back to including the following:

• Agora's reported SDK vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to spy on private video and audio calls.
• The flaw in Agora's SDK that is used by dating apps like eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, MeetMe, and Skout. It was also found in healthcare apps like Talkspace, Practo, and Dr. First's Backline.
• McAfee disclosed the flaw in April of 202 and it took Agora seven months to release a new SDK to remediate the threat.

The cybersecurity conversation then shifted to the SolarWinds hack and the update figures released by the White House. As of today, it believes (so far), that 9 federal agencies and 100 private sector companies have been impacted.

The conversation also explore the news that although the hack remains considered of Russian origin, it's likely that the hackers launched their attack from inside the US.

The cybersecurity conversation wrapped with some good news post SolarWinds hack from Microsoft. On Thursday, Microsoft announced in a blog post on its Security Response Center published that its internal investigation has concluded into the activity of the threat actor and that there was no evidence of access to production services or customer data. The investigation also found there were no indications that their systems at Microsoft were used to attack others.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, I'm joined by Tim Yates, the CEO of DataXstream for a conversation around how wholesalers are benefitting from DataXstream's OMS+.

We've been talking a lot about supply chain here at Futurum, and with good reason. A global pandemic has shown us in no uncertain terms how important supply chain is and, in some instances, how precarious ours is. That's especially true as it relates to some 415,000 wholesale distributors out there, with a combined annual sales of some $7.8 trillion.

We kicked off the show with Tim sharing some background on how a career start as a mechanical engineer morphed into technology and ultimately founding and leading DataXstream.

Before diving into technology solutions, we discussed some common challenges wholesale distributors face, including:

• The wholesale distribution ordering process, which can be a nightmare. Think multiple supply chain locations, different prices for different customers, based on agreements that vary across the board, large orders that often span over a hundred lines — complex is an understatement when it comes to describing that challenge.
• Inventory management difficulties.
• The (sometimes massive) learning curve related to ERP solutions within the organization, and the fact that front line and field salespeople often have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the nuances of those platforms.

We explored how we're seeing customers impacted by COVID-19 and how things like inventory visibility have played a role in the transformational shift that many wholesale distributors are undergoing.

We talked about the importance of rapid digital transformation, in the wholesale distributor industry and beyond, some of the roadblocks customers face, and what we see ahead.

We then shifted to discuss DataXstream's OMS+, which is an order management solution that helps wholesale distributors offer customers fast, reliable service, and Tim shared some key benefits of OMS+, along with some customer/industry use case examples.

We closed the conversation with a preview of some new features coming to OMS+ that Tim is especially excited about, especially those related to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into the platform and the exciting benefits that will afford users.

For SAP wholesale distributor customers, using DataXstream is truly a game-changer. You can find DataXstream on the SAP Store, along with an Infosheet that our team produced, How Wholesalers are Benefitting from DataXstream OMS+

Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform designed to help people connect, focus, learn, and thrive at work. In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I was joined by my partner and fellow analyst Daniel Newman to talk all things Microsoft Viva.

For starters, a solution like Microsoft Viva is important on a number of fronts — we've collectively adapted to hybrid work, business leaders are cognizant of and trying to avoid burnout, and are focused on helping people feel more connected and supported by the organization, and they are also recognizing the importance of learning management and creating a culture of continuous learning within organizations (and making learning easy).

The Microsoft Viva Experience platform is comprised of a number of components that are conveniently centered around connection, insights, learning, and topics. Our conversation included a brief snapshot of each, including:

Viva Connections

The Viva Connections part of the Microsoft Viva Employee Experience Platform is the "gateway to modern employee experience" that is personalized and appears in the apps and devices employees use every day (like Teams). Viva Connections gives people a curated, company-branded experience that pulls together news, conversations, and other resources. It designed to be quick and easy to use, and users can publish content from SharePoint, Yammer, or Microsoft steam, to a single feed and post the external news and content organizations want employees to see (and use).

Of special interest to me, was the ability to use the Viva Connections platform to reach specific departments, regions, or roles within the company, by audience targeting or bring attention to important items in the feed by way of "boosting" so that items appear on top of the news feed until read or they have accomplished a certain number of impressions.

Microsoft Viva Topics

Microsoft Viva Topics uses AI to help empower people within the organization with knowledge and expertise in various apps to connect, manage, protect, and share that knowledge across systems and teams. Note that Viva Topics is available today for Microsoft commercial customers.

Viva Topics is intended to help manage the sea of information that employees encounter and must deal with on a daily basis. Microsoft data indicates that employees on average spend more than an hour a day looking for or recreating info that already exists within the organization, more than triple what they spent five years ago. To be fair, there's more information now, but still, that's a lot of wasted time and incredibly frustrating.

Onboarding, skill development, and knowledge drain are key issues business leaders face and Viva Topics is intended to address that. It appears as though this has grown out of the Project Cortex Preview program, launched about two years ago, a program in which Microsoft customers participated to help shape the product. Companies like Arla Foods, Unilever, Siemens Healthcare, and Mott MacDonald have been using Viva Topics in their organizations and have participated along the way in fine-tuning this product.

Microsoft Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Learning is yet another component of Microsoft Viva platform, and is an app for Microsoft Teams that is in private preview at this time.

In June of 2020, Microsoft announced a goal of helping 25 million people around the world gain the digital skills they need to be successful. Now the goal is to extend beyond supporting jobseekers to helping support people's success once they are hired.

Daniel and I know from firsthand experience as well as our own research that successful digital transformation journeys (and successful organizations) rely on an organizations' commitment to create a culture of continuous learning. That's exactly what Microsoft Viva Learning is designed to do.

Viva Learning features a central hub where people can discover, share, assign, and learn from best-in-class content libraries, including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third party content providers, and an organization's own custom content, all geared to make learning on a daily basis a standard thing.

Teams and groups can set up their own learning tabs, and learning is not only personalized, but learning content is also centralized and easily accessed.

In developing Viva Learning, Microsoft, partnered with Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX to integrate world-class content into Viva Learning.

It's also exciting to see that some of the biggest learning management system providers SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone, OnDemand, Saba have announced their intent to integrate with Viva Learning.

Microsoft Viva Insights

Last but never least, we touched on Microsoft Viva Insights, the final part of Microsoft's Viva employee experience platform. This offering is focused on employee wellbeing, which enables productivity, innovation, and engagement at work. Why is this relevant? Burnout and stress are increasingly more commonplace today — and that's a problem, and learning and development can play an important role in reducing stress and burnout. LinkedIn Learning's 2019 Workplace Learning Report showed that 94% of employees surveyed said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. Boom.

Equally relevant to this conversation, a December 2020 study found that 75% of US employees reported experiencing burnout, 70% reported higher stress, and more than half reported elevated levels of anxiety. All of these things inevitably lead to a lack of engagement, and non-engaged, unhappy employees generally don't stay.

As part of the Microsoft Viva Insights platform, the Glint Microsoft Power BI dashboard plays a role. Glint is a "People Success Platform" that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2018 and which uses real-time data, "people data," to help employees increase employee engagement and develop their people.

Microsoft Viva Insights for Teams is designed around fostering a culture where people can thrive. Featuring a dashboard designed to gauge how employees are feeling, the hope is that leaders can use de-identified and aggregated collaboration data to see "how people are working" and get a sense of how engaged and connected they are overall.

Personal wellbeing experiences, medication, mindfulness experiences, collaboration within the organization, engagement with others, all of these things are able to be monitored in a personal yet private manner, and hopefully help everyone — individuals, managers, and leaders — thrive.

What we share here in these show notes and in our conversation in the webcast just scratches the surface on all things related to Microsoft Viva's employee experience platform. Not surprising seeing this coming from Microsoft, and it's a perfect addition to the M365 platform, easily accessible by all — from enterprises to small to midsize businesses. It will be interesting for our team to watch how this plays out.

In this episode of Futurum Tech Webcast, Interview Series, I was thrilled to host Josh Teitelman, VP of Customer Experience at Allstacks and John Steinmetz, CTO of Convo Communications for a conversation about building a high performing engineering team, and what the secret sauce is that makes that goal a reality.

First a little bit about Convo Communications. Convo, is a deaf-owned company that is all about connecting humans. And it's safe to say that their understanding of human connection is quite a bit different than the norm. At Convo, they know that in a rapidly-advancing tech world, technology is often developed on the basis of spoken language. Convo offers a different perspective — and works with clients to ensure that universal communications that just feel right is the end deliverable.

Allstacks is a leading predictive forecasting and risk management solution for software development. By leveraging AI and machine learning to integrate data across Product, PMO, Development, and QA teams, Allstacks can provide a comprehensive view of software initiatives throughout any organization. Aligning teams on outcomes that matter is what they're most passionate about.

Our conversation today revolved around:

• John spoke about leading an engineering team in a pandemic, both from a personal standpoint as it relates to Convo, as well as the impact on their customers;
• Some of the biggest challenges that organizations faced as they pivoted to WFH initiatives in order to keep employees safe;
• Josh talked a little about how Allstacks' users responded to the pandemic and the challenges their team saw related to WFH initiatives;
• We discussed the importance of maintaining priority alignment and setting expectations within an engineering team, how difficult that can be, and some thoughts from the trenches on how to do that successfully;
• Tying engineering goals to overall business goals — and how to do that;

As a final part of the conversation, both John and Josh shared some interesting customer use cases that really brought home for us the value of building high performing engineering teams, how to think about making that a reality within your organization, and how to think about the technology best suited to help you achieve those goals. In this conversation, it's clear that Allstacks has played a significant role in helping Convo Communications reach their goals — and if building a high performing engineering team is on your radar screen, I can promise that it's definitely a conversation worth checking out.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I was joined by my colleague here at Futurum, Olivier Blanchard, for a conversation about chips. We started with a conversation about chips that power mobile devices and took a dive into Olivier's research on why Honor and Qualcomm's complete mobile solution makes perfect sense.

We discussed:

• Honor's move from Huawei;
• Honor's partnerships with key chipmakers including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Samsung, SK Hynix, Sony, and Qualcomm, and what that likely means;
• The role we expect Qualcomm will play moving forward in both the budget and mid-market tiers of mobile devices;

With chips on our mind, we then segued over to a discussion of news out of Qualcomm's two-day Automotive Redefined: Technology Showcase 2021 and what we see happening with regard to Qualcomm's Automotive sector strategy. Olivier walked us through the highlights of Qualcomm's Automotive Redefined: Technology Showcase 2021 event and the many advancements we're seeing and will be seeing out of Qualcomm with regard to 4G LTE and 5G building global momentum for connected cars. That was but one tidbit, and this was a comprehensive conversation about the Automotive sector and the exciting things we're seeing across the board in this industry. If you're a car person, or if you're a technology person interested in the Automotive, this is one part of the conversation you won't want to miss.

Lastly, we tackled the reality of a global chip shortage, what's causing that, and the impact that shortage is having on the automotive industry. In short, a global pandemic resulted in a surge of consumer desire for smartphones, gaming devices, TVs, and computers, causing chips to largely be gobbled up to serve the consumer sector. The automotive industry was pinched, and their supply chain issues as it related to chip production has become a very big problem. During the course of the last six to 9 months, the semiconductor industry has not been able to scale up as quickly as needed to meet the demand in the automotive sector.

This is a nice end to an interesting conversation about the semiconductor industry and how chips play an outsized role, in everything from mobile devices to the Automotive industry — and a global chip shortage is a very big deal — especially for the automotive supply chain. For a nice read on that, by the way, check out this article from Financial Times: Global Chip Shortage Pus Car Supply Chain Under the Microscope.

Leading tech analysts from Futurum Research offer weekly deep dives on the latest in tech news, new products and services, mergers, earnings, regulations, and more, from startups to industry leaders, emerging tech and what's ahead for industries across the globe, along with interviews with tech industry leaders and experts.

Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, the contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast – Interview Series I am joined by Nakul Duggal, SVP and General Manager of Automotive at Qualcomm. Nakul leads the team that manages Qualcomm's automotive strategy, the semiconductor and software portfolio, and the ecosystem development which includes partner relationships. With the explosive growth of electronic and autonomous vehicles, this is a very exciting part of the company to be involved in right now.

Our conversation covered several aspects around the changes in vehicle technology we've seen in the last few decades and what we can expect in 2021 as well as some exciting Qualcomm announcements. Check out my quick review below:

Qualcomm's Automotive Announcements

My conversation with Nakul explored the following:

• A quick look into the expansion of the Snapdragon Ride Platform.

• How Qualcomm has partnered with Amazon to bring Alexa technology into its Snapdragon Automotive Systems.

• Why partnering with legacy automotive companies like GM makes a difference for Qualcomm.

• What the Digital Cockpit experience will be like for consumers now that it is integrated with Alexa.

• Bringing 5G into the automotive space through different aspects of the portfolio.

There is so much opportunity for growth in the automotive space and I am eager to see where these announcements from Qualcomm take us this year and beyond.

If you'd like to learn more about Qualcomm's automotive announcements be sure to read the recap from my colleague Olivier Blanchard:

Qualcomm's Automotive Sector Strategy Shifts Into High Gear This Week With A Bevy Of Announcements

Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, the contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast – Interview Series I am joined by Federico Agnoletto, Senior Economist at GSMA Intelligence. Federico is part of the analyst arm of GSMA, one of the largest trade unions in the world representing mobile operators. GSMA Intelligence provides data and insights on the mobile industry and the wider ecosystem — a very important topic right now.

Our conversation covered a recent study GSMA did in partnership with Qualcomm about millimeter-wave 5G and the total cost of ownership over the next five years. It was a fascinating conversation and one you don't want to miss.

Understanding Millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G

My conversation with Federico also revolved around the following:

• The details of how and when mmWave 5G could be most cost effective

• An exploration into the connection between mmWave deployments and 5G success

• What operators are missing by going forward with 5G deployments but not mmWave

• Economic analysis of different deployment scenarios across a wide range of areas including rural, suburban, and urban

5G is booming. Teleco companies are building more infrastructure to support the expansion; device manufacturers are building more compatible devices for consumers. But mmWave deployments are still lagging behind 5G deployments. The good news? The study found that mmWave deployments can be cost-effective for all involved. I think it's only a matter of time before these deployments are seen worldwide.

If you'd like to learn more about the report, check out the breakdown from my colleague Olivier Blanchard here:

GSMA Intelligence Report: Mobile Operators may Still be Underestimating the ROI of 5G mmWave Deployments

Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, the contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.