We are live for episode 25 of the Hot Desk Podcast with Melody Brue and Robert Kramer. We’re are discussing Avaya ENGAGE, Box Content Cloud Summit, BlueYonder, and Meta’s Workplace migration to Workvivo. Also, a quick MSBuild teaser?
Watch the full episode here:
1:30 Avaya ENGAGE
8:42 Box Hubs
15:54 Blue Yonder
21:11 Meta’s Workplace Migration to Workvivo by Zoom
29:03 What’s Coming Up?
Avaya ENGAGE
https://avaya-engage.avaya.com/denver-2024
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melodybrue_i-spent-this-week-at-avaya-engage-i-had-activity-7196896786895020032-c-cL/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://x.com/MelodyBrue/status/1790410664915152941
Box Hubs
https://blog.box.com/join-box-hubs-beta-start-curating-organizing-and-publishing-great-content-today
https://x.com/MelodyBrue/status/1791135694481436922
Blue Yonder
https://blog.blueyonder.com/our-top-7-takeaways-from-the-icon-2024-main-stage-keynotes/
Meta’s Workplace Migration to Workvivo by Zoom
https://joshbersin.com/2024/05/goodbye-to-workplace-by-meta-hello-to-workvivo-by-zoom/
What’s Coming Up?
Microsoft Build
Zoom Perspectives
Canva Create
IBM Think, Informatica World, and Salesforce Connection
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:
Melody Brue: Welcome to this week’s edition of Moor Insights & Strategy Hot Desk Podcast. I’m Melody Brue and I’m joined by Robert Kramer, VP and principal analyst of ERP and enterprise data. How’s it going, Robert?
Robert Kramer: I’m good. It’s Friday and we’re all getting ready for the weekend, so it’s been a good week. Thank you. How about you?
Melody Brue: Good. It has been a good week. It feels like a long week, but glad it’s Friday and we’re going to talk about all the things from the week. On this show, we talk about all the tools, trends, trends and trajectories in people and marketing tech, enterprise apps, ERP, CRM, and all the glue that holds it together, data. This week we are going to be talking about Avaya ENGAGE Conference, sorry, Box Content Cloud Summit, that’s how you know we’re live, and the beta launch of Box Hubs. We are going to talk about Blue Yonder and Meta Workplace migration to Workvivo, which is now a Zoom property, I guess. So we got a lot to talk about. That was just a big huge list. So yeah.
Robert Kramer: Where should we start?
Melody Brue: What’s that?
Robert Kramer: Where should we start?
Melody Brue: Well, let’s talk about Avaya ENGAGE. So I was at ENGAGE this past week, Monday through Wednesday, ENGAGE, so I was actually just a couple of weeks ago we talked about this. I was with Avaya at their Analyst Conference. So a lot of the stuff that I heard at the Analyst conference wasn’t able to share quite yet other than just some general thoughts, but it definitely set a nice foundation for what I saw at ENGAGE and ENGAGE is actually more for their partners, customers, their international user group.
And so it was a really nice chance to talk to people, leadership, employees, customers, partners, and the real, I think the big theme of the show of the three days, which I think is great, is CX plus EX equals BG, which means customer experience plus employee experience equals business growth. And I think I wrote a whole LinkedIn post about this and highlighted some of their big partnerships including a massive expanded partnership with RingCentral, their recent acquisition of Edify Technologies. A couple of things I think are really interesting to point out, but I think the biggest thing for me to point out is that there’s been a pretty big culture shift with Avaya from coming out of bankruptcy, of restructuring, and just sort of trying to protect the base. They have this massive on-prem base that they’re known for; to this culture shift of they’re not just telephony and they’re really leaning into experience, customer experience of course, but employee experience. And that is a bit of a shift, I will say from a year ago when we talked about this. And so really happy to see that and some partners that are really helping them to do that. A couple of them that I was able to spend some time with LivePerson, which is an integration that helps with their digital channels, bots, analytics and everything just helps with that experience, helps to identify that employee, the agent burnout, all of those things. I feel like I’m just like there’s so many things I could talk about.
One more thing that I think is really interesting to point out is the opportunity to hear from their customers and hear what their pain points are, especially in the contact center. And there were some that they put on stage like Disney and Southwest and of course those are interesting to hear from. But I actually got more out of just the conversations where I was able to sit and have private conversations with people, I guess not private, but just not planned conversations with people. And one of them was Edenor, which is a utility company. And it was so interesting because when you think about a utility company and the problems that they have and the customers that they serve, they’re trying to deal with energy consumption and environmental issues and then they have people who have different ways of paying their bills, different ways of communicating, a number of different issues that they’re having to deal with and also trying to be, I think there’s this interesting dichotomy of the more energy they use, the more they get paid, but at the same time they want to be a sustainable company and they want to teach their customers how to lower their energy bills and their energy consumption.
And so they’re really leaning into that, but also figuring out the different channels in which to communicate to their customers, but then also the things that are just completely out of their control like weather. When your power goes out because of a storm, they get all those calls. Nobody’s calling Mother Earth, insert whoever you believe in that’s responsible for the weather. So it was great. I think it was a really fantastic add-on to having that information directly from coming from the Analyst Summit to really being able to get in and talk to all the various stakeholders and really see a little bit more under the hood.
There are definitely some challenges that they have coming up. I think that a focus on who the ideal customer is something that they’re going to need to hone in on, and the complexity of the type of customer that they deal with isn’t always just the large enterprise. But we talked about those things and I think all in all I’m going to say that I really enjoy those conversations, especially the problem solving ones. And I loved hearing from these customers about how they’re solving the customer interactions.
Robert Kramer: That’s very interesting what you said because I think that many people don’t 100% understand our travel and how we do it and why we do it and why we can’t just do these things virtually. Of course we can, but there’s such a substantial difference being firsthand in front of these people. It’s the vendor that you’re talking to, it’s the clients, it’s the other analysts, it’s hearing this information, it brings up ad hoc conversations. It makes it much more meaningful to understand what they’re trying to tell the messaging and really to give advice when you need to. So it’s such a win to be there in person. It sounds like you got a lot out of it, plus you are one of the few analysts that were there, so that’s very knowledgeable suitable for you as well.
Melody Brue: There were only a couple of us there and that’s nice. I mean, I love the analyst community. I love having some people to bounce ideas off and everything and often we do podcasts together and all that. But I really do think, like you said, there’s a difference between in-person and virtual where you can have these conversations that just happen in the hotel lobby or walking over to the convention center that aren’t planned that sometimes that’s where you really get the good information. But anyway, on to Box Hubs. So a few weeks ago when you and I were both in San Francisco for Oracle, their Analyst Summit, I had a stop by at Box for a visit and I actually got a preview of Box Hubs, which I actually got last year too. But this was just about to go into beta and now it is officially in beta as of this week when they had their Box Cloud Summit. I’m like, “What am I?”
My words were not coming out properly. This is again how you know we’re live. Content Cloud Summit. Box Hubs is, I’m going to give it to a really simple way, but basically it is a way to organize your content within Box where it is in hubs and pushed out to share with the people who need it. And this saves a ton of time from looking through documents, from looking through different folders, from finding old content and all of the things. I was talking so much about Avaya that I’m actually going to get your take on this and if you want my take on this, actually, it’s in the show notes and I’m quoted in their blog post that was posted this week about it. But I want to get your take on it because I think that the amount of data that organizations are producing and housing is just becoming unmanageable and I think Box Hubs is a way to curate and manage content. And so give me your take on what Box is doing here.
Robert Kramer: You just said it very well. So the point that you made is that companies have to have data management strategies. What are they going to do with all this data? How do they go through and organize it and how does AI play a role to organize it? So the Box Hubs give you a chance to put this information into specific hubs, and the way that they’re allowing you to do it is with unstructured data. So it could be various types of files like PDFs or videos or spreadsheets. It could be folders as well. It allows you to actually put this information only in specific hubs that you’ve approved so you can actually set up projects and then people that need to access it, they don’t have to come through thousands of different files to find the information they need. It could be automatically there and then utilized pretty efficiently.
But it comes back to everybody’s talking about data and AI and how they work together, but the real picture is how do you get a strong data management strategy? I think it has to be put together well to understand how much data do you have, where it’s coming from, and to somehow reduce your technology stacks so you can be more efficient and make the most of this data because I think that the data that is being gathered right now is only going to increase over time drastically. And I think that companies don’t know what they don’t know because they’re not sure how much data they have and what’s useful, but it’s a fantastic step in the right direction. I’m curious to see some use cases on how it’s going to be used of how much data is going to be in there that these companies are going to be actually exercising these projects off of. What’s your thoughts in that perspective?
Melody Brue: Yeah, I think one of the things that I feel like when you don’t spend so much time searching through all of the data and also searching through the wrong data, so one of the things that hubs can do for you is when AI can search enterprise data, it’s also searching through old drafts hubs. You can put all the final drafts into this hub and so you’re not actually querying data that’s old, that’s no longer where you may actually have to keep it for some sort of compliance issue, but it’s not old information. So if you’re searching within the hub, you’re only getting the information that you need.
People spend so much time, often hours a day just searching for the information that they need. So when I think about ROI on AI, I think less about productivity and more about what it gives you back and what it gives you back is less mental strain gives you back more time to think, more time for the things that are just human, like creativity, strategic thinking, all of these things that it’s not just about working faster, it’s actually about getting smarter, I think. And I think tools like Box, that’s where I feel like this adds a tremendous amount of value and I really am looking forward to, and we did have this discussion about further in their roadmap of where Box can actually start to recognize where files may belong together and maybe say, “Hey, would you like to create a hub?” Maybe it recognizes that these are all the documents that you guys use for research on company X. Maybe I’ll say company B because X is an actual company now and create a hub for that. So I think there’s some iterations on it later down the line that could also be incredibly interesting.
Robert Kramer: Well, just one quick thing. We all talk about AI and how great it is for data, but what’s going to happen? We’re all going to see this as data is only as good as the quality that you have, garbage in, garbage out, but AI will point out how bad your data is. So if your company has been set up not correctly and the data is not there that you’re expecting, AI will be the first thing to point out that the quality of your data and 50% of all enterprise data is sitting in these ERP and supply chain applications, which is one of the things we’re going to talk about in a minute. But those specific applications, those enterprise applications are super important for things like the Box Hub to access that data and that data needs to be correct. So we’re going to go through this data management phase that these companies are going to need to understand what they have and then how they prepare for the future to have their data as an asset.
Melody Brue: That is a good segue to what we’re going to talk about next and this one’s all you.
Robert Kramer: Yeah, Blue Yonder is a very strong supply chain management application and I wrote a recent article on ERP modernization and how companies that ERP companies are modernizing their applications to more have mainstream advanced technology. And Blue Yonder is doing the same with their SEM and they’re actually as other companies are combining data and AI to get to that modernization to bring in advanced technology to have a unified cloud platform actually using Snowflake.
But they’ve released some new products at this annual event, which most companies do, and some of them include an intelligent assistant to help automate task and tackle supply chain challenges. They have something pretty interesting that they have what’s called an innovation studio, which allows to co-create and do workshops with clients and vendors. They have a new cognitive solution which introduces the way to manage supply chain uncertainties, and that’s kind of interesting because it uses AI to a different level to analyze information, to understand patterns and help you make predictions and decisions when supply chains aren’t working correctly. It’s hard to manually understand how do you fix this disruption? What do you do when the product’s not available? What do you do when there’s an earthquake or how do you handle sustainability when there’s a company does they do it now, they don’t do it? Things of that nature and the forecasting it’s able to do as well.
They also came out with something that’s called Composable Journeys, which allows you to really have a more modern supply chain as well. And they take various components, this is really interesting, like services and data and applications and processes and put it all together to combine a new process to allow you to have new automations for recommendations of that supply chain optimization. So they’re investing a lot of money into their application and it was really a neat conference to attend, although I was remote, so it was one of those that I didn’t get the chance to be on hand and I would’ve liked that because one of those conferences when you’re there, you can learn a lot more and get a lot more out of it.
Melody Brue: Yeah, when you could talk to people. I find that the predictive scenarios are really interesting. We saw that at Oracle with supply chain where they can model a what if scenario. I think that’s just fascinating. I mean I will compare that in the CX landscape of call routing. They can look at something all these data points and say, “Well, this person likes…” They have all this information on a person and they’re like these things and these things and they know all this about them and so therefore we should route them to this agent that’s going to be the most successful route. It’s crazy that we have that much data, but it’s so helpful for the outcome that we’re looking for. And I think that’s so smart, which is let’s not just use AI for AI’s sake, let’s use it for the business outcome that we’re looking for.
Robert Kramer: And that’s really smart that you said that because exactly what they want to do. How do I make this data better? How do I use it to make predictions? So they came out to a couple of different cognitive applications. One is about integrating business planning, which automates scenario planning. Another one is about merchandise planning to optimize decisions on processes around merchandise. And then is another one is about execution. So when ERPs and SCMs were just getting started 30 years ago, it was more of a system of record. Now that system of record with good data of course, and AI and machine learning and all the tools that we have, it allows you to really be a step ahead and it’s an asset. So data, it’s imperative that it’s a strong component of this. I actually think, and we’ve never really weighed in on this, that a chief data officer will be something that will be very important to a company of all this data opportunities, I see that as being a crucial point in AI fitting under that layer, but we’ll have to see.
Melody Brue: So one of the companies that I work with on the HCM side actually does have a chief data officer and with HCM, that’s something clearly there’s a lot of data, a lot of PII. So I agree with you, that’s probably something that we’ll see more and more of. And look at that, what a perfect little segue speaking of HCM. So this week, Meta announced that they are going to retire their Workplace, which is basically their Facebook for work. And they have named Workvivo, which is now a Zoom company, as their only preferred migration partner. So this is I think a huge boom for Zoom. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to say the C word or the P word, the thing that kept us home for years. This may be one of the best things that happens to Zoom in terms of a quick gain of customers.
There are so many workplace engagement platforms out there and for including Slack and Teams and a number of other more startup type companies. I think for Meta to only say one and they barely for very specific about this is the only one that they prefer, says a lot about Work Vivo and I know Work Vivo pretty well. Some of their customers are the Virgin Group, Lululemon, Amazon. They do a really nice job. One, they’re all about employee engagement and making employees feel kind of seen and heard, and even the ones that don’t have a desk or maybe even an email address. So they’re very much catering to the frontline workers, the workers who may be on an airplane half the time. Ryanair is one of their customers. So it’s really just a centralized digital space for employee connection and collaboration. And they have really high numbers in terms of engagement and all of that, which I don’t know offhand, but I think it’s telling in a couple of ways.
I think it’s very telling that Meta would choose them. Also, Meta has said the reason why they’re sunsetting Workplace is to concentrate on AI. They do have quite a number of customers, so it’s not like it was just an entire failure. But I think I would say that it definitely puts Workvivo in a really good position. But they have sort of like a running start, but maybe a little bit too much time. Meta has said that they’re not going to shut down until August of next year. So I did a quick just search on LinkedIn and there are so many companies out there who are already trying to lure those customers away.
So Workvivo is going to really have to do its work to keep those customers, even though Meta is saying, “We’re going to help you migrate, we’re going to do all the things, we’re going to give you the tools.? It’s certainly an opportunity for Slack, Teams, a number of other companies to come in and say, “Here, we have a better solution for you,” or “We have a cheaper solution,” or whatever it is. But I think it’s a great opportunity for Workvivo. It’s also really good timing for Zoom when they’re trying to show that they’re more than just a video platform.
Robert Kramer: Sounds great.
Melody Brue: I’m chatty today, huh?
Robert Kramer: It’s been a long week, so we’re wrapping up and I think it was successful.
Melody Brue: All right. Any thoughts about Workvivo? Any thoughts about employee engagement platforms? What are your-
Robert Kramer: Yeah, I think it’s a very competitive space. I think it’s a very, not only competitive, but specific to what your users like and what they’re used to. So I would ask you back one more question in just a second, but they’re all going to have specific user interfaces that are all going to have something that is easier on the way that your personality is and which one plays that role. I think it’s really competitive and when it’s competitive, it means that those features are even more important and then to access the right tools. So do you see one as having to leg up on the other ones? Is this going to be able to stand the way that you’re proposing that they stand after they do this exit?
Melody Brue: So I think Workvivo has a very intuitive user face and so intuitive interface, sorry. What am I talking? So I think from that perspective, I think the reason why workplace is intuitive for people is because they use Facebook. So it’s very clear like, “I know how to use this.” Workvivo has a similar, it doesn’t have that Facebook vibe, but at the same time you can share. But then there’s also various different things that you can do, recognition, other things that take it beyond just this sharing, onboarding. There’s a lot of very functional things that can be added in that aren’t necessarily it’s not just community, not to say that community isn’t important. It is, but there’s other parts of it that are important. I think you’re right about it. It’s somewhat what people are used to and what people prefer. And so if somebody is already a Microsoft shop, then Teams may be really appealing to them because it’s very easy to then collaborate with any of your 365 documents, anything. So it’ll depend on how the integration works. But what I think if you see, for instance, the Virgin Group, their Workvivo space is totally branded to the Virgin Group. So it really feels like your-
Robert Kramer: That’s a big deal.
Melody Brue: -within the experience. And I think that part of it, I haven’t seen others that are, it’s almost like do you really want to be so much out of it where it’s almost white-labeled? It’s like there’s a little like Workvivo over here. So that part of it, they do a really nice job of making it feel like it’s part of the company, but is that going to harm them from a branding standpoint?
Robert Kramer: That’s a good point though.
Melody Brue: Where are you in it? But I think it’s great for them and we’ll see. I mean, they have a long time to get this figured out, so maybe too long. But I understand from Meta’s perspective they’ve got to give customers enough time to move on over. But anyway, a couple last things. So not a whole lot we can talk about, but we did have the Microsoft Build Analyst Day this week. Quick thoughts on next week’s Microsoft Build, anything in particular you’re looking forward to?
Robert Kramer: Well, I think it’s, again, everybody’s talking about data and AI and how they work together and how they improve what applications that they have for the different offerings and the different product lines. So it’ll be interesting because Microsoft has a lot of different applications for all the way from the enterprise, which I would call the ERP know to the workplace a tremendous amount in CRM, so in Microsoft Office, all part of the workplace. So how are they using AI and data to advance their applications and make it more efficient for their users? One question I have to you is how much AI do we really want? Where does it start? Where does it stop? We think we talked about this last week. So it’ll be interesting where they use it. I think it has to be used right. When I cover ERP and SCM, I think if it’s intuitive and it does streamline processes, fantastic. Makes the forecasting always a big deal. We want to know what that is. Trends, great. Cross-selling, fantastic. When you get into these things of applications, sometimes people just want to work and if it slows them down, I don’t know how productive that announcement or that enhancement is, but I’m looking forward to see what they have to say because their competition is strong and they’re a major player with Google, obviously, and Amazon and Oracle and others. So what’s your thoughts?
Melody Brue: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to… So last week Microsoft released the Work Trend Index and I’m working on a write-up on that. That’s more than just what they released in terms of results, but actually what that means. And I have a feeling that we’re going to get more out of that at Build, kind of some actual use cases of how Copilot’s been used across enterprises. And here’s from some customers, and I think there’s a lot that we’re going to hear. Okay, this fly. We have a third guest on our podcast today.
Robert Kramer: Special guests are good.
Melody Brue: Special guests.
Robert Kramer: They drop in whenever they want.
Melody Brue: Yeah. So yeah, I’m looking forward to that. And then also next week I actually, I take off Monday I’ll be in New York with Zoom, I get to go check out the MLB Replay Center and have meetings with the executive team. So, really excited about that. Then I hop on a plane all the way across the country to LA to Canva Create. How about you? Well, I know you’re home, but-
Robert Kramer: I’m home and I’m actually going to be doing everything virtually. I had three conferences this week. One was Informatica, which handles a lot of strong data integration solutions, which is that middleware that moves data from generally from an ERP to these business applications. And then IBM Think, which they have a lot of new announcements around Watsonx and then also Salesforce has their Connection 2024. So all three of those I’m going to be doing virtually. We’ll see. I’d like to be at these on site opportunities, but I’m about to leave in a couple hours. My wife has been induced, so we’re going to have a baby girl I think probably tomorrow morning. But I was telling Mel, last night, I was putting together the stroller and I usually don’t get too teary-eyed, but I was. And it’ll be a baby girl. She’ll be born this weekend. Hopefully healthy and everything will go good. So mom’s running around packing and we’re going to go to the hospital in a couple hours. So I’ll be home all next week.
Melody Brue: That is just amazing. And knowing you, you will probably be back on this podcast next Friday, but if not, we will resume the following week and good luck to you. And for everybody else, thank you so much for joining us. Sorry, I was a bit chatty today. I don’t know.
Robert Kramer: Maybe we’ll have a special guest though next week though.
Melody Brue: Yeah, I don’t know.
Robert Kramer: It might be a baby girl.
Melody Brue: Yeah, well, and not the fly.
Robert Kramer: Right.
Melody Brue: Thank you all for joining us. Please let us know if there’s anything you’d like us to talk about. If there’s anything you enjoyed from the show other than my too much talking or didn’t enjoy, let Robert know about that one. Hit us up on Twitter, hit the subscribe button, and we will see you next time. Thanks for joining us.
