New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Saudi oil bounceback

From Fortune

In the wee hours of a sweltering Saturday in September, a volley of missiles and aerial explosives pierced the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. The attacks knocked out about 5% of global oil production almost immediately, yet one month later, they might as well never have happened.

Saudi Aramco says it’s currently pumping 9.9 million barrels a day, the same as before the Sept. 14 surprise attacks at Abqaiq, the world’s biggest oil-processing facility, and the field at Khurais. While the attacks laid bare Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability to major disruptions, Brent crude has slid below where it was beforehand, trading Monday at less than $60 a barrel."

Here's how:

* Using crude in storage to meet customer contracts

* Swapping some cargoes of light grades with medium or heavy barrels

* Cutting domestic refinery runs and buying fuel abroad

* Contractors worked non-stop to repair units

* Spare and redundant capacity allowed Aramco to rely on processing units that weren’t running at the time of the attacks

 

 

 

Innovating for the 20s - don't forget to look back

As I was filing our quarterly Form 941 last week, it hit me that we have entered the last quarter of this decade. As I flew into LaGuardia on Monday, it took me back two decades to my time at Gartner. In October 1999, there was nervousness about the damage Y2K could cause, but also euphoria at the phenomenal few years many tech vendors had enjoyed. The introduction of the euro promised another bonanza for the near future. Enterprise vendors, particularly two sectors that I followed - enterprise applications and service providers - had reason to feel very good about themselves.

In New York I heard an optimistic Mike Salvino , the new President and CEO of DXC, at a HfS event. I heard similarly optimistic (for different reasons) Cognizant executives at one of their events the day before - they also have a new CEO. I also kept up with the celebratory mood at HRTech in Vegas virtually.

At Gartner, I had followed SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and their SI partners. CSC, EDS and HP Services were players back then.  They continue to live on in the form of DXC, founded a couple of years ago. Cognizant had revenues of less than $ 100 million in 1999. It has grown like a rocket with over $16 billion in revenues now. HRTech was only 2 years old in 1999. But the backwaters of the HR function had led the client/server applications market. This time around, it has similarly led the cloud applications market.  

There is lots to appreciate and applaud.

However, the even bigger lesson of the last couple of decades is the many missed opportunities. Outsourcers missed out on the cloud infrastructure market. It was theirs to lose and so far, players from left field like Amazon and Microsoft have benefited. After 20 years of cloud applications (Salesforce was born in 1999), application vendors can barely cover 20% of the country/industry grid. At the HfS event last week, the biggest attention was on robotic process automation (RPA). Hardly any talk of Amazon's Kiva warehouse robots, or UPS's drones or other operational automation. Or automating the labor intensive outsourcing space. CRM vendors completely missed out on the digital advertising market. Google, Facebook, and digital agencies have made out like bandits in the vacuum. SaaS vendors had an amazing business model which bundled multiple contracts - the license, the maintenance, the hosting, the application management - into one. Then they got greedy like their on-premise competitors. I saw Bruce Rogow, my former Gartner colleague in New York and he told me he sees how in his travels he see CIOs struggle with new opex/capex funding paradigms. Instead of delivering a knock out punch, SaaS vendors mostly co-exist with their on-prem competitors. Outsourcers saw every one of their clients develop smart products and let contractor manufacturers like Foxconn and Flex dominate that market. They have let GE, ABB and others generate excitement about the IoT space.

Vendors ask me, what's next? Blockchain, machine learning, quantum computing, sure. But much bigger opportunities will persist from those missed in the last two decades. A new generation of vendors will move in. Vendors will cannibalize each other. And here is the most important nugget. Customers learn from their mistakes - I am seeing that in the new wave of SAP related services. In writing my recent book, I saw much more caution about using SIs as they implement S/4HANA. There is a "fool me twice, shame on me" vibe.

So, forget about doing business as usual. The best thing every vendor can do as we enter a new decade is to be introspective, even if Wall Street is pleased with your performance. Ask the tough questions - how the hell did we miss as many markets as we did? And how do we re-organize to make sure and not miss so many markets again? 

Exciting times ahead.

Image credit

Back to radio roots - podcasts

If you own a radio network, how do you promote your podcasts? By calling back to the roots of podcass and airing them on the radio, of course.iHeartMedia has unveiled a Sunday Night Podcasts initiative that will air podcasts on 270 of its radio stations at the end of each week, starting with The Ron Burgundy Podcast on August 11th. You can also expect series like Stuff You Should Know, TechStuff and The Ben and Ashley I. Almost Famous Podcast, although just what you'll get and when will vary. It's up to the stations to choose the podcasts and time slots that fit.

Engadget

Out There

Great PopSci issue which looks at the edge of everything - in space, under our oceans, the poles of our planet and elsewhere.

We know so little - so much more to explore

An acceleration in biomimicry

Other neuroscientists are studying zebra finches’ songcraft. Some are becoming expert in the electrical conductivity of sheep skulls. Still more are opting for the classics of high school biology: fruit flies, whose neural setup is relatively simple to behold, or worms, who wring considerable juice from their few neurons. Over the past few years, technology companies have been raiding universities to hire away such people. Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all hired doctoral candidates from one of Mathis’s recent fellowship programs, she says. “The Ph.D. students would have jobs before they got their degrees.”

 

Animals have long played important roles in advancing corporate science, of course, particularly for medical treatments. But the leap required to translate insights from the zebra finch’s sound-processing anatomy into Siri’s voice-recognition software—or mouse gaming into a future when Amazon.com Inc. runs all-android warehouses—is of an entirely different order. With whole new industries at stake, the race to unlock the secrets of the animal mind is getting weird.

BusinessWeek

 

 

 

Reimagining Capitalism

From a must read issue of Forbes.

"And those were just some of the billionaires willing to speak on the record. Virtually everyone I talked to acknowledged the need for change. Some incremental and many systemic; some spoke in whispers, many in full-throated pleas for “reform” or “a reboot.” The rock star Bono had perhaps the most poetic suggestion: a reimagination.

If such a term conjures Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, two of capitalism’s visionary saints, so be it. Entrepreneurial capitalism remains, objectively, the best system ever invented to create and distribute prosperity, and if you look at the billion-plus people in China, India and elsewhere who were lifted from extreme poverty in the past two decades, it remains easy to sing its praises. The dynamism remains true in the U.S., too. Of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, 67% are self-made and 11% are immigrants. “America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,” Buffett says."

You may enjoy this Bill and Melinda Gates discussion about billionaires and philanthropy

 

 

Forbes

 

 

Dean Kamen, Polymath

Dean Kamen keynoted at PowerPlex last week. I would have been content to just listen to him talk about his serial inventions which have earned him nearly 450 patents - the Segway, insulin pumps, prosthetics and countless other items.

However,  in his talk he spent plenty of time on FIRST and how it has fired up so many of our young about robotics and STEM topics. 

and that is about to get turbocharged with help from Disney 

But to me even more inspiring was how he has helped revive Manchester, NH. That textile town is now a high-tech hub. This Politico article describes Kamen's role in the revival. So many other US towns could benefit from similar rejuvenation.

Just when you thought he could not do any better, he ended his talk with

"Us technologists solve problems...we can always wait for politicians or lawyers...but why wait?"  

Indeed.

The Workday Innovation Summit - raising the bar even after a decade

"Like a marathon tennis match with plenty of volleys and lobs and aces, the back and forth was something to watch." 

I wrote that in August 2010 when Workday hosted its first Technology Summit for analysts. "Rarely though 20 of us are we in a room for a whole day - many of us have competitive business models, others honestly cannot stand each other. So, it is even more unusual we would (mostly) agree about - and even admire what was on display."

A decade later, Workday could easily invite over a hundred analysts interested in its rocket ship progress. It now tops the Fortune Future 50 list. It's cloud handles 12+ billion transactions a month. But it keeps the invitee list small, and instead varies the content to keep up with its growing product mix and market trends. The "faculty to staff" ratio keeps improving.

CEO Anil Bhusri and his team remain remarkably open. One of the slides summarized his changing role (and changing market emphasis on machine learning). He had no reason to say so, but he apologized for not spending enough time with analysts. He has had family issues including the passing of his father so it was especially gracious of him.

Workday's pioneering format has led other vendors to follow suit. They realize user conferences are intended for customers and a separate forum works better for analysts.  Plex combines them with plant tours and customer advisory board meetings. SAP recently used its summit to introduce us to its Qualtrics acquisition.

Of course, some vendors avoid the summit format - too much executive time in front of pesky analysts:)

A setting on the water in Marin County gave this one a unusual advantage over others. A decade later Workday continues to raise the bar.

10 Grand Challenges for Technology

From the MIT Technology Review

None is easy, but all are incredibly important

see if you can guess the challenges before you click through...

 

 

 

7 Engineering Marvels

The This is Engineering campaign, led by the Royal Academy of Engineering, has worked with young engineers to identify seven wonders of the 21st century world that are rarely recognised as feats of engineering. The list includes breakthroughs in fashion, sport, technology, entertainment, film, healthcare and the environment, and highlights the increasingly broad role of engineering in everyday life.

Royal Academy of Engineering

They include Gore-Tex fabric, Hawk-Eye, Dolby Atmos, iPhone, YouTube, 3D printed bone implants and Clean water