Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes:Summit NA: Community Summit North America, the largest independent gathering of the Microsoft business applications ecosystem, is taking place October 10 through 13th in Orlando, Florida, featuring 500+ sessions and 300+ speakers.How to compare cloud vendors: They have different revenue streams, distinct customer bases, and come in a wide range of sizes, but cloud vendors can best be understood in three dimensions, Wayne says: their layers, their origins, and their coverage.Advice for the cloud buyer: Know what you're buying. Know when you're buying it. Know why you're buying it. And take full advantage of what you bought.The Big Quote: "Remember, digital transformation is driven by technology in two ways: what I can do with my technology, or what somebody else can do with their technology against me. That's what drives the digital transformation. And the cloud products are perfect for that." This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:"The moment of truth" in retail execution: Wisy is not focused on inventory management issues, but rather on helping brands and retailers optimize the display and pricing of products through AI-powered computer vision analysis and predictive analytics.Reaching a tipping point: Tech solutions that leverage AI for retail execution have existed for a while, but have been overly clunky and thus under-utilized. The Wisy platform, by contrast, is optimized for use by human beings in all sorts of environments.Offline analysis: Wisy just announced a major breakthrough—users will now be able to get instant results and analytics, even if they don't have an internet connection or their cloud has gone down. This will save time and lots of money in terms of processing.The Big Quote: "We don't think AI is going to replace humans. On the contrary, we still need humans for a lot of things. But we want humans to be more productive and do what is more rewarding... We see this as a transformation of a whole industry with a new set of tools."Want to learn more about Wisy and founder Min Chen?Explore Wisy in the Acceleration Economy DirectoryConnect with Min on LinkedIn Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Big announcements at recent flagship event in Amsterdam: Toni and Mitch talk about the new "vertical product strategy" SAP Fioneer unveiled at its Financial Services Forum, including three new platforms for banking and insurance customers.Trends in the larger insurance industry: At their recent mega-event, the SAP and SAP Fioneer teams gained a ton of insight into what is top-of-mind for banking and insurance customers in this time of massive change.What's next: With recent technological advances—including the cloud, AI, IoT, 5G, and more—insurance is moving towards a focus on the individual, a shift that has the potential to dramatically change how consumers engage with insurers' products.The Big Quote: "We announced our platform strategy from an SAP Fioneer perspective... Over time, what you're going to see is specific vertical solutions deployed within each one of these three different platforms from us." - Mitch Bouchard This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Speaking the Same Language: Decision-makers accelerate change by embracing industry and vertical cloud with vendors who can understand the transformation of their industries to co-create to grow the business.Buyer Motivations Are Shifting: Vendors need to understand the expectations of today's companies to fulfill promises to ensure they can deliver on the benefits to customers.Features and Function, Not Pricing: Not a new concept. However, decision-makers in the marketplace are experiencing a level of change behind technology-driven features for their P&L.The Big Quote: "…I do think if there's a shift in…who actually sits around that, that boardroom table, I think there's a substantial shift there today, and an exciting one actually for a lot of companies, as long as they can adapt to it."This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Events evolved: As attendees adapt to hybrid shows, understanding what changed enables people to leverage both in-person and online benefits of industry shows.Get creative, opt for flexibility: Hospitality resources may be short-staffed, travel could be affected, or speakers might not be able to attend in person. Event organizers can help vendors increase visibility by going online, conference speakers into the event, and holding virtual meetings.Do your homework to lay the proper groundwork: Outline plans on which vendors to see, sessions to attend, and how to divide and conquer with other colleagues attending. Have you thought of social media to amplify your presence as a leader?Bring it home and take it forward: Vendors look at the opportunity to connect with customers in high-quality conversation and seek feedback to achieve solutions and understand experiences while engaging with business leaders.The Big Quote: “It’s those pure insights that are equally as important to watching and making sure that feature function during a software demo is what you need…certainly the vendor relationship is important, but the experience of your peers is going to speak volumes about if that is real.“This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Three priorities for hiring: Pat says that the best hires (1) are able to do the job well, (2) help diversify the organization in terms of background, ethnicity, etc., and (3) are a good fit culturally for the company and the role.Recruiting today is too passive and too focused on ops: To find the right person for the role you need to fill, companies need to embrace active recruitment done by a talent attraction leader.The most successful companies combine recruiting ops with talent attraction: Hard data about candidates is important to help HR managers make their assessments, but you also need a talent attraction leader who understands soft skills, culture, and other factors like that in order to find the best possible hire.The Big Quote: "You've got a brilliant sales leader focused on customers, customer success, big-deal strategy, how to develop account executives, how to attract them... If you take that person out and put in their sales ops person, that's the same analogy as what's happened to recruiting to talent acquisition leadership over the last several years."This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:A new POV on recent Microsoft announcements: Wayne talks us through his understanding of some key points made by CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood on the company's latest earnings call, and how CIOs and CTOs should interpret them.Microsoft's full-stack offering is key competitive advantage: Purportedly lowering costs for customers is part of how MSFT is working to stay ahead of AWS and others, and the gamut of services they offer is essential to their efforts.The win-win-win of embracing WFH: It's time for boards to accept that WFH is here to stay—sustainability is important for the world and our future, ESG is good for corporate perception, and employee satisfaction is critical to both businesses and workforces.The Big Quote: " When you talk about lowering the customer's bill, I don't think [Satya Nadella] is trying to lower the dollar spent with Microsoft. He's trying to raise the value of what you get. If I spent $1 and got a server, what did I get? If I spent $1 and got a place to run a modern, secure application that's automatically on my phone, what did I just get for that dollar? Yeah, I think Microsoft is saying I'm gonna give you a lot more for your money, because of our unique approach." This episode is brought to you by BMC. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Some background on SAP Fioneer: Falk and Mitch explain how the partnership came to be and offer details about how the two organizations work together while maintaining independence.What makes SAP Fioneer unique in the market: by building the backbone for "the end-to-end business process," SAP Fioneer is more than a point solution or even a vendor, it sees itself as a partner to customers.Looking to the future of financial services: Falk and Mitch each share what they expect to be the next big trends and transitions in FinServ, from making a cashless economy more accessible and equitable to AI to the metaverse.The Big Quote: "It will be more and more important that these systems integrate with each other, speak the same language. This is where you get the economies of scale. This is where you standardize, automate and harmonize your landscape. And if you're able to do that, you will be good for your customers. And what's good for your customers is actually then good for your business, as you can imagine." - Falk Rieker This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Introducing Task Force Tribute (TFT): Inspired by a group of military veterans in Chicago who walked 13 miles to honor 13 service members who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, TFT comprises a small group of people who are traveling 7,054 miles together, to all corners of the country, one mile for every service member lost during the Global War on Terror.Creating a virtual memorial to those we've lost: During the cross-country trip, TFT will be raising awareness around its intent to collaborate with leading tech companies in the U.S. to build what Christian calls "the first highly inclusive and encompassing virtual war memorial."How listeners can get involved: Christian suggests three actions to take. First, just spend some time learning about the effort and following the journey. Second, make a donation of $70.54, or any amount, to help support the trip and the memorial. Finally, anyone who is a military member or family of a military member, reach out to the TFT team to share your stories.The Big Quote: "So many people don't want to talk about this kind of stuff, because they don't want to talk about themselves. We want to make it clear that this is an opportunity for our military members to talk about the other great women and men that they served with, and the great examples that they saw, and candidly, and provide a ground truth, if you will, to the history that they were all part of making."This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

The Big Themes:Project success depends on preparation: About half of enterprise software and digital transformation initiatives fail, and Raven Intelligence data points to the fact that many companies simply don't have their ducks in a row before getting started.Inside the Readiness Tool: Bonnie explains that the tool is both free and easy to use. Anyone on the project team can complete it by answering 14 questions about stakeholder support, team leadership and roles, change management, and planning and prep.The benefits of assessing readiness: The tool will provide a score, one through 100, that will help companies gauge where they are on the spectrum in terms of readiness. It's essentially a litmus test for, should we start this project now?The Big Quote: "You'd be surprised how many customers go through the motions—they select a software, they select the partner, and they truly aren't ready internally to start the project. And lo and behold, they choose a great software, they choose a great partner, and it still fails."Curious about your transformation readiness? Try the new, free tool on the Raven Intelligence website. Visit Cloud Wars for more.