New Florence. New Renaissance.

Unit4: AI is the new UI

It is an ancient post now, but I had written The Best UI is no UI. One of the most interesting things to come out of Unit4’s analyst summit last week was its vision of “self-driving” ERP, their vision of machine learning and artificial intelligence driving the user interface.

Stephan Sieber, EVP of Strategy and Operations, explains

“Like a self-driving car, self-driving ERP takes care of tasks that are better served by technology, leaving people to focus on the exceptions that need human intervention.

Self-driving ERP doesn’t ask the user to constantly enter data. It doesn’t require huge amounts of training in order for users to understand how to achieve desired outcomes. Self-driving ERP becomes an intelligent support and planning system that utilizes information from all sorts of internal and external sources including productivity tools (calendar, outlook, document systems, social tools) to drive cases,projects and initiatives and tasks. It delivers actionable insight based on what it already knows. The system will make suggestions based on company behavior, personal behavior, the weather, traffic and all other possible sources it pulls data from.”

Three things I like about Unit4’s vision

a) They are leveraging Microsoft’s machine learning advances (it’s a broader arrangement where MS Azure data centers will also provide the IaaS for Unit4’s public cloud) (click image to enlarge)

b) They have already considered several vertical scenarios for the people/services industries they are focusing on. Since the Microsoft arrangement is not exclusive, how vendors like Unit4 differentiate with it will be key

c) Not something they mentioned last week, but listening to Thomas Staven and Ton Dobbe of Unit4 discuss electronic documents in the Nordic public sector, I was reminded that in I had profiled a Swedish government customer of Agresso (now Unit4) in The New Polymath in 2010. The document exchange involved 85,000 suppliers and tens of millions of invoices. I was impressed at the digitization progress even back then. Think of the ability to train machines with that much data already digitized. Also exciting to see Unit4’s ability to take that experience to other parts of the world.   

Photo Credit: Unit4

Oracle Cloud Summit: A Marvel of ‘Miniaturization’

As I wrote here, the quality of vendor analyst summits has improved dramatically in the last couple of years. Looking at the agenda I was sent ahead of coming to this week’s Oracle Cloud Summit I was prepared for an endless stream of Powerpoint presentations. 

Instead I was impressed with the variety of perspectives – not just product centric, but executive, sales field, customer, partner as well. Day 2 was similar but focused more on HCM products – a bit of a repeat of the themes I had heard in Washington last month, but with a newer set of customer and executive voices

Thomas Kurian, President, set the tempo for day 1 with a slide a minute for 45 minutes where he summarized Oracle’s growing portfolio of –as-a-service offerings – SaaS, Paas, Iaas and DaaS. The man has a breathtaking command of Oracle products and you have to admire how efficiently he covered the portfolio. Across the two days, 20+ presenters marched through, by my estimate, over 750 slides.

CEO Mark Hurd took a different tack and presented more on state of the industry and a handful of slides with lots of white space, and instead answered several questions from the audience.

The night before as part of a reception, Oracle had several booths to show off its investments in UX. Day 2 we got to visit the applications UX lab with all kids of devices, motion analysis, eye tracking and other technology. The end result is a pleasing front end to a growing set of Oracle apps. Between the two days Oracle, also managed to showcase 20 short demos across the sessions.

Three panels hosted by Shawn Price, SVP Oracle Cloud, showcased 14 Oracle customers/partners, and 5 of Oracle’s field executives representing a breadth of industries and geographies. Many of them were available for conversations during the rest of the day. On Day 2, two HCM  customers and two Oracle (internal) HR executives provided additional color

The setting – Half Moon Bay for Day 1 and Redwood Shores for Day 2 -allowed for plenty of fresh air and also pleased my FitBit. With so much to cover, it was thoughtful of Oracle to allow for enough “outside time”

Finally, given the mass of content at most of these summits, I find myself chasing the vendor for copies of slides for days afterwards. Oracle had them all on an internal portal by the afternoon of Day 1 and on a zip drive for Day 2. A minor detail, but again reflective of the logistical feat the event delivered.  

I heard a few analysts bitch about information overload – clearly there was with that much content. Others complained there was not enough detail in some sessions. To me, that’s what follow up calls are for.

I for one appreciated the large investment Oracle made and for packing so much into the two days. It’s miniaturization applied to our world of content.

 

Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud”

At Convergence this week, customers profiled in various sessions played to Microsoft’s positioning of the “intelligent cloud”. They represented Azure cloud computing, machine-learning and leverage of Internet of Things in a wide range of industries. CEO Satya Nadella posited that other industries could become as margin rich as the software industry has been if they can learn to tame the coming explosion of devices and data.

The customers represented asset-heavy ones like Ford (which is using the Azure cloud for various connected services and has partnered with Microsoft for its Sync infotainment system) , Rockwell Automation (using the Azure cloud to monitor asset health).

They include Wash (an operator of laundromats which described how Microsoft helps in a low margin industry to deliver differentiating service calls and how it is starting to help with dynamic pricing )

They also represented (somewhat) asset light ones like Accuweather (which amalgamates a wide range of weather related data feeds to provide forecasts and other useful weather/climate data), J&J Services (a UK food service provider which described how machine learning is making their eCommerce portal far more interactive). Marston Pubs and  Taverns in the UK discussed Microsoft tools for social engagement.

Photo Credit: Microsoft

Docker and other containers

Docker kicked off the container boom 18 months ago, when it released its technology (also called Docker) under a free-of-charge open-source license. The software sparked the kind of rapid uptake generally reserved for consumer gewgaws like FarmVille, clocking 43 million downloads as of early October. Users include Google Inc., International Business Machines Corp. , Spotify, Yelp Inc. —and, yes, Microsoft—as well as nontech companies like the BBC and a handful of big banks, according to people familiar with the financial institutions’ operations.

“The interest level is off the charts,” says Dave Bartoletti, an analyst with technology research firm Forrester Research Inc.

WSJ

 

Cisco’s Cloud Connector

With Intercloud, Cisco is reprising the strategy that brought it success in hardware. In the 1990s its routers were in demand because they let various proprietary technologies work together—an IBM network could communicate with an Apple one.

More than 3,700 people have been pulled from all corners of Cisco to work on Intercloud. The company has set aside $1 billion to develop or acquire technology and to persuade cloud providers to join the Intercloud ecosystem. So far 40 partners, including Deutsche Telekom (DTE:GR), have signed up, and a handful of organizations, among them Johns Hopkins University and real estate investment trust Boston Properties (BXP), are using Intercloud.

BusinessWeek

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An encryption wrapper for the cloud

Gillis now runs Bracket Computing, a startup that on Oct. 22 unveiled software designed to make public clouds secure enough for sensitive corporate data. Essentially, Bracket’s software wraps a company’s business applications in a bubble of encryption without making the applications harder to manage. “If we demonstrate that the public cloud is every bit as good, why would anyone build another data center?” says Gillis.

Security software is typically designed to protect a particular application or type of data. Bracket encrypts everything before it gets to the cloud servers, leaving the customer with the only key to decrypt it. Its setup also seeks to simplify how IT is managed.

BusinessWeek

photo credit

Oracle DaaS – Data-as-a-Service

Oracle invited me to moderate a panel in their DaaS launch today. Watch the whole hour for some great perspectives on this exciting new market category, and our panel starting around 26.00.

Talking to Steve Miranda and Omar Tawakol before and after I got even more excited about the concept

a) There is a new generation of data asset entrepreneurs like Omar (whose company, BlueKai Oracle acquired) who are about separating signal from noise– under NDA I have been briefed by other entrepreneurs focused on supply chain, HR and other DaaS. Scary smart folks.

b) Watching Omar talk about all the social and other marketing data feeds, Steve talking about feeds from machines and wearables, you realize we are not anymore in the Kansas of internal, structured data so many companies are still heavily invested in

c) How rapidly business and deployment models are changing. While the old model of “buy hardware, install software, load data, clean for quality – pay for all that” is not going away the speed of getting started with and the economics of DaaS are going to be compelling

d) How effortlessly Oracle with its decades of data management experience and horizontal and vertical application knowledge could play in a wide range of DaaS categories. 

Personal Clouds

Trying to connect to the cloud after switching from Apple to Android products, or vice versa, can arouse nostalgia for messy piles of paper. Lyve Minds, a startup funded by storage company Seagate Technology (and showcased at CES this week) aims to erase the frustration with a free online app that can turn a family’s devices into a personal cloud capable of beaming data almost instantly from one device to another. “The consumer doesn’t want to manage all this stuff,” says Lyve Minds Chief Executive Officer Tim Bucher, a former Apple engineering executive.

BusinessWeek

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It takes a digital village

Workday broadcast the Predict and Prepare 2014 event this week (replay here ) from the PBS Tampa station, WEDU. The feedback was excellent, and as we debriefed after the event, I had to marvel at the huge amount of detail that went into the production. 

Tami Mandeville, Geoff McDonald and Felicia Egan of Workday worked out all the registration (over 1,300), travel, studio and broadcast logistics impeccably. They provided us detailed guidance like “avoid pinstripe and herringbone pattern clothing. Causes a moire distortion”. They pre-toured the studio to make sure the air-conditioning adequately offset the lighting heat.

They hired Conn Jackson, a celebrity in his own right to direct the production. Amazingly positive personality. WEDU had Sony HDC-950 Studio cameras, teleprompters, other technology and a slew of audio, lighting, makeup and other professionals that make the production look so good. It felt nice to walk in the footsteps of Jim Lehrer and other PBS broadcasters who have used the studio. On24 had a pleasant web experience for viewers (see still below), and we heard of a couple of viewers who watched the show on their mobile app. That’s clearly progress!

Bill Kutik is an absolute pro when it comes to moderating panels like this. Indeed, we were honored this was his 100th panel (and talking about small details – Workday honored him with a cake after dinner and took pains to order a carrot kind, after researching he is not a chocolate fan). He sweats the minutiae -and ran us through several iterations of our predictions for weeks before the event. (Just the high level predictions and the time guidelines – the details of what we covered were totally unscripted, something us panelists appreciated of the moderator)

I was delighted my fellow panelists, Naomi Bloom and Brian Sommer picked wide ranging predictions, not glib short term ones for the next few months. All of us had pages of typed and hand scribbled notes in prep.

Finally, I was pleased two of my hometown’s restaurants, Bern’s Steakhouse with its mind-blowing wine cellar (which impressed even the visitors from California) and Oystercatchers with its stunning bayfront and stone crabs shone a very nice light on Tampa for our visitors. I will take credit for the small detail of recommending these places:)

Lesser known IaaS providers

GigaOm lists a few beyond Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft and other better known Infrastructure as a Provider service vendors

1: Tier 3. .

2: ProfitBricks.  

3: Virtustream.

4: DigitalOcean. 

5: Internap:

6: GoGrid: