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ShortList Spotlight: OpenText Brings Integrations, Scale & Security to the DAM Party

Liz Miller talks Constellation ShortLists, unpacking the category of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for High Volume Commerce and its leading solutions. DAM has always represented the last mile of hashtag#technology that pulls everything together. It's where the intersection of planning, assets, documents, etc. can meet and be deployed. And in today's world, DAM has to be used everywhere and available at scale.

💡 Liz highlights OpenText as a leading DAM solution for usability, scale, security, and speed. Watch the full video to learn more about using OpenText in your vendor selection ⬇

Check out the full Constellation ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gnwk89qf

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors.)

Liz Miller back again to talk more constellation shortlists. This one I'm going to tell you right now. This has to be one of my favorite categories, digital asset management for high volume commerce, and yes, one of the reasons why damn is one of my favorites, I get to say damn all the time, and no one's gonna scold me for cursing. Sorry, mom. But for me as a marketer, especially as a marketer that was working in any type of commerce field, damn has always represented that last mile, that last mile of technology that pulls everything together. It tends to be that intersection point of where all of your hard work and all of your planning for all of the assets, all of your creative, all of your documentation, all of your product renders, everything that you've done goes someplace can't just be in a big bucket.

Damn represents that place where all of your work meets all of that strategy and then can be easily deployed the new kind of what's different in dam today is that it has to be used everywhere. It has to be used everywhere, across the organization and in high volume commerce. That means some really interesting parts of an organization that's perhaps doing product renderings, prototyping, 3d modeling. You're dealing with people who come from across the enterprise and are dealing with very, very different assets. And all of those assets have a place, but they also have to be able to move at a scale that is churning what feels like every single day. And that's what makes high volume commerce a really interesting place to specifically look at, damn solutions. And I gotta tell you, there's like, 50 to 60 that I look at every single year for this specific shortlist, and it is everything from just simple content storage all the way to up to some of your most sophisticated and, quite frankly, complex solutions that are needed in a commerce setting.

So let's dive in. We're talking about scale. We're talking about usability. We're talking about integrations, integrations into tools that range from everything from your ERP, your supply chain, your warehouse management, you need to know every single thing that's going to be out there that needs to be cataloged, that someone may need an asset to go with, but you also need speed, speed and scale and flexibility, and that's why these solutions are really hard to list. And quite frankly, there's one brand I want to talk about, one vendor that for years, had been kind of the mainstay on the list, but in recent years, drop just below, just below that list that would appear on the shortlist.

And that's open text, and it's not they got bad. It's not that they were somehow not really worthy competition to all of these shortlist vendors. It's just a lot of new players that hit the market, and our executive network was really talking about those, implementing those and really enjoying them, but the call to reassess open text and to really take a deep dive into some of the new innovations that have been placed in the solution really became very loud and clear from a couple of our clients that said, listen, not only have I stayed with Open text, but I'm expanding what I'm doing with open text, so I want to dive into that and talk a little bit about that. Today, open text has been a mainstay, not only in content and content management, but also in asset management. There is a deep understanding as far as how to manage, maintain and support Asset Delivery, as well as asset organization and asset management, and that's really important.

But some of the things we really need to talk about when it comes to OpenText and some of the new, let's say, new mindsets as an organization, they have. The number one thing, integration, integration, integration. OpenText really understands that it is part of a much larger ecosystem, especially when it comes to its commerce clients. You are dealing with platforms and solutions that are not typically integrated and managed into, say, some of your other asset management or some of your other creative management solutions. This is a very different beast when it comes to commerce. And OpenText really understands that. But the number one thing interestingly that every person I talk to, every customer and every end technology user that's using OpenText, media management, it's got to be the integrations. It's probably the first thing everyone mentions to me that everyone who is creating within the organization, they might be doing 3d modeling. They might be doing product prototyping. They might be doing your traditional asset creation and creative asset development. Everyone is able to utilize and integrate easily and quickly into open text. So you might be in Photoshop one moment it was. Trader in the next you might be in PowerPoint, but you also might be in Premiere Pro. You also might be in texture. You might be creating massive 3d models. You are still going to be able to integrate quickly, reliably, and have the uptime and the scalability that you need to be able to pull your assets into the central repository. And let's also point out something really important here. The second thing everyone brought up to me was one word simplicity. There is a big difference between simplicity and simplistic. I bring it up a lot because it matters, right? You can't be simplistic in your tool can't just have a bucket someplace you stick things when it comes to high volume commerce brands, there is a demand there. There is a demand for speed and for scale. And OpenText gets it right with this all inclusive subscription pricing. Customers actually volunteered to me that there was never the sense they were going to get a gotcha invoice. We all know what we mean by that, right that the layers on unexplainable costs.

Why do I all of a suddenly have to play that? Yes, I know my storage got bigger, but the subscription pricing and the way that OpenText has structured a lot of their pricing and their availability makes sense to not only the CFO, but also to the Chief Digital Officer, to the Chief Marketing Officer, to everyone involved in this new CX, this new asset ecosystem. Everyone understands what the expectation is, and everyone understands where that invoice is going to be. And that is wildly important, especially when commerce can change on a dime. The other thing that's a differentiator, at least in my own analysis, is a lot of the AI models that are used here, I think a lot of times, especially in modern conversations, when we talk about dam, we really quickly get into a conversation around generative AI and asset manipulation, right? And yes, dams have to have that. You have to be able to personalize. You have to be able to use the right image for the right situation, for the right implementation, but you also have to be able to have standard data. You also have to be able to translate. You have to be able to have data standardization that is not just normalized, but it's also harmonized across all of your metadata, across all of the categorization, and if you're in high volume commerce, you know just how much that takes. Right?

Again, with Media Manager, you can extend a lot of these media support. And it's this limit, this idea of this limitless media support, that's so important that you can really extend well beyond, say, marketing assets or your product and your commerce assets you're looking again prototypes, Lydd models, complex video documentation, it allows you to think about your content and your assets differently. Do we really need multiple locations where we're putting all of this, or can we start to harmonize this so that the data that we're pulling into our system starts to grow and build, and in true AI fashion starts to actually make things like tagging, things like categorization, that much smarter and that much easier, because at the end of the day, we still have to think about damn as being that last mile to experience delivery, Whoever is having the experience our shopper, our retailer, our partner, our market, people, internal to the organization. It's supposed to be easy to use, and I think somewhere along the line, especially for a lot of damn solutions, we lost that idea and we lost that understanding, but open text has done a really nice job of bringing all of that back and bringing in innovations and solutions that feel purpose built for the setting that we're in. Because at the end of the day, we're really here to create profitable relationships with our customers and a lot of times and a lot of experiences. We have to do that through assets. We have to do that through what they see, what they hear, what they experience, what they're searching for. Does it make sense these AI models and all of these tools and the intention behind these actions from OpenText make me understand that. Yeah, they get it. They absolutely get it. But there's something else I want to bring up about OpenText that I think is really important, and it certainly weighed very heavily when I started looking at this short list, it's the strategy for the rest of the company.

In recent years, OpenText has put in a lot of investment into really becoming a security company. And for those of you who've heard me get on my soapbox before, y'all know I really love security, but it's super important when it comes to commerce and assets, when it comes to a damn. You don't want something that's just rule based, role based, oh, sure, people can't get in it. You want an organization that, to its core, fundamentally understands, respects and implements security, security measures that allow access, that allow that identity of the user who can. Get into the system, but also who understands what's getting into your system. So the fact that there are native aggression integrations across open Texas platform and its portfolio is really important, and it's really important for someone who is looking at a damn solution to look at security as a massive measure of what's important to bring into your organization.

So with that, hey, congratulations to OpenText, back on the shortlist, certainly back on that literal shortlist of solutions that here at Constellation, we recommend that executives start to look at to make that buying decision around solutions and complex solutions like dam for high volume commerce, just a little bit easier. You. 

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Peraton's Cari Bohley: Why internal talent recruiting and retention is critical

Peraton, a next-generation national security company, is continually searching for talent including employees with high-security clearances. But the real win for Peraton has been courting internal candidates.

The company is an integrator and enterprise IT provider for the US government. Peraton provides cybersecurity, digital, cloud, operations and engineering services for space, intelligence, homeland security, health and defense among others.

In Peraton's Supernova Award entry, the company noted that it saw internal job board applicants increase 9.8% and more engagement overall. I caught up with Cari Bohley, Vice President of Talent Management at Peraton, to talk about the Supernova finalist entry in the Future of Work: Human Capital Management category.

Here are the highlights from our conversation.

Peraton's role. Bohley said Peraton is a government services contractor focused on national security. Projects can range from rocket launches to intelligence, data analytics, maritime security and modernization.

A history of mergers and acquisitions. Peraton was a spinoff of L3Harris Technologies in 2017 and then made a series of acquisitions including Solers (2019), the IT and mission support unit from Northrop Grumman (2021) and Perspecta (2021). "In just three years we grew to 19,000 employees," said Bohley. "Even though we've been around since 2017, the legacy of all the different companies means we have people with a lot of tenure and years of service."

The talent management game. Bohley said competition in Peraton's industry is fierce and there are "very unique requirements we're trying to fill." Peraton needed to cultivate internal applicants while courting both active and passive external candidates. "Without something like AI it's hard to look for unique information and indicators," said Bohley. "The other piece we're looking for is passive talent. We're looking for people who aren't necessarily looking for a new job and AI helps us identify them."

SeekOut's role. Bohley said Peraton used the SeekOut platform for its AI-driven talent management. She said Peraton had worked with SeekOut for a few years and expanded the contract when the company realized there was more power to find talent. SeekOut Recruit, Grow Internal Talent and Grow Career Compass were deployed. "It just made sense for us to explore the expanded capabilities SeekOut already had," said Bohley, who noted the new modules aligned with Peraton's employee engagement and career growth strategies.

SeekOut's technology integrates with multiple Peraton systems including HR and learning management so it can surface patterns for employees on career paths.

Business metrics. Bohley said retention of employees and mobility were the primary business metrics to justify the project. "Not only do we retain our employees, but we have a place for them to grow their career and move them throughout the organization," said Bohley. "If we're able to do that then we can bring in new employees from outside and get them to build careers. It becomes an end-to-end process for helping our folks build their careers."

If Peraton is successful, it should be able to reduce turnover, increase engagement and mobility and staff programs internally instead of having churn, Bohley said.

Difficult roles to hire. "In our industry it's really high clearance talent that's difficult. These are people that are doing top secret work for the government," said Bohley. "There are a number of companies that do the work we do, but it's a small industry."

Building the business case. Bohley said IT teams need to focus on key metrics that matter to leadership and the story behind the business case. "Make sure you've got a strong business case and get the buy-in," said Bohley. "Having a sponsor to help you is incredibly important."

Why internal candidates matter. "Internally, we know our candidates. We know the types of projects they worked on. We know their performance and we don't have that with external candidates," explained Bohley. "When we're looking for positions that are more strategic it really helps us to source internally when we have so much more data."

Advice for HR leaders. Bohley said "you have to go into AI. You don't have a choice." She said AI has been critical because she has a small team and there are productivity gains when generating ideas, developing training and other items. "AI is something for all of us to take advantage of," she said.

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Ultra Tool & Manufacturing: The importance of IoT, automation

Andrew Loescher, Ultra Tool & Manufacturing Automation Specialist, shares the importance of #automation and #optimization of the shop floor. Andrew is a SuperNova award finalist for Constellation Research and tells his story to Editor in Chief Larry Dignan.

View the full case study here: https://www.constellationr.com/node/33436/vote/application/view/1068

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Full video transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript is not edited and may contain errors)

Hi, I'm here with Andrew loscher. He's Ultra he's an automation specialist at ultratool and manufacturing. So first off, congrats on being a supernova Award finalist. Let's just start a high level. What does Ultra tool and manufacturing specialize in? Sure, ultra tool and manufacturing specializes in on time, high quality metal stampings, sheet metal stampings. We also build high quality tools for the stamping industry as well as we provide a full fabrication department for customers who are looking for smaller runs of sheet metal goods. We also have a value added department that can add nuts, bolts, weld parts of the sheet metal, parts that we stamp. And how large is the company? So we're about right around 100 employees. We're right around $28 million in sales per year.

Okay, so I know you were trying to, you know, scale things up and, you know what? What were your challenges in doing that and just sort of getting the data you needed to optimize? We really started the journey about four years ago now. So what kicked off the journey was really just hearing a lot of the talk about IIoT right away. We had some conversations with a company at the time called cores engineering. They were bought by Plex was bought by Rockwell, but so they provided a solution for us. But really, even before they provided a solution for us, they helped us really figure out how we could benefit from smart technology. Plant monitoring on the floor as I talked with representatives from at the time Coors engineering about what you know, plant monitoring in general, can do for you. One of the most powerful things that they had said at the time was really it can do anything for you. It just takes a team of people who have eyes on the floor, who can see what the problems are, the inefficiencies are. And once you really have that kind of mindset looking for those inefficiencies, there's there's always a tool, there's always a smart tool, or some logic you can build behind the scenes to improve those inefficiencies and save money.

So did you have any infrastructure in place to, you know, measure these processes and manufacturing in place to begin with? Or is that something that you worked with Plex to kind of just integrate some of our machines are fairly smart, at least the stamping presses. They have mountains of data that you could pull from them. They all are driven by industrial computers, PLCs and we had Plexis ERP ahead of time, so we kind of had these two pieces. We had the ERP was working behind the scenes, and we had our machines, but we didn't really have anything tying them together. So really, the first time, I personally looked into one of our stamping presses to figure out what data we could pull from it, I was I was pretty surprised and very excited to be honest about what we could get from that machine and feed into our ERP system, or just create a dashboard for our own visibility. So Plex really provided that that intermediate piece to connect our machines to our ERP system, and that that connection was mostly a software layer, yeah, mostly a software layer. I really all we had to add was switches in any of our older machines that didn't have them, and we standardized right away how we were going to communicate. So we had stamping presses that didn't even have a PLC, that were just built off and relays all the way up to a new, new servo stamping press that has, you know, way more technology than we'd ever look at or need to deal with. The presses kind of come with a monitoring system that we just upgraded those across all of our presses. So, so really seamless implementation, because we just really needed to upgrade those boards on each press and then connect an Ethernet cable and you're good to go. So how has this changed your processes, and how you go about optimizing keep. Biggest change for us was, again, just getting into a mindset of what were our processes that were inefficient, first of all, and prioritizing which ones we felt we could make more efficient with this, with this technology, and then getting people on board and train to deal with that. So right?

The first step in the process was just getting our key players, managers, supervisors, together in a room and just kind of having a roundtable discussion on what everybody's problems are, what if, what inefficiencies were there specifically right away related to monitoring and recording production on the plant floor and interfacing with Plex. So we were trying to take away anything that an operator had to do specifically in Plex manually so that they could focus on making parts. Really just took away some processes, to be honest, like recording production, scrapping parts in the system, and printing labels. Have you been able to tweak the processes from your learnings initially, I guess, how often do you go and kind of tweak how things are done? I would say, from an implementation standpoint, the Plex engineers that take on the implementation are very hands on, very thorough, also very capable and interested in training people within our company to tweak background logic and parts of the automated processes, especially with our some of our machines did require fairly custom logic. So what used to be called Mach two and a Plex automation and orchestration has a pretty, pretty good set of templates, logic, templates and things that they've built out to work for customers. But with some of our machines, there was quite a bit of custom, custom building behind the scenes. Their engineers helped out with but I kind of picked up the ball and was able to learn how to build that logic behind the scenes, which was really helpful for us, and I know it has been for other companies that I've spoken with, so that, you know, even little things here and there that come up, they're able to build additional logic, or tweak logic, or use some kind of history of transactions to make make the processes even better. What? Um, what have the returns been like? What?

What have been some of the benefits you've been able to quantify? Yeah, so right away, the ROI for me was really just in recording, production and printing labels. So just on our stamping floor alone, we have 13 stamping presses. 10 of the 10 of them are automatic. And some of those, some of the, some of the jobs that we run, I mean, we're making parts anywhere from really 20 up to 200 strokes per minute, parts per minute. So we have some people that are making, you know, hundreds and hundreds of boxes every day. So for that person, have to walk up to their computer and type in how many parts they've made, and then, you know, click through a couple of screens in Plex, which, you know, Plex is great, but it's still all extra work. So they're trying to record production, print a label, apply a label. And I would say, probably in at least a third of our jobs, they're stopping the machine to have to do all that. So now all of that is done, recording production, recording scrap, printing labels, all that's done automatically, so an operator just can walk over, quick, pull a label off, slap it on a box. So the return on investment. On that process alone, paid for, paid for the mach two product, but Plex ano product for us, just in one year's time, if we have all of our machines running on our shifts, and again, it kind of depends on the job, if it's if it's one where the press is stopping or not. So we're really saving money. We were seeing returns upwards of $48,000 a year just on label, printing itself and production recording. Now we're also planning on building, building a lot, quite a few other initiatives out. We have some pretty good ROI numbers for some additional logic that we built in house to track track setup time for machines, so if an operator z is struggling with a setup previously, we didn't really have very good real time visibility into that to have a supervisor go out and assist. So. Something maybe turned into a five hour setup on a machine, maybe a complex setup where now we can track what's going on there via machine statuses and send out the correct people to assist the operators so they can get a machine up and running faster. So we saw a really good ROI numbers on that as well, and decreased setup times because of that.

So the How long will this scale out take? We've had the product or about two and a half years now. We've just done stamping the build out, wasn't it was probably over a couple months. So our the way we did it was, let's roll this out on two machines to start out with. So we just get our feet, our feet go on, and we get people seeing how it's working. Because once you kind of build out the one or two machines, especially with us in our stamping facility, our presses are mostly the same. So we were able to build out just, really two, two machine templates that we could then apply to the rest of our presses. So after we had those two kind of done and taken care of and running well, an implementation for another one was less than a day. It's really just applying that template to another work center, testing it out for an hour or two, and then just kind of letting her rip. We do have, like I said, we have our full fledged fabrication department and a value added department with spot welders, welders press brakes, whole bunch of different machines that we also plan on implementing at some of those implementations will be simpler. For example, our spot welding machines, we plan on also recording production, and that's kind of already something we've done. So applying that to another work center is just a matter of really getting one piece of data from the machine. Hey, am I stroking up and down? But in addition to that, we have we have other initiatives that we are going to get going. We plan on building a dashboard to track cycles on all of our spot welders, so that we know how many times a consumable, like an electrode on a spot welder, how many hit sets, how many strokes it's made because they wear out.

So that can be a problem if we have, if we're not changing those in a certain time frame, then you might start getting bad parts. So now we can have a dashboard with real time visibility into how many, how many, how many strokes a machine has made, so that we can be proactive and change machine consumables when we need to. All right, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Larry.

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Workforce Management ShortList SpotLight: ADP

As #enterprises face longer and more flexible working hours, they need help tracking time, scheduling attendance, and managing worker attendance. Leaders need tools to help their operational managers make better #workforce management decisions. #ai is also changing enterprise #automation substantially. Vendors need AI-based automation in the core workforce management automation areas – with tangible success.

💡 With this context in mind, Holger Mueller highlights his Workforce Management Suites ShortList and why ADP made the list! Watch below ⬇️

View the full ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gVnH6M2t

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: This transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)

Hello everybody. It's Holger Mueller Miller here from Constellation Research, here to speak to you about two things which are near and dear to my heart, which are the hard things in HCM and the things which make enterprise move farther faster. The hard thing in HCM is payroll and workforce management. We're going to speak about workforce management today, and we're going to start about constellation port lists. What are constellation shortlists? All about?

They are about us looking at a number of vendors in the space in the workforce. Managers paid about 30 or 40 vendors, which we typically speak at least twice a year. In many cases, like the ones on the shortlist, we go to their conference. We go to their analyst events. We speak to them almost on the monthly level. We help customers to select software and selection processes for their offerings. So we're very intimate, familiar depending on the frequency and popularity of the solutions.

So what is relevant for that is that it helps you as an enterprise, when you listen to us, to accelerate your software selection and enterprise acceleration is near and dear to my heart. It's my research area. How can companies become faster, move faster, become more agile, accelerate overall return, better shareholder value, create better employee experience, better customer experience. All these things are crucial part of enterprise. Explorations and shortlists are important part because you need to select software and be on top of that software.

So let's look of the shortlist which we published just in the space about workforce management suites, and let's look about what are the critical capabilities there selection criteria which we look into. So first of all, everybody has a strong time and tenants management, it's basically the building blocks of any workforce management solution. If you do not have that, then you're not able to run workforce management has to be complete, has to be easy to use, has to be mobile, has to be available for all employees and also gig workers. There has to be strong scheduling. That's where the rubber hits the road. If you don't have strong scheduling capabilities in a workforce management product, your managers will struggle, your schedules will struggle, not a good position to be in.

So this is why it's critical to have strong scheduling capabilities and at least three or more of the following five areas, workforce planning and forecasting, compliance management, reporting, payroll interface, because that's where and ultimately, your employee satisfaction hinges on and because you're no longer working with just normal employees, strong gig worker support. So additionally, there's geographical and adoption parts. There has to be support for more than four continents. It has to be more than six and a half 1000 customers and more than 2.3 million users, and everybody's working on a smartphone in 2024 everybody is having that in their pockets. Your employees and gig workers do that as well. So very strong mobile platform support is absolutely essential and critical.

So what are we talking about? One of the shortest vendors, and congratulations. Here is ADP workforce management. What is setting apart from full length criteria? What's setting ADP workforce management apart from a capability perspective compared to the other products which are also on the shortlist, and everybody has their own differentiators. So first of all, it has a strong full capabilities and time in 10s, as well as absence management, as I said, very critical to make it part of a working workforce management system that will legal the input box are really working, and they do for the ADP solution here, you have to have good enough scheduling, and scheduling is super critical to make basically workforce management really work. You have to support your managers and schedule as well to make this a successful offering overall. All the other components can be great. If scheduling doesn't work well, then it's critical ADP does good to very good scheduling in what matters also very much in a very modern, compelling user experience. And that is so important, because people don't want to spend too much time figuring out how to schedule things. They want to be able to use things right away and actually successfully. From that perspective, reuse templates, find people who are the right people, easy way of fashion.

And ADP has done, like in general, across the ADP solution, a very good job on the user experience for that which differentiates it compared to the other members of the shops. ADP has very strong labor forecasting, which is not a surprise to a certain point, because labor statistics are very close to ADP. ADP is better at many governments at forecasting labor trends because they have so much payroll data. And the integration of the two are very, very strong in terms of the labor forecasting capabilities in the ADP workforce management product. And, of course, table stake for ADP, nobody surprised, but still worth mentioning, one of the best, if not the best, payroll integration from all the workforce management products. That sums it up. From my perspective, what's also important is not. Forget it's not only about the technology, it's about the mix of people and technology. You have to get that right, select the right workforce management product, which we're helping you with.

The shortlist for Workforce Management. ADP is a very strong content out there. Check out the overall shortlist to have a look. I mentioned the differentiators for you, but you also have to think about the people on this so otherwise you won't be successful. This is Holger Mueller from Constellation Research. Thank you so much for watching. What you think about the shortlist? What do you think about ADB, workforce management? Please don't be shy. Reach out to me. Love to hear from you. Thanks for watching you.

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Nvidia highlights algorithmic research as it moves to FP4

Nvidia has developed a system that preserved large language model (LLM) accuracy with less precision. The system, which will be outlined at the Hot Chips conference, highlights how Nvidia's AI game is becoming more about software and optimization as much as it is hardware.

In a briefing, Dave Salvator, Director of Accelerated Computing Products at Nvidia, outlined the Nvidia Quasar Quantization System and Research.

He outlined how Nvidia new Blackwell GPUs move to FP4--four bits of floating-point precision per operation. In a nutshell the shorter the floating-point string, the faster the execution. Moving to FP4 and reduced precision means faster compute, lower power and reduced data movement. The trick is preserving accuracy.

Salvator said Nvidia has been doing a lot of algorithmic work to preserve accuracy as it goes to FP4. "It's one thing to claim you have FP4 support in your chip. It is another thing entirely to actually make it work in real AI applications," said Salvator. "The amount of algorithmic work we have been doing to ensure that we preserve accuracy as we as we go to that reduced precision has been a substantial amount of work, and it's ongoing work."

Here's a look at the system and the output of an FP4 bunny. Click to enlarge the first slide.

Salvator explained the importance of the FP4 generated bunny picture.

"What you see on the left-hand side is an AI generated image from Stable Diffusion where we use first FP16, and then we ask with the same prompt to generate that same image using FP4. Now you may notice there are some slight differences in the image, not so much around image quality, but for instance, how the bunny is posed. That's actually an artifact of doing AI generated imagery. If you run the same prompt through most text to image generators, what you'll see is that from run to run, the image generated will be slightly different. In other words, the image that gets generated is not entirely deterministic. It's not going to be the exact same image every time. What's more important to focus on is the image quality? And what you can see is that we've preserved a huge amount of the quality. In fact, nearly all of it when you look at that image that was generated using FP4."

Salvator noted that Nvidia's algorithmic research will land in developer libraries for software developers. The upshot from Nvidia's talk at the Hot Chips conference is that the company's Blackwell efforts revolve around a complete platform including switches, racks and cooling to go along with GPUs.

Other talks from Nvidia at the Hot Chips conference include:

  • A tutorial on liquid cooling systems with Blackwell including warm water direct-to-chip approaches.
  • A talk on how Nvidia uses generative AI to build its processors. 
  • And a deep dive into Blackwell architecture including shots of Blackwell-based systems and core components in the lab.

Nvidia is an AI player at Hot Chips, but rivals are also at the conference. Qualcomm, IBM, Intel and AMD are also giving talks.

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity nvidia AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Workday Q2 solid, announces Equifax partnership

Workday’s second quarter was better than expected as revenue posted growth of 16.7%. The company also moved to build out its Workday Payroll services.

The cloud HR and finance firm, reported second-quarter earnings of 49 cents a share on revenue of $2.085 billion, up 16.7% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.75 a share.

Wall Street was expecting Workday to report earnings of $1.65 a share on revenue of $2.07 billion.

Workday CFO Zane Rowe said the company is “focused on balancing targeted investments across our growth areas along with driving efficiencies across the company as we leverage the power of the platform.”

Rowe added that the macroeconomic backdrop in the second quarter was on par with the previous quarter. Workday reiterated its previous outlook for fiscal year 2025 subscription revenue and raised its non-GAAP operating margin. Workday projected fiscal 2025 subscription revenue of $7.7 billion to $7.725 billion, up 17%. Non-GAAP operating margin will be 25.25%.

Insights:

For the third quarter, Workday projected subscription revenue of $1.955 billion, up 16% from a year ago.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Workday delivers solid results, but stays on a constant pace of around 15% growth. The question for the second half is this: Will there be an AI acceleration for Workday, and will it propel its growth in the 20% range? If Workday delivers to forecast where is growth missing that is being compensated by AI growth? Or – hard to believe – is the growth not coming from AI? With the platform readiness on the Extend side for AI powered Next Generation Applications – we will know soon."

Ahead of earnings, Workday and Equifax forged a partnership to provide employment and income verification through the HR and finance platform. Workday said it will integrate Workday Payroll and The Work Number employment and income verification from Equifax. Workday's new opt-in Employment Verification Connector For Equifax integration is expected to be available to all U.S. Payroll customers in 2025.

Workday launched Global Payroll Connect, which integrates with payroll providers, so customers can integrate payroll with Workday’s platform. Workday said the pre-built API integrations in Global Payroll Connect cut implementation costs by up to 50%. Workday also outlined Workday Payroll provided by Strada to HCM customers.

Research:

On a conference call with analysts, Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, said enterprises "are focusing their investments on the areas that will help them increase productivity and improve their operations."

Eschenbach said Workday is winning more full suite deals. He also said that Workday Financial now has more than 2,000 customers. 

Other notable items from the conference call:

  • Workday Rising will feature a heavy dose of the company's AI vision and a show case of innovations across applications, platform and user experience. 
  • The partner ecosystem has been driving ACV. Partner-driven ACV more than doubled in the second quarter sequentially.
  • The Equifax partnership is an example of Workday's alliance strategy. Eschenbach also touted the recently announced strategic alliance with Salesforce
Data to Decisions Future of Work Tech Optimization workday AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR Chief Information Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

Zoom Contact Center shows traction in Q2

Zoom's revenue growth remains anemic, but the company is increasingly winning platform deals and displacing legacy players in the contact center.

The company reported second-quarter earnings of $219 million, or 70 cents a share, on revenue of $1.16 billion, up 2.1% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings of $1.39 a share handily topped estimates. For the third quarter, Zoom is expecting revenue of $1.16 billion to $1.165 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $1.29 a share to $1.31 a share. Zoom expects fiscal 2025 revenue to be between $4.63 billion and $4.64 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $5.29 a share and $5.32 a share.

With all those numbers out of the way, the primary takeaway is that concerns about Zoom growth remain, but the company is building a platform play that may add growth in the future. Zoom had 191,600 enterprise customers and 3,933 customers contributing more than $100,000 in trailing 12-month revenue.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said Zoom Contact Center is starting to scale with its biggest deal to date and packages that leverage AI for agents. Yuan said:

"In Q2, we landed our largest deal for a new Contact Center customer, who chose our top-tier Elite CX package coupled with Zoom Phone. We are seeing increased adoption of our advanced Contact Center packages, as customers seek to utilize our AI capabilities to enhance agent performance. Of our top 10 Contact Center wins, all represented displacements of major contact center vendors, and 40% were migrations off of first-generation cloud-based solutions."

TIAA was a big Zoom Contact Center win as was Lyra Health. Rival contact center players have noted economic headwinds and longer sales cycles from customers. Yuan said Zoom Contact Center's integration as well as feature set is winning customers. Zoom has also added new pricing tiers but remains competitive in the field.

In addition, Yuan said Zoom's Contact Center roadmap and architecture is winning as proof-of-concept projects win out against rivals.

Yuan added that Zoom Contact Center is being paired with Zoom Workplace as enterprises aim to meld customer experience and employee experience. Zoom AI Companion is also being used by more than 1.2 million accounts and sits across multiple Zoom products.

Zoom will advance its AI strategy at Zoomtopia in October with multiple enhancements to AI Companion.

Outgoing Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg said Zoom is seeing strong enterprise demand. "We've had a lot of stability in terms of our retention rates and this is going to show up eventually in our net dollar expansion that we expect to start to reaccelerate as we come to like the middle of next year," said Steckelberg, who said SMB is still seeing macro headwinds.

Constellation Research's take

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said:

"Perhaps the most interesting snippet of Yuan’s remarks is that Zoom Contact Center is displacing "first-generation cloud-based solutions." This should be a bit of a wake up call for the market, but also one that Yuan should keep in mind as what he himself is positioning as a "second-generation cloud-based solution" – nothing in cloud is forever. The market is experiencing a bit of a malaise as customers who shifted quickly from on-prem solutions to CCaaS have now completed that honeymoon phase of speed and perhaps some initial cost savings. But there are growing grumbles about not fully realizing the operational efficiencies expected from the transition. Even more are questioning the ever-expanding function sets especially as AI gets integrated across suites and price increases take hold. In reality, the market is seeing those inaugural cloud migrations start to kick off limited experiments and explorations with other providers and vendors. Some are choosing to move forward with a more hybrid approach of on-prem telephony and over the top AI and digital business applications purpose built to leverage cloud to accelerate process and efficiencies.

So yes, Zoom and Yuan will likely be the beneficiaries of some of this exploration, but the question becomes what happens when second-generation migrations start to get hungry to explore the third generation?

It is also worth noting that Zoom has yet to fully realize what it is as a platform. Right now, Zoom is focused on articulating its integrated communications strategy, but this CCaaS + UCaaS story has become a familiar refrain for those of us following other players like RingCentral. And similar to RingCentral, Zoom has also invested in an Events business. So where does that start to come into play? Right now, both RingCentral and Zoom segment their events businesses as separated entities due to segmented buying centers. But when does that end to end capability to engage, sell and influence business through integrated omnichannel communications step into the limelight?"

Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience zoom B2C CX Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer

Revenue Platforms: AI and Focus on Full Journey Are Changing the Game

The #revenue platforms market continues to evolve rapidly. This is due to several factors—namely that most businesses are continuing to transform their #business models to better support a “retention-focused” economy and that businesses must rethink their #growth strategies in the wake of this development. Revenue platforms, which previously focused solely on sales actions, need to accommodate more stakeholders along the journey, including #customer-success in addition to other postsale departments.

This means that revenue platforms are evolving to include more datasets, and data sources, to better support a full-journey approach to growth. In addition, the workflow capabilities need to expand to support more end-to-end processes and experiences—incorporating task management that spans #Sales, #Marketing, Customer Service, and Customer Success.

And finally, just as in many other sectors, artificial intelligence (#AI) is changing the game. AI can bring more predictive insights to revenue teams as well as streamline productivity by automating many of the more mundane and low-impact actions sellers and other revenue stakeholders perform on a daily basis. Also, generative AI (#GenAI) tools can help build revenue platforms into more intelligent full-journey tools that ideally help better orchestrate engagement in such a way that no potential growth opportunities get lost in the shuffle.

Enjoyed the preview? Access the full report here: https://www.constellationr.com/research/revenue-platforms-ai-and-focus-full-journey-are-changing-game

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)

Hi. This is Martin Schneider, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Wanted to talk to you really quickly about my new market Overview Report, which is called revenue platforms, how AI and focus on full journey are changing the game? One of the reasons why I came to constellation is because there's this really interesting transformation happening around a big area of tech, around sales automation, rev ops automation, and even, you know, just CX in general, where we're really transforming from these kind of commoditized and very transactional systems of record to really transformational, really supporting a full journey growth optimization strategy that companies need to have to remain competitive in this day and age, right?

So what we're really seeing is tools like AI are making not just smarter systems, but really joining up with workflow and other capabilities to create this kind of just in time, joined up full journey concept where we're really, you know, able to kind of predict how our growth is going to happen in ways that we really couldn't before we went from a big focus on kind of net new sales and really leads and the pipeline and conversion metrics and things like that, being the KPIs that matter to really looking at this full journey, holistic growth concept, it's very new, and not a lot of people have mastered it yet, and that's why, and kind of that's why I'm here.

But really, you know what we're talking about is there's some new kind of buyer requirements and new challenges we need to be thinking about when we look at our revenue platforms, and which ones are really platforms, rather than point solutions. I go over the vendor landscape and look at about more than a dozen vendors in this report, and really how they kind of hash out in terms of that platform scalability, as well as that full journey and AI focus that's really needed to be effective moving forward. And then I talk about a lot of best practices that you can be thinking about when you're either deploying a revenue platform for the first time and making that selection, or trying to optimize existing tools that you may have among the shortlist that also recently came out for revenue platforms that I just put out last week.

So check out on the Constellation Research website. Grab the report if you can, and if you remember, if you're not, become a member, because this is some really transformational stuff, and it's just the beginning. So I'll be talking a lot about this and writing a lot about this. Thank you. Applause.

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Snowflake reports better-than-expected Q2, ups product revenue outlook

Snowflake reported strong product revenue growth 29% in the second quarter and raised its outlook.

As usual with Snowflake, it takes a long scroll to figure out what the company actually made or lost. Snowflake reported a second quarter net loss of $317 million, or 95 cents a share, on revenue of $868.82 million. Non-GAAP second quarter earnings for Snowflake were 18 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting Snowflake to report second quarter non-GAAP earnings of 16 cents a share on revenue of $850.15 million.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, said the company was seeing "great traction in the early stages of our new AI products." Snowflake needs its AI lineup to be a hit as it competes with Databricks.

As for the financial outlook, Snowflake projected third quarter product revenue of $850 million to $855 million, up 22%. For fiscal 2025, Snowflake sees product revenue of $3.356 billion, up 26%.

The company also said it authorized another $2.5 billion to buy common stock through March 2027.


Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said Snowflake's reported strong growth but burned cash. He said:

"Snowflake blew through $1 billion in cash in 6 months. Snowflake had a very good quarter on the revenue side – growing 30% but its net loss is up more than 40%. And all that despite a rosy outlook thanks to AI. But something will have to give in the second half as somehow Sridhar Ramaswamy and team want to end the fiscal year with an operating income of 3% down from 5%. The question is – when will Snowflake turn profitable on a GAAP basis. Looks like not this fiscal year."

Speaking on a conference call, Ramaswamy said:

"In the first half of this year alone, we brought as much product to market as we did all of last year. We are making Snowflake the best cloud for computation, collaboration, and application on all data. And we are leveraging the power of AI to make all of these easier to create, maintain and use. This is what our team is aligned around. And I can tell you, that our customers are adopting the new capabilities at an incredible base."

Ramaswamy cover the following topics:

  • Security: "We obviously had some rough headlines in the quarter as some of our customers dealt with cybersecurity threat. As extensively reported, the issue wasn't on the Snowflake site. However, we understand that when it comes to cybersecurity, we are all in it together," he said. "My one ask of all businesses around the world, whether they are a Snowflake customer or not, is to enable and enforce multi-factor authentication in your organization and ensure that you have network policies that are as strong as possible."
  • Product availability. "In Q2, we made nine net -- nine net new product announcements and brought more than 15 and product capabilities to general availability to the market, that's what we call, progress," said Ramaswamy.
  • AI. "As of the end of Q2, more than 2,500 accounts were using Snowflake AI on a weekly basis. We expect that option to continue to increase and revenue contribution to follow. Our Notebooks offering is also seeing great traction in public preview, with more than 1,600 accounts, using that feature. This is critical to engage with data sciences on will unlock new opportunities that we previously did not address," he said.
     

Data to Decisions snowflake Chief Information Officer

New Research: Revenue Platforms: How AI and Full Journey Focus Are Changing the Game


One of the main reasons I joined Constellation Research was because I see a fundamental shift happening in how we approach growth strategies, and that the technology supporting go-to-market teams needs to adjust significantly. That is why my first major research piece focuses on how Revenue Platforms are transforming to better support the new requirements of growth operations teams. 

You can access the report, Market Overview: Revenue Platforms - How AI and Focus on Full Journey are Changing the Game here. The report outlines the major developments across the revenue Platforms market - and how capabilities like AI and advanced workflow are enabling users to truly rethink how they approach their growth strategies. Companies need to be thinking about how every phase of the customer journey can be accountable in contributing to growth - so revenue platforms are no longer the remit of “sales” but rather an enterprise-wide strategic platform. 

In the report I analyze the vendor landscape, and look at more than a dozen providers and reveal how their offerings best utilize AI and other tools to support a full journey approach to growth. There are some surprises as newer entrants to the space have been challenging the more entrenched vendors thanks to the speed and alacrity that AI enables from an innovation perspective. 

Finally, I outline some best practices and some questions to ask as enterprises both rethink their approach to growth but also how they either initially deploy, or optimize and existing revenue platform. 

This is just the first of many research pieces I will be releasing in the coming months that tackles this increasingly important topic of growth transformation. Look for more reports and “big ideas” around growth operations, the emergence of the Chief Growth officer, and more! 

Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Sales Marketing New C-Suite Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI business SaaS PaaS IaaS Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Chief Revenue Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer