This is part of a series of 20 highlights from the Acrobatics during the crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and other series I launched last year.
Over my career I have been to or worked in 70 countries. One minor disappointment in 2020 was I did not extend my tally. Also given the severity of our COVID19 crisis and the rancorous politics it was easy to forget there is a big world outside the US. So, I was pleased to do a number of calls with executives about what was happening elsewhere
Starting off is Peter Maier, President Industries at SAP. SAP has the image of a lumbering giant whose projects take forever. In this excerpt he describes a project where they built a registration portal (Rückholprogramm) within a couple of days for the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswaertiges Amt) to help airlift stranded German citizens around the globe as commercial air travel came to a standstill. He describes another 2 week project to help manage capacity across 25 hospitals in the Heidelberg University system. In the fuller session here he describes SAP and customer heroics in other markets.
At 3.00 is a very different perspective from Amit Shah, who is CIO of Excelitas Technologies, a spinoff from PerkinElmer. As he describes it, they are "light people" with products which "create light, sense light and bend light". Since they make components for avionics, imaging, temperature sensing and many other applications considered essential, the majority of their global locations remained open. Full interview here
At 6.17 is Andre Blumberg, Senior IT Director at CLP Power. Based in Hong Kong, he was one of the few executives I talked to last year who was in his corporate, not home, office. In the longer interview here he describes how energy consumption patterns have evolved over the last few months - consumer v. commercial, across Asia-Pacific. He also describes the 3 Ds driving their business - decarbonization, decentralization and digitizing - and how the crisis has influenced their thinking.
Darren Roos, CEO of IFS, describes from London starting at 9.40 heroics in his UK and European customer base. He pays them tribute with the term "challenger mindset" and calls them "beacons of light in the darkness". Full interview here
At 11.56, Kevin Parikh, CEO and Chairman of Avasant takes us down memory lane to the evolution of global outsourcing. In the fuller interview here I liked his optimism about using maturing technologies to re-imagine the world as we recover from the crisis.
At 15.03 Phil Fersht, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst of HFS Research provides a contemporary look at global outsourcing as he contrasts how India and Philippines have handled the crisis. Full session here
Finally, to reassure us the world is still round, at 20.49 Rob Enslin of Google Cloud describes his "round the world" trip of virtual client calls in one day. Full session here
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