Diginomica

We talk to long time collaborator John Appleby in his new role as CEO Avantra, a firm providing tools for SAP customers that aims to make their day to day lives easier.  John is uniquely positioned to discuss SAP operations as one who grew up as a BASIS consultant, has worked in many areas of SAP apps and on the H|ANA system.

Chris Kernaghan and I discuss the merits of each of the hyperscalers in the context of heterogeneous landscapes and especially in situations where you are considering a significant transition. The obvious scenario is SAP ECC to S/4HANA but there will be others. 

Den scored a conversation with Matt Steiner, newly minted head of product at Neptune (diginomica partner) for his take as a partner with SAP at TechEd 2019

Our personal take on the show

Den listens to Brandon Toombs as he sets out his expectations and wishlist for the upcoming SAP SuccessConnect 2019 event.  There's a lot of talk about payroll. 

In this entertaining conversation, Den and Jarret chew the fat about how the SuccessFactors implementation landscape remains something of a Wild West. Bonus points for listening all the way through - and we could have gone on a LOT longer. Extra bonus points for Jarret's tips on using LinkedIn to create a large network of interested practitioners in the field. 

There is a change a-coming as more enterprises turn to a build rather than buy mode of operation - sometimes including back office functions for which you'd think there's plenty of COTS choice. We discuss this topic with Frank Scavo, CEO Strativa/Computer Economics. 

In this candid conversation, Mike Fauscette, who heads G2's data analysis unit talks methodologies and what buyers are looking for in data-driven buying decisions. 

My good friend Abesh Battacharjee talks about the genesis of a project designed to support Bloodmates, a non-profit in India that is trying to make access to blood much easier than it is today.   

While working at Dell Boomi, Rick Nucci, co-founder Boomi and now CEO Guru found that internal sharing systems didn't work. Guru attempts to solve this problem.  Phil took the opportunity to record a conversation with Rick while at a Slack event so this one has the added bonus of being set to music. 

Rachel Happe and Den get into a wide-ranging discussion covering the results of the 10th annual Community Roundtable and some of the big issues that community leaders are addressing. Everything from measurement difficulty through to holding raitonal business conversations and on to diversity and the problems of those who are disempowered feature in this near hour long conversation. 

This week, Salesforce announced it is acquiring Tableau for an eye-popping $15bn. That was a 42% premium on the previous close. The deal is expected to close Q3 2019. There's plenty to like about this deal but we don't ignore the larger market impact, what it means for SAP and BOBJ or Microsoft Power BI and Google. 

The Coherence Economy is a new topic for me. Mulesoft has been talking about this for just over a year and in this recording, Phil Wainewright digs into the topic with Uri Sarid, CTO Mulesoft.  As a teaser, Sarid had this to say last year: An economic revolution occurs not when an innovation becomes possible, but when it becomes practical. We’re on the verge of a new economy.

This week I met with Rose Hayes, VP at JLL. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the impact of change and how Workfront is facilitating fresh approaches to processes within the firm. 

From today's smorgasbord:  A conversation with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian – solving the enterprise multi-cloud problem. ASOS profit collapse highlights the importance of animal print skirts as well as working tech.  Zoholics 2019 review – Zoho One customer Purolite shares lessons on cloud adoption and adapting to change. 

Anyone who has created content knows its hard work so imagine our chagrin to find that DynamicsFocus is stealing our and other publishers' content. Here's the story and this is the site.  And here's Stuart's opinion about the person in question: https://twitter.com/WhoStu/status/1116296826259476485 Better still:  Well, I got a reply from our content thief. It's not an apology, Opens with "Hey Jackass", goes on to complain about "badgering" about "the stupid articles". Not a shred of repentance, just that he'll take the"stupid articles" down. @alexscroxton @bryanglick @ldignan @bobevansIT — Stuart Lauchlan (@WhoStu) April 11, 2019

Links to today's stories: How MercadoLibre built a learning culture to keep up with its growth – an SAP SuccessFactors story. Blue Prism shows its colours around the rise of the ‘Digital Worker’ NetSuite opens up its Brainyard to share the knowledge ...and of course, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is never far from our thoughts: Facebook wins on BS points as TV interview with “very idealistic” Zuckerberg fails to land a blow

Phil Wainewright gets up close and personal with Tom Keiser, COO Zendesk in a wide-ranging discussion about the world of in-store retail technology, the challenges some firms experience and how this dovetails to XaaS. 

Apologies for being so slow this week - it's been one of those weeks where project mayhem got in the way of just about everything else.  Anyhoo - better late than never and here's what we have for you today: Vendors aren’t helping us to build agile HR, says Deutsche Telekom exec Adobe Summit 2019 – how Avianca Airlines is facing the transformation challenge Regulate me! Does Mark Zuckerberg really want government to stage an intervention? Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on moving NetSuite to the Oracle Cloud Build diverse teams and show the benefits for your organization Oktane19 - Okta sets out its stall as an identity platform Real-time for the win – how Donnelly Custom Manufacturing excels at short-run manufacturing with IQMS.

Phil and Jason shoot the breeze on all things digital, XaaS etc while puncturing myths about blockchain, chatbots and other esoteric technologies too numerous to mention.