Enterprise hits and misses - IT spending puts legacy vendors on notice, and digital transformation is quantifiable
- Summary:
- This week - IT spending gets cloudy as on-prem vendors get another wake-up call. Digital transformation gets quantified, and event reviews roll on. Your whiffs include some epic privacy gaffes, and I take a shot at "PR doorknobs."
Lead story - Flexera's executive survey confirms IT cloud spending shifts
myPOV: Flexera's IT spending survey got quite a bit of play this week, but when you survey 303 vetted C-level executives and senior IT managers, you're going to get some editorial juice.
Kurt dons his solid state, vendor duster-busters BS detector goggles, issues the necessary survey disclaimers, and dives in (Flexera executive survey - changes in technology spending reflect strategic priorities, preference for managed services). So what did we learn? First lesson: IT spending optimism, but with geographic variation. Kurt:
More companies expect to increase their IT spending next year by a margin of 56-20 percent. However, there's a notable divergence between North America and Europe budget plans, where 25 percent of organizations plan to decrease IT spending versus only 17 percent in North America. A contributing factor to lower budgeting optimism in Europe is likely somewhat slower economic growth in the Eurozone writ large.
Flexera found that a good chunk of IT spend management is wasted - at least 12 percent, though Flexera estimates that number runs higher (Flexera is an IT cost management vendor). But Kurt sees a bigger story:
More significant than the absolute levels of IT spending are the changes in allocation. Currently, 43 cents of every IT dollar goes to software and services, with cloud infrastructure and applications making up a quarter of the total and 22% going to licensed, user-managed software (typically, but not exclusively deployed on-premises).
The breakdown will look much different next year since 55% of Flexera respondents plan to reduce on-premises software spending, while more than 80 percent expect to increase the money flowing to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS vendors, many of them significantly.
There's no big surprises in this data, but it certainly puts vendors that serve both on-premise and cloud customers on notice. Kurt issues a similar wake-up call:
As the changing spending patterns reveal, the most successful technology vendors will be those that directly address these business and IT strategies with innovative, rapidly evolving products and services.
Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week
Use case smorgasbord - a slew of use cases came through this week. Mark kicked things off with Nationwide CDO - a great data strategy focuses on delivering value for the business. Can Snowflake's cloud data warehouse impact airline CX? Jess takes a look in A new approach to analytics for improved CX takes off at Finnair. Mark filed another keeper via the story of the UK's first mobile-only bank in Atom Bank - using Google Cloud to create the bank of the future.
All eyes on Black Friday as ASOS boss insists the worst is over after 68% full year profit collapse - the road's gotten more than a little bumpy for this UK e-commerce success story. Stuart: "ASOS emerges from 2019 with its reputation badly damaged and once online customers wander off elsewhere, it's notoriously hard to recover them. The firm needs a damn good Black Friday/Christmas..."
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. It was another bonkers enlightening week on the event circuit:
- FutureStack London - New Relic customers take many paths on the digital journey - Phil delves into the many customer use cases sparked by IT monitoring vendor New Relic. Interesting: "New Relic's mantra of 'measure, execute, improve' comes far more naturally to digital natives than it does at more established companies."
- ServiceNow eyes investments in verticals, low code and field service - Derek gets the latest on ServiceNow's competitive evolution: "By being able to sit across a variety of systems of record - both on premise and in the cloud - ServiceNow isn’t in direct competition with any vendor in the traditional sense." Also check his use case: Capita Software goes from 26 service desks down to one with ServiceNow.
- Zuora Subscribed London - confessions of a Subscription Economy virgin - Martin nabs diginomica title of the week, eh?
- Workday Rising 2019 - Machine learning holds the key to a changing world - Phil assesses the core takeaways from Workday Rising: "Workday is going to have to work hard to bring its customers along the path it has mapped out for them. It is prodding them towards the future at a much faster pace than I've seen from other enterprise application vendors."
- SAP hits its leadership crossroads - breaking down my interview with McDermott, Morgan, and Klein - last week, I got a plan-wrecking phone call...
A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:
- Zoho muscles in on hyperscalers with Catalyst serverless functions - Phil
- CFOs must make better decisions, regardless of market conditions - a view from Host Analytics' CEO Grant Halloran - Jon
- Hitachi Vantara Next2019 - conference takeaways - Neil
Jon's grab bag - Stuart can't resist poking those who invented poking mocking the sanctimonious again in Zuckerberg has a dream that's a nightmare - Facebook's 'defender of free speech' spin escalates. He also found the time bears down on a new CEO opus, Book Review - Marc Benioff's Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change.
Best of the rest
Limiting myself to five quick hits this week; Las Vegas is paging me again...
I've been waiting on numbers to validate so-called digital transformation efforts. McKinsey made a significant contribution this week, via Transformation metrics: Defining success:
We isolated the 82 public companies that had undertaken a full-scale transformation and had an observable 18-month transformation track record to see what we could learn from a statistical analysis of their experiences. The research highlighted four indicators that showed a statistically significant correlation with top-quartile financial performance during the 18-month test period.
Whether or not that methodology is unimpeachable, it gives us something tangible to work with. And what were those four indicators?
- Go big, go broad - the digital transformation should be all-in, not department-specific
- Move fast, renew often - in other words, score "quick wins" early to keep buy-in strong
- Embrace organizational health - a debatable concept (what is a healthy culture exactly?), but McKinsey says measurable metrics are the key here.
- Stretch your aspirations - companies with ambitious transformation targets performed better.
I found these criteria a bit generic. I favor factors such as: focus on outside-in transformations (starting/ending with customer expectations), treat all constituent groups (employees, supply chain partners, end customers) as customer groups, each with their own CX needs. That said, any effort to quantify digital transformation, and examine its connection to corporate results, is welcome.
Honorable mention
- What's New In Gartner's Hype Cycle For CRM, 2019 - as you know, I live and die by the
soothing Circadian rhythmsanalytical fodder provided by Magic Quadrants and Hype Cycles. Louis Columbus explores a big one - the CRM hype cycle, where we learn about blockchain for lead generation, knowledge graphs, and relationship intelligence. Will any of these become as widely adopted as sales KPI analytics? Only future hype cycles will reveal... - Maybe shadow IT isn't so bad after all, study suggests - Joe McKendrick digests fresh Shadow IT survey data. Alas, we're back to the same old logjam: validation bottleneck. "The problem, the survey finds, is that today's IT departments often lack the processes and protocols to enable employees to use preferred technologies securely."
- Brexit: All you need to know about the UK leaving the EU - no, not the deepest Brexit analysis, but the BBC has the latest for those who missed a chapter as it all comes to a boil...
- How Zero Trust, Service Meshes and Role-Based Access Control Can Prevent a Cloud-Based Security Mess - How many security buzzwords can you jam into a headline? Bet you can't top this New Stack achievement. On the redeeming side, the topic matters.
Whiffs
The competition for headline-of-the-week was spectacularly intense:
- Texas man brings steer to Petco to test ‘all leashed pets are welcome’ policy - and it worked!
- Police warn Somerset holiday home owners over pop-up brothels - there goes the neighborhood...
- Want a ride in a Lyft? Just sign away your right to sue if they kill, maim, rape or cheat you - welcome to the sharing economy...
The whiffery didn't end there. Privacy whiffs galore:
Friendly reminder: Fingerprints are a bad way to secure your phone https://t.co/7ljq8QKqwP
"Samsung has spent millions on making its phones more secure..."You’d think all that money would be enough to fend off the threat of a $2 silicone case. Apparently not.
-> whoopsie
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 19, 2019
Google might want to be careful about the word "probably":
Google exec says Nest owners should probably warn guests their conversations are being recorded https://t.co/GBiKTD0Spk
"probably" - lolz.
Maybe also tell your guests that if they endorse any products in your home, they can expect to receive them in the mail within a week :)
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 16, 2019
When you're not ready to acknowledge your botch-up, just put your app in maintenance mode instead:
Mercedes-Benz app exposed car owners' info to other users https://t.co/xYukgoopuW
"The apparent security lapse happened late-Friday before the app went offline “due to site maintenance” a few hours later."
-> our awesome connected future, arriving :)
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 19, 2019
Meanwhile, we have Meetup.com to thank for one of the goofiest monetization experiments of all time:
To Meetup: if you're going to change your prices, be clear about it - https://t.co/hp1lTGTLho
"it’s been charging a subset of users $2 simply to say they’re going to an event. The change has naturally upset some..."
-> More monetization brilliance from the geniuses at WeWork
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 16, 2019
Yes, let's encourage less RSVPs on our platform, after all, those who pay for meetup accounts don't care who is showing up.
Finally, Verizon, the digital geniuses that own Yahoo (I know, it's hard to keep track of, Yahoo has been swapped around more than a Grateful Dead Bootleg), recently issued a bizarre announcement that effectively ends Yahoo Groups.
It's another dork decision in a long line that marks the decline of a thoughtful Internet, giving way to the social media circus we all perform in today:
So OF COURSE Yahoo! is going to stop allowing use of Yahoo! Groups in exactly one week, and OF COURSE Yahoo! is going to delete/wipe ALL content in ALL Yahoo! Groups in 3 months. And OF COURSE the front page says NOTHING about it. https://t.co/2tNGpt9WoX pic.twitter.com/2U52mPK2ej
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) October 16, 2019
The way Yahoo/Verizon have snuck this through, groups with historically-useful archives probably won't be able to back up their data in time. These PR doorknobs have other concerns. The shame of it is that Yahoo Groups still had traction, and under the management of a lean organization, are probably monetizable via a subscription/advertising combo. But I guess finding a good home for such things is too much of a distraction from the hard work of rescuing AOL from itself. See you next time...
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.