We’re LIVE for Ep 34 of the MI&S Hot Desk Podcast! Join Robert Kramer & Melody Brue for a rundown of what’s up this week in collaboration, CX, ERP & SCM, and a little sports tech. We’re talking lots of great stuff – Oracle, Salesforce, Zoho Analytics, ERP trends with IBM & Oracle, US Open, plus a preview of Mel’s new Webex Cisco Desk Pro.
Watch the full episode here:
Listen to the audio here:
00:52 Cisco Desk Pro Video Conferencing Device
4:40 Oracle CloudWorld
13:45 NetSuite SuiteWorld
18:31 Salesforce – Dreamforce
32:05 Zoho Analytics
36:12 ERP – IBM and Oracle – Robert Kramer’s ERP Research
Cisco Desk Pro Video Conferencing Device
https://www.webex.com/us/en/devices/desk-series/cisco-desk-pro.html
Oracle CloudWorld
https://www.oracle.com/news/
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-kramer-58239b22_cloudworld-suiteworld-mywheelhouse-activity-7239671357716795393-PwQr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://x.com/MelodyBrue/status/1833604336116764874
https://x.com/MelodyBrue/status/1833540500231754203
NetSuite SuiteWorld
https://www.netsuite.com/portal/company/newsroom.shtml
https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/research-notes/research-note-how-netsuite-has-shaped-the-saas-and-cloud-erp-landscape/
Salesforce – Dreamforce
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_df24-activity-7241918042501193728-VpFa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patmoorhead_df24-activity-7241913485025050625-G-lR/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-kramer-58239b22_erp-scm-df24-activity-7242274114827161601-qmvq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/dreamforce-24-recap/
Marc Benioff at World Economic Forum
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-01-16/salesforce-s-benioff-on-building-trust-in-ai
Zoho Analytics
https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2024/09/16/zoho-analytics-advances-self-service-bi-with-ai-powered-tools/
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240912570058/en/Zoho-Launches-AI-Rich-Highly-Extensible-Version-of-Zoho-Analytics-Democratizing-Self-Service-BI-to-Any-Persona-or-Business
ERP – IBM and Oracle
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-09-09-ibm-to-acquire-accelalpha,-leading-oracle-consultancy
Robert Kramer’s ERP Research
https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/erp-and-scm-what-to-expect-in-2024-part-1/
https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/modernizing-erp-systems-innovative-strategies-with-infor/
https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/enterprise-data-technology-part-5-data-quality-with-acumatica/
https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/research-notes/enterprise-data-technology-part-1-internal-and-external-data-sources/
Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show. The contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.
Transcript:
Robert Kramer: Hello, welcome to this week’s edition of Moor Insights & Strategy Hot Desk Podcasts. So Mel, here we are on episode 34, Melody Brue and Robert Kramer, both VP and principal analysts. Here at Moor Insights, I cover ERP and Enterprise data, and Mel covers modern work, HCM, and cx. On the show we talk about all these different things, but tools, trends, trajectories, people in marketing technologies, enterprise apps, E-R-P-C-R-M, and everybody’s always talking about the glue that holds it together, which is data. So this week we’ve got some really neat things to talk about with Oracle, Salesforce, Zoho, ERP, and a little bit of a sports tech. So little disclaimer, the show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we’ll discuss publicly traded companies on the show, its conference should not be taken for investment advice. So why don’t we get started? I was just noticing something, Mel, you got a better picture on your camera. This sounds really interesting. You have a new
Melody Brue: Look different here.
Robert Kramer: Yes, yes. You got some video conferencing device that’s new. What’s going on?
Melody Brue: I do. I am testing out the Cisco Desk Pro. It is a video conferencing device, but it is actually so much more than that. I’m going to demonstrate something to you that I think is so cool. It’s also going to have a little fit check at the moment. So if I’m sitting at my desk and we’re talking about something, if I decide I need to stand up a bit, it automatically adjusts the camera to where I am. If I move around, let’s say I have a whiteboard over here, it’s going to follow me, it’s going to follow me to wherever I am, if I want to sit down, if I’m going to come over here, if there’s multiple people, whatever, it follows you. And so it adjusts to that. There’s no need to futz around with your camera and everything. I’m on day one, so I’m still learning a lot of the things. But this morning our coworkers, Anshel and Will did their podcast from San Francisco and so I wanted to check it out and I put them on. So this also acts as sort of a second screen or in my case, a third screen.
And I had them on, and in this case it was just the two of them talking. But the sound you can hear, if Will was over here and Anshel was over here, if Will was talking, the sound came from over here. If Anshel was talking, the sound came from over here. So you can see that in a meeting situation. If you are at home and you are meeting with people who are in an office, say in a meeting room, and there are 10 people, not every meeting room is equipped with the right kind of technology that has the camera that focuses on the person who is speaking. So sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s talking, who’s saying that, right? This helps actually focus your eye to where the sound is coming from, which is really, really smart technology. So there’s so many other things. It’s Zoom certified Team certified, Google Meet certified. So it syncs to your calendar. So when it’s just sitting idle as a third screen or second screen, you just hit one button to join the meeting. So say you’re coming in from something else, you’ve got a meeting you’ve got to get onto, you don’t have to log in, you just hit a button and join. So I’m really excited to try out more things. These are just the first little tricks that I figured out, but I really like it so far and I’m going to do a full review of it. It’s quite large. Let me see what the actual dimensions are. Is that
Robert Kramer: Something that’s a mobile device?
Melody Brue: No. So it has a 27 inch touchscreen.
Robert Kramer: Oh, that’s nice.
Melody Brue: 4K display, 71 degree field of view, 12 megapixel camera. So this is the pro. There is a smaller device, but it’s not something you’re going to carry around with you. It’s something that’s going to stay in your office or in some cases in offices like in an office building. But people can then log into it with their WebEx login and then they can still have that one touch to join. So it’s very cool and I’m really liking it so far.
Robert Kramer: Glad you got it up and running. And we saw each other last week. We were in Las Vegas. It seems like there’s so many shows in Las Vegas, but we make the most of it and it’s kind of a great place to actually have an event because you could stay at the venue and it’s really central for everything. So we were just at Oracle’s cloud world and Suite World for NetSuite. How do you think it went?
Melody Brue: I thought it was great. I mean there was lot of stuff, a lot of things going on. I think probably we’re focused on a couple of different things being there. Certainly a couple of the things that I sort of honed in on the CRM side, HCM and then I was really actually pleased to hear a little bit about their sustainability efforts, which is something I think Oracle does quite a lot of actually and doesn’t talk as much about. And we’ve talked about this before, that there’s a little bit of a kind of, I don’t know, it’s the opposite of greenwashing. It’s like this green hushing thing that’s happening that people have stopped talking about sustainability and I think it’s because of the greenwashing, but they talked about their Oracle Fusion cloud, which is their sustainability application, and I don’t think it’s really gotten the attention that it deserves, but it’s really there to streamline the sustainability data management and reporting so that people can make progress on their environmental targets. It integrates the data from Oracle Cloud applications so they can track sustainability related activities and then contextualized data analysis within their business processes.
So all these through have all of these prebuilt dashboards and it provides what you need to track all of sustainability. You need audit trails, you need emission factor mapping, third party integrations. So they have a really good toolkit to measure and improve environmental performance. And Oracle just introduced this new capability to existing customers at no additional cost, which I think that’s a great value add and it shows I think a commitment to their sustainability efforts, but also trying to help their customers on their own sustainability journey. I think the other, I’m not sure, but for me the big other standouts there were I think, let’s see their dynamic skills. So that was another thing on HCM. So they announced a new open skills architecture within their dynamic skills, which is how in part of their Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, the naming architecture on some of this stuff can get a little bit complicated. The Oracle dynamic skills, which is part of Oracle Fusion Cloud, HCM. I think when you start adding all of these things on, especially with AI added to it, which we can move on to that in a bit, how Oracle is adding AI to everything and making it part of it, not making it an add-on, which I think they have a huge advantage in doing that. But I think one of the big issues that companies are facing right now is talent needs are changing rapidly. AI is a big part of that. Massive layoffs are a big part of that, organizing structures within organizations to maximize CapEx.
So skills have emerged as this really critical need for assessing organization’s potential. And so what Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM does is it helps leaders leverage AI to really go through their workforce, see where they have holes, see where they have gaps, take this kind of skills inventory and then figure out put that against third party skills data and labor market analytics so that they can manage this skills library. I mean, this is becoming a really complex thing that businesses have to deal with and businesses can either cobble this all together with multiple platforms where they have, let’s say it’s like an intranet or an employee engagement platform. Work vivo is a great example of that where they have skills management and then also a learning platform. But then you also have HCM providers that can track learning paths and career paths. I think what Oracle is really trying to do here, and we’ll see with Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM is with this kind of journeying of employees path is offering kind of all of those steps in one. Hopefully they’ll be able to do that. We’ll see, this is a new introduction, but I like what I saw. That was a lot just to GY four days. They had a lot merged into a few days, but I’d love to hear from you about, of course you saw a lot of things in your swim lanes, but in general, none of it exists without the data.
Robert Kramer: That’s interesting because you talked about AI and how it’s really throughout all the Oracle applications, specifically the fusion applications, NetSuite talked a little bit about the same and how they have all these new additions including AI embedded throughout the application. But a lot of this goes to, like you said, the data management to maximize all those features and we’ll get in the Salesforce in a minute as well. The data management, the structure of how you handle data, the integrity of it, the security of it I think is a really strong point because in order to actually utilize some of these features, the data has to be at a certain level, but Oracle is at a really good spot because they own a lot of the data for their customers, meaning customers utilize Oracle throughout their enterprise in many different areas. So you’re not having to tack on different technology stats unless you want to. And that’s some of the things that you talked about, all these features, where do you start and stop of using these features? Is the application complex or applications or the businesses or the businesses make the applications complex because of all the features they need? But I felt it was, and I spent some time talking to the ERP folks and going back to what I just said about how much they’re utilizing of their ERP, they felt there’s a huge need to actually take a look at their customers and what amount of features and functionalities they’re using within their ERP and SCMs because of the fact that a lot of their customers are adding on different features from different types of vendors, but at the same time, they could already have these inherent in the applications they own.
Melody Brue: Yeah, I think, like I said before, what do you think of their advantage over their advantage of not charging for AI? Because it’s built into all of their applications.
Robert Kramer: I think if your customers are wanting it and you don’t have to charge ’em and your ROI still works. I think it’s just a business model that they’d like to have. I think that the competition, if they want to charge and you’re not charging, you’re going to keep your customer retention. So I think it’s a valuable component to keep that retention. I think that’s a big thing for long-term success is that retention of those customers. And I think it’s kind of noted that it is something that customers are expecting and if you look at some of the other companies, we will talk about them a little later. They are not charging for Salesforce, I don’t believe is charging for AI. But I might be mistaken. I think it’s important to not nickel and dime all your customers. What’s your thought on that?
Melody Brue: Yeah, Salesforce is charging for AI. There’s a lot of things we can talk about that when we get to that because they are charging kind of per instance and they have actually have some investors that are concerned about that. But let’s get through. What about you spent more time at NetSuite Suite World than I did? Anything that was going on there that you feel like was particularly.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, so they talked a lot about the AI enhancements that being embedded throughout the application, not on top of the application Salesforce connector they now have, which is apropos for this discussion. They have a new user experience where they’ve really changed some of the look and feel, but I kind of felt that was needed maybe years ago. So even though it’s called Redwood, it was a new change, but something that was not necessarily that was eye opening, that it was something that, it still looks a little antiquated from my perspective. But they have a new project management module, they have a new procurement solution, new training option. So they’ve taken a little bit of a good stance from these, but I think it’s not about the features, it’s about the business impact. Are companies able to utilize NetSuites in a way that I know they have 40,000 customers in a way that it’s maximizing the ability for them to be more efficient or is it just more of a static system that allows them to monitor the business versus improve the business? So the features that I saw I didn’t think were that amazing, but they were necessary to keep their vision for.
Melody Brue: The features when you look at their legacy customers, the features may not be a massive draw. I do think for new customers, especially with Redwood, these features are going to be a big draw and the design element is going to be a big draw because it really is a massive improvement from previous applications from Oracle, the usability, the user interface, everything is, it’s just better to make it really simple. And so if you’re starting from scratch, so I think if you’re a legacy customer, you’re going to have to go through the porting of everything over and they’re saying that’s going to be really easy to do. Is it ever really easy to do? We’ll have to talk to some customers to find that out. It usually isn’t. But if I’m looking for a solution and I see that there are some really compelling things about that. When you think about the different people that now are in systems that didn’t use to have their hands in systems where we used to call it shadow it, now everybody’s kind of has their hands in things and it’s controlled, but at the same time, HR people and now we’re going to have agents coming, AI agents, the usability and the user interface really has to be that simple. And when you design it with that in mind, it’s just going to be better. It’s going to be easier to use.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, I mean I come from a world where it was character based a long time ago, and people, enterprises, users, they were functionally good at and efficient with what they were doing. So like you said, if the user interface is strong, it’s easier to learn, it’s easier to understand and then be successful. So I agree with you, but at the same time, they might have legacy customers that need to go onto this and they do have a program to get them to go to the latest, but at the same time it does fall back on that data management for new and existing customers. One of the questions I was curious, I didn’t get the answer, was how many of your customers of those 40,000 are not on the current version, even though they have automatic updates and they move them I think a couple of times a year to the latest version, how many of them are not on it? You can always say no or turn it off and then to get to these latest features, how big of a hurdle is it because it’s a big deal. One thing that NetSuite does have, because I just wrote an article on them, is they have just an enormous presence with retention with their customers, which is a big deal. And like you said, it’s that user interface is really good compared to the competition specifically for small to medium size businesses. It’s a great application.
Melody Brue: Well, we probably should move on to what has been on everybody’s mind this week, which is Salesforce, Dreamforce.
Robert Kramer: Yes.
Melody Brue: Big news coming out of Dreamforce, although it’s kind of been trickling in, so really shouldn’t be any surprise to anybody I think, which is that Salesforce is making a really massive pivot to AI agents. So much so that Mark Benioff just said, we should start calling this agent force. He started talking about this at their last earnings and it has kind of sparked some discussion and even some criticism from investors, but we got to see a lot of it. Some of these announcements have been sort of trickling out over the last week or so, but the big announcement obviously was agent force, which is their successor to Einstein, and I think it’s a really bold move. It’s a big leap where they’re saying AI can really drive not just business operations, but business revenue. He said, this is just a revenue machine. That was a remark that Benioff made in one of the earnings calls.
Robert Kramer: If they’re able to do what they want to charge for it, like you said.
Melody Brue: Right? So well, one of the investor concerns was that if you have so many agents that can these things, are you charging, do you have less Salesforce seats that you’re charging for? So that was a real big investor concern. So the response was they’re going to charge per instance with these agents and it’s $2 per instance where that has come up, which is that one inquiry or is that the thread of inquiries? I don’t think that we’ve gotten super clear on how the pricing structure is going to be. Pat Morehead was at the full analyst day and got to stick around and ask a bunch of questions, so I’ll be really curious to hear more detail about the pricing, but I think what we know so far is probably more than what most people know, and so if what we don’t know is really how they’re going to charge for this, and I think with AI pricing, nothing at this point can really be long-term because the price is going to change, the price of computing changes the price. But one thing I think is interesting before we get into individual use cases is the confidence that came across and am not talking about just in the way of we’re going to throw up some fancy demos and we’re going to tell you this is the best thing ever.
It was a different kind of confidence in that Benioff said, we’re going to have to let users put their hands in the soil and get going. He wanted people there. He actually invited investors to come to Dreamforce. Typically, the investors who wouldn’t be there said, I’m putting budget against this. I want you there. I want you to put your hands on this. I want you to sit and actually create your own agent. It’s that easy. That shows an actual readiness where in so many instances recently where people have announced AI tools, it’s like this is coming. You’re going to be able to do, you’re going to be able to do that. So not only did we see them saying, Hey, it’s here, sit down and get together with these, what do they call them? I can’t remember what they call their helpers, but they’re also doing a world tour. They’ll be in Dallas, they’re not in Austin unfortunately, but they’ll be in Dallas, and I think I’m going to go because I really want to have some hands on experience with this and see how easy it actually is. I’d love for Jason Anderson to actually get his hands on this. He’s our DevOps person. He’ll find any issues of like, okay, yes, this is a dev tool versus this is a citizen dev tool, but for me, those were the big standouts. Obviously we can talk about all the things like there’s agent force for sales teams, for CX, for marketing, for commerce. I’m going to publish my thoughts on that, but those are my general thoughts on the announcement
Robert Kramer: Before I jump into what I thought, what do you think about, because I see the ERP businesses going from a user base pricing to a consumption based pricing, which is interesting because Salesforce right now is user base, and so you buy a hundred seats for the people that you want to use it, and then now you going to have the AI on top of that. What some of the companies are doing is they’re doing this consumption base where it allows anybody in the company to work within the system, and then they’re just built monthly for wherever that consumption is. I’m wondering if the AI agents will prompt something more like that, so it’s not so complicated.
Melody Brue: I think that’s quite possible, especially with the concerns that investors have brought up about charging per seat because if you reduce the number of seats, interestingly, Benioff at the World Economic Forum in whenever that was, I can’t remember was that March? He actually was talking really futuristic about when you eliminate, if AI gets to the point of actually eliminating seats, which let’s be honest equals eliminating in some cases jobs, is the government going to come after companies to tax the AI?
Robert Kramer: Good point. That is a good point.
Melody Brue: I think there’s so much of that’s still unknown, but I think that was a really interesting point. I can actually link that in the show notes, his conversation at the World Economic Forum about that definitely shows he’s a thinker when it comes to things like that. He’s not just throwing this out there and hoping it works. He’s thought through every bit of this, but actually that does bring up a point. I do wish that Salesforce had talked a little bit more about the human in the loop and how Agent Force will be more of a collaboration tool between people and AI. ServiceNow made a similar announcement with some AI agents just a week ago. It didn’t give as much attention because it wasn’t around their big huge conference, but their big focus was on people managing a team of agents. So the person still is sort of in control, and it sort of gives them the balance between automation and human touch. It also, I think, eases some of those fears of job loss and all of that. And I think when you look at individual tasks, whether it’s commerce or marketing or whatever, there’s risk. There’s risk in both in data security, but there’s also risk in just losing that human touch, that human creativity that the relationships when it comes to sales. I mean, there’s so much of that.
So I think I would’ve loved to see them, and you were on the analyst watch party, which was great of them to do. I really appreciated that We as a group, a community of analysts watched the keynote together and were able to talk about it. That came up actually quite a bit, was that it’s like, where’s the human in the loop here? There were ways that they talked about obviously that it benefits your job function and all of that, but I think they could have done a better job of articulating how the human maintains that kind of interaction and that collaboration to make it feel more, I guess, safe in a way, both from a risk standpoint, but also just from a human standpoint. And I like the way that ServiceNow did that.
Robert Kramer: Well, a trust standpoint too, because they show the bells and whistles, but how do we get to the bells and whistles? How is the data management of this needed? What do I have to do? And I think that they talk about it, but they don’t really go too far past MuleSoft to integrating because all this, the agent forces connects to the data cloud, and then the data cloud has to have high quality data integrity. Then for these, the interface two ERP systems and for that trust factor, what human resources are required to make sure that integration piece is working, and these autonomous AI agents are working in the way to help benefit us from an automation perspective, from a scalability perspective to actually handle predictiveness analytics for my supply chain. How do I know and trust that that it’s going to work the way it should. Now, if it is set up and it is working, there’s some super high-end value with this, but when you look at the complexity of it and the security and the trust, I think there’s some things that need to be clarified because of the fact of what these ERP systems and they directly connecting, what happens if there’s a problem with the data, what’s the trickle down and what’s my damage from that perspective? Is it worth the weight that I put into it? So I think there’s some big value there, but at the same time, there’s some concerns and I think they could be identified and overcome, but at the same time, those challenges are not lAId out in front of the customers as well. But the demos were fantastic. What did you think of those?
Melody Brue: Yeah, I think in terms of risk, they have the two, the prebuilt and then the kind of made from scratch, which made from scratch is using existing Salesforce tools, but the prebuilt like agents for service, agents for sales, so SDR sales development representative, personal shopper marketing campaign agents, those are prebuilt. So they’re trained on a specific role. They’re given context, they’re given actions, they’re giving guardrails. So I feel like those are going to be looked at as a little bit safer. They could also be looked at as a little bit more of a threat to somebody’s job. But I think the sort of built the configured ones are the ones that are really going to have to be looked at carefully with all those things, especially the data. The devil is in the data. I always say, in order for these agents to deliver their best performance, they’re going to have to maintain that data. So that’s the only way for the agents to be able to take the most appropriate actions, really what they’re doing. I’ve always said that these typical AI, generative AI has been sort of a good intern and now an agent is really going to be more an assistant where we’ve called co-pilot an assistant. This is an assistant that doesn’t sleep and is able to make decisions on your behalf based on things you’ve told it you’re okay with and you’re not okay with, and all these very clear parameters, and you hope it doesn’t make mistakes.
Robert Kramer: And it does learn along the way and it does improve. But at the same time, to make decisions on your behalf, like you said, there has to be a human component of this to make sure that the decisions are correct and you’re comfortable. But I do think we’ve talked about this, the trust component is a big deal, and I have to, if I have a huge amount of financial things at stake losses that could happen, I need to be able to trust those decisions are the best. Otherwise, I’d rather do it through the traditional ways, which are not too far from just using NetSuites or Sage or SAP to run the course of my business that I’m used to.
Melody Brue: Yeah.
Robert Kramer: Anyway.
Melody Brue: Well, we’re going super long, so we’re going to have to buzz through a few other topics. And this actually was announced maybe two weeks ago now, but we haven’t done a podcast in a while because we’ve been on the road. But this was actually quite an important development from Zoho, which is a new release of their Zoho analytics. This is a big milestone for them because this really takes them from being a reporting tool to this AI powered BI platform, more than a hundred new enhancements, which is all of course driven by AI. But what I think is really important here is that this sort of unlocks the business intelligence for various personas and various business types. So it really, I think it positions Zoho in a much better place against competitors, even like Tableau, which is Salesforce company, and using it uses, I actually, I’ll link this in the show notes, but wrote my write up and opinion and analysis on this in Forbes, but I really think this does for me, I think it bridges a big gap between analytics and machine learning with their studio, the data science and machine learning studio so they can integrate the machine learning into analytics workflows. So what that does, and that sounds probably like a whole word jumble, but what that does is it gives both technical users like data scientists and non-technical users like business analysts to build these custom machine learning models without extensive coding. It’s not no code, but without extensive coding. So I’ve talked a lot about this.
Robert Kramer: Well, I mean, enterprises need reliable. They have to have reliable data, excuse me, and they need a powerful analytics platform to break down all this to show the results. And for Zoho to continue to move towards enterprises, I know that they want compete a little bit more with the likes of NetSuite. They’re going to need tools like this. They’re going to need be able to have a stronger BI and tool set to show and perform with a lot of these new features that you’re talking about. So it’s well done from their perspective and needed.
Melody Brue: They’ve really made a transformation from this. Started out, Zoho Analytics started out as Zoho reports, and that launched in 2009. So they have had this sort of long-term vision for their business intelligence, and I think this speaks to how Zoho manages their own growth, but also moves along with the growth of their customers. They’ve started with small medium enterprises, they’re moving up that chain, and so they’re offering more advanced capabilities as their customers grow.
Robert Kramer: Think, I don’t think that you want your customers to leave. I think this retention thing that I previously mentioned is a big deal. So the features that they can keep on adding on will be really needed because their customers, I’m assuming some of them are growing and they’re going to need more features and functionality within their system, so they don’t want to have to let them go to a NetSuite or a different product like a Sage or an Acumatica or something of that nature. Microsoft has a product as well, and so does SAP. So I think it’s super important for them to continue to do what they’re doing. And it kind of leads to another subject is that ERP systems are really looked upon to be not used to their full capabilities. When I met with the people at Oracle, it was really noticeable that they talked about this So IBM actually is acquiring a company called, I’m not sure if I could say it right, but Excel Alpha and they’re, they were actually purchased, and this is kind of a growing trend and similar how Capgemini bought a company called syn, and they’re buying resources or companies that have resources to help with these ERP transformations to help get better use of these ERP systems or to do migrations or all the above. But also IBM announced that they’re having a new partnership with Oracle as well to help doing the same thing. So this goes with, I know we’re kind of going backwards to talk about Zoho, but it’s a trend that ERP systems need to be utilized more, and they’re being seen by companies like IBM and their consulting practice, which is really a dynamic practice now since they bought Pricewaterhouse Cooper a long time ago. But at the same time, you don’t want to increase your technology stack unless you need to, and you need to be able to get your data management under control. These all blend together as kind of a trend that’s needed for success and not continuing to keep on adding technologies unless you need to. That’s a long winded answer.
Melody Brue: I think that’s a great explanation, and I loved at, when we were at Oracle when one of their executives said he didn’t like using the term ERP, and at lunch you and Pat and I were talking and it’s like, well, he said something like, nobody goes into the work and says, I want to do enterprise resource planning today. And it’s like, well, who goes into work and says anything like that? I don’t go into work and say, I’m ready to analyze today. So the reality is these are things that need to be done. These are really important parts of keeping a business running. So I think that sometimes I feel like people sort of gloss over when you start talking about ERP, and I think we probably need to link your first series of articles about ERP and just sort of the basics of ERP in the show notes here, because I think that was a really good fundamentals of what it is, what it means, and how every single business can’t run without one in some capacity.
Robert Kramer: You’re not going to put your data and transactions in multiple systems. I mean your master data, specifically your transactions, all your financial information, your manufacturing processes, your inventory, I mean all that has to reside there. And these ERPs pull it all together in one central place to actually maximize operations. And these other tools that are, we’re talking about like Salesforce and Agent Force are tools to help be more efficient for what your core practice of your ERP is doing. In my eyes, if your ERP is down, you have a problem. If your CRM is down, you have a problem, but not as big of a problem. So I think it’s critical to understand what you have and get that data corrected as best you can so you can utilize SAPs extra features that they have, Oracles and also functions that are within Salesforce that you all want to use.
Melody Brue: All right, before we talk about what’s coming up, let’s give a little plug for our game Time Tech pod that just aired yesterday. We had such a great game Time Tech Pod. We’ll link that also with Noah Kin, who is the head of IBM Sports, sports and Entertainment Technology about the US Open and we should have worn our US open hats. Had I thought of that, I would’ve at least had it here.
Robert Kramer: Hard to find the right hat when we were there and they look sharp.
Melody Brue: They’re great, but that was awesome. So check that out in the show notes, but since we’re really running late on time now, where are you headed next? What’s coming up?
Robert Kramer: So I’m going to be going to multiple places, but in about a week I’ll be at Infor, which there are a major ERP Solution. I’ll be at their annual conference, which is going to be fantastic, and then I’ll be at a few other ones after that, including LogicMonitor, Teradata as well. So it’s going to be a busy October and we’re looking forward to some of these new opportunities.
Melody Brue: There’s a lot happening in October, so I am headed, actually, I take one of our children back to college at the University of Oregon tomorrow, and then I’m headed to Orlando for Verint. Verint is a CX automation company. Very interested to see what they have going on. They have a ton of different bots and even though they don’t actually call them agents, they do a lot of things that are very agent like time scheduling, things like that all around CX. I’ll report more after that. After that, I am going to Fem AI, which is an initiative that Cadence has going on along with other companies. That is to get more women involved in AI.
Robert Kramer: Oh, that’s cool.
Melody Brue: Wonderful. I’m very proud and very honored to be a part of that. I’ll also be doing a video on that, and from there I go to Boston where I will be at a Microsoft event and I will be seeing IBM and Haiku and I don’t even know after that I can barely, oh, after that I go to WebEx and Adobe Max. Those are all both super fun events. So busy and those are all just in October. I haven’t even gotten into November. We will have to figure out lots of ways from the road for us to sync up pod about all of these interesting things going on. Now that you all know where we’re going to be, we would love questions. We would love any kind of topic that you want to hear about. Hit us up on Twitter. My Twitter is at MelodyBrue super easy. Roberts is not as easy, but Robert Kramer_data.
Robert Kramer: Robkramer_data.
Melody Brue: Rob Kramer. We’ll put it in the show notes.
Robert Kramer: There you go.
Melody Brue: Hit us up on Twitter. Let us know what you want to hear about. Also, you can put it in the comments. Make sure you have subscribed. Thank you for joining us. We love to have you here. This was a great conversation, Robert. It was a little long, but we had a lot to catch up on and yeah, we’ll see you next time. Thanks so much
