Enterprise hits and misses - retailers get autonomous, blockchain gets real, and Google gets an anti-trust action from the U.S.
- Summary:
- This week - retailers buckle up for the holidays, and lay ambitious plans for 2021. Blockchain gets some real world use cases - and critiques. The U.S. files a landmark anti-trust lawsuit against Google. Your whiffs include my personal fave - parrots manipulating Alexa.
Lead story - Retailers go autonomous as holiday season heats up
MyPOV: With a holiday season like no other on the horizon, retailers are drawing on field lessons and next-gen tech to change their post-pandemic prospects. This weekend, I heard about how retailers like Shake Shack are buying up retail space at a pandemic discount, plotting for the long game.
Kurt kicks things off with "Grab-and-go' - why autonomous retail is ready for a breakout year. Amazon's 2018 touchless grocery store experiments weren't wildly successful, but Kurt says that category is about to change:
2020 is a year when societal tumult has accelerated many business and personal changes, feeding the demand for contactless, 'socially distanced' shopping, but 2021 will be the year autonomous retail sees mass deployments.
Given I am a notorious 5G grouch skeptic, I was very curious for Kurt's 5G take. My issues: 1. Is 5G ready? (no, not in the U.S.). 2. Is it necessary? Kurt has an answer for that second part:
Gu says that having a high-performance network enables a hub-and-spoke architecture in which one server (or small cluster) can serve all the locations within close proximity. He also sees 5G is facilitating the growth and placement of nanostores.
Okay, I'll keep an open mind on that one... But how are retailers faring now? Mark gets into that in Sainsbury's CIO restocks retailer's data abilities: When I hear a company extol the virtues of their data-driven personalization, I get that grouchy feeling. But as Mark quotes Sainsbury's :
We were the first to use our data insights and understanding to really understand who were elderly, disabled or vulnerable so that we could protect their access to groceries when they needed it most.
Yeah, that resonates.
Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week
- Career progression, leaps of faith and 'imposter syndrome' - two women of color share their experiences of fashion tech - Stuart with an inspiring story of two women impacting retail, via the Fashion Minority Alliance.
- Martha Lane Fox - why technology has to be at the heart of the post-COVID recovery - Madeline raises the kicker question: what kind of recovery do we really want? "What can we do to make sure we build back the most resilient, sustainable, inclusive, equitable society?"
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- SAP ditches 2023 'ambition' as Q3 FY2020 signals overall weak demand - Den's SAP earnings preview digs into macro-economic concerns, topped up with SAP cloud strategy questions.
- Work.com - the story so far, what's to come and why Salesforce Towers will be empty for a while yet - Stuart with an unflinching but fair piece. He gets QOTW: "The idea of ‘everyone back to the office’ is far too simplistic. This remains, sadly, an evolving story and one to which we will undoubtedly return."
- The truth about transformation - the view from Pega's VP digital automation and robotics - Truth: I'm not a huge fan of vendor news stories, yes, even my own. But give me this vintage Den Howlett vendor think piece anyday - loaded with diverse views on the limits of RPA, the potential/pitfalls of low code, and where we go from here.
Sage Intacct Advantage is in the books. Brian penned a monster preview piece - we added coverage on the ground from a news-heavy show.
- Sage's mid-market evolution - insights on how Sage Intacct, People, and X3 are converging - Brian
- How COVID-19 is changing the future of healthcare at Vera Whole Health - Derek
- Sage People crashes the Intacct party with a keynote challenge to HR leaders - Jon
A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:
- Coupa launches new initiative to connect buyers with diverse suppliers - Derek
- FinancialForce offers a 'Business 360' view into customer engagement - Phil
- Celonis wants you to buy into its execution management vision. Is it truly revolutionary? - Den
Jon's grab bag - As readers know, I am sour on blockchain-for-enterprise, because of gratuitous handwaving by overzealous marketers concerns on fit, readiness and performance-at-scale. But for public good projects with lower scale? I'll listen. Cath has my attention with Tech for good - How blockchain is used to transform the lives of people in marginalised communities.
Stuart keeps an essential convo going in Algorithmic bias - how do we tackle the underlying problem that inhibits the full potential of AI? Gary asks: Could data science help us fight back against the COVID ‘infodemic’? (That would be nice, given popularity algorithms have spread so much toxic soulrot sludge disinformation in the first place).
Jerry wins the surprise-Jon-with-a-new-buzzword award for "intent-based networks" in The future of data centers is intent-based networking. That's good and bad news for IT. Finally, Brian takes ERP vendors down in the rant knock-out round with Friday Rant - ERP in 2020 is a mess!
Best of the enterprise web
My top seven
- Tibco to buy Information Builders' tech for analytics, integration. But will it blend? - Tibco is about to shell out $1 billion (or so). Why? "Hyperconverged analytics," or so we're told.
- To Err Is Human: Misconfigurations & Employee Neglect are a Fact of Life - Hollywood might make hacking glamorous, but as Liviu Arsene writes, "Employees and misconfigured systems do most of the heavy lifting for these threat actors."
- Accessibility and the courts. HRTECH held to account? Dear HR vendors, don't say Thomas Otter didn't warn ya: "Inaccessible product is not just technical debt, it is moral debt, and a reputation and legal risk."
- The Long-Term Impact of Pandemic Behaviors on Urban Mobility - Re-Imagining Corporate Innovation with a Silicon Valley Perspective - I've been waiting for Evangelos Simoudis to put the pandemic shifts through his mobility lens.
- You Don’t Need a Blockchain, You Need a Time-Series Database - Refreshing/non-hyperbolic blockchain banter.
- United States v. Google - Ben Thompson issued the most balanced/detailed take on this landmark lawsuit.
- After Groundhog Day... what happens next? - Bit of an old school audio webinar format, but still an essential conversation from HfS Research, on where those of us with a stake in enterprise tech go from here.
Whiffs
I know what you're thinking, but I'm not making any Zoom video attire jokes. It's too easy and too not-safe-for-work. Interesting how "I didn't know the cam was on" falls short sometimes...
We've got a no-contest winner for article title of the week: Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery.
Here's one for the "our connected future" file:
I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine https://t.co/2KsRwAdrMd
— rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
Our "smart future" isn't all that intelligent yet either:
"Alexa, did my power go out last night?" (yes)
Alexa: "Here is something I found on wikipedia..."
Yeah, "AI" is really progressing at an amazing rate. Four years into owning Echo devices....
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 13, 2020
Though I can watch parrots bossing Alexa around all day:
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.