This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Amazon reported third quarter net income of $9.9 billion, or 94 cents a share, on revenue of $143.1 billion, up 13% from a year ago. Amazon was expected to deliver to third quarter earnings of 58 cents a share on revenue of $141.4 billion.
The company said its North America commerce business delivered third quarter operating income of $4.3 billion on revenue of $87.9 billion, up 11%. International sales were $32.1 billion, up 16% from a year ago.
In a statement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the commerce business delivered on cost savings and speed of delivery. He added that the AWS business "continued to stabilize." Jassy said:
"The AWS team continues to innovate and deliver at a rapid clip, particularly in generative AI, where the combination of our custom AI chips, Amazon Bedrock being the easiest and most flexible way to build and deploy generative AI applications, and our coding companion (CodeWhisperer) allowing enterprises to have the equivalent of an experienced engineer who understands all of their proprietary code is driving momentum with customers."
As for the outlook, Amazon projected fourth quarter revenue between $160 billion and $167 billion with operating income between $7 billion and $11 billion.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Opaque Systems, a software startup focused on confidential computing, has named Aaron Fulkerson as CEO. Fulkerson most recently ran ServiceNow's Impact unit and was Founder and CEO of MindTouch, which was acquired by Nice Systems.
With the addition of Fulkerson, Dr. Rishabh Poddar, co-founder and CEO until recently, will become CTO. Opaque Systems has raised $22 million in Series A funding in 2022 to bring total financing to $31.6 million. Investors include Walden Catalyst Partners, Storm Ventures, Thomvest Ventures Intel Capital, Race Capital, The House Fund, and FactoryHQ.
Opaque Systems features an analytics and AI platform that's built for confidential computing and enables data to be shared and analyzed by multiple parties while maintaining confidentiality and protecting data. The company provides Data Clean Rooms as well as OpaquePrompts, a privacy layer for large language models, for multiple industries including manufacturing, finance, healthcare and insurance.
I caught up with Fulkerson and Poddar to talk privacy, data management and generative AI as well as the need for a platform agnostic privacy technology provider. Here are the takeaways from our conversation.
What brought you to Opaque Systems? At ServiceNow, Fulkerson ran the Impact unit, which drives personalized recommendations, training and experts on demand to drive value from ServiceNow's platform. That personalization required data and model training that was often challenged by data privacy and data sovereignty. At the same time, generative AI and large language models (LLMs) surged. "For many organizations there's some layer of privacy over the top of an LLM that allows an organization to use it without exposing proprietary data or sensitive information," said Fulkerson. "There's going to have to be a privacy wrapper and privacy enhancing technologies. What Opaque Systems has done is built a product with verifiable trust in the DNA of every digital interaction. It was impossible to pass up the opportunity."
The technology. Opaque Systems has a specialized software stack that offers encryption as well as a digital signature at the hardware level. Intel pioneered confidential computing hardware, which is now available on all the major cloud vendors enabling Opaque Systems to focus on the software.
Although Opaque Systems got started with data clean rooms, Fulkerson said the vision for the company is broader. Data clean rooms are a feature available from multiple vendors, but most of these efforts are tied to platforms. Opaque Systems offers a privacy layer across multiple data sets and systems. "Opaque is allowing companies and organizations to encrypt data sets, put it into an Opaque room with multiple other encrypted data sets and then you can run data processing jobs while maintaining encryption," explained Fulkerson. "Encryption in transit is typical but we have encryption at the time of processing." He added that verifiable trust technology allows for analytics, machine learning models and other applications to be built on top of encrypted data.
Generative AI use cases. Poddar said generative AI is in Opaque Systems wheelhouse because it is fundamentally about running AI and analytics on sensitive data. "LLMs are an emergent and particularly exciting class of AI applications evolving as we speak, but we've seen a bunch of data privacy issues," said Poddar. "Enterprises will have to define and figure out their privacy strategies around LLMs."
"If you're training a model, you don't want the model to remember your confidential data," said Poddar. "You want to guarantee your data remains protected and encrypted while still allowing these generative AI workloads to be run on that data. LLMs were a natural extension of our core capabilities around confidential AI and analytics."
Poddar and Fulkerson added that LLM use cases in the enterprise are exploratory for now, but that'll change quickly, and privacy issues will need to be addressed.
Privacy first deployments. Fulkerson said the shift from exploratory generative AI use cases to production will happen in the next year. "Generative AI is going to be the killer app and we have to be able to provide a data privacy wrapper."
Fulkerson said Opaque Systems has a bevy of financial services customers using Opaque's analytics. "We're working with financial institutions that have data sets that can't be shared across business units because of regulatory requirements or different geographies even within their own organizations," he said. "If you have a retail bank, wealth management and lender you can't share data across them. If you're able to encrypt those first party data sets, you can use analytics to solve problems like fraud detection and anti-money laundering."
Customer 360 efforts will also become privacy first because of regulations as well as the need to enrich profiles with encrypted data, said Fulkerson.
Poddar added that LLMs will become part of the AI pipeline in enterprises and privacy ops will become a crucial component. "People will need to think about privacy and security issues from the ground up as they adopt this technology," he said.
The state of privacy. Fulkerson today's software paradigm for privacy revolves around contracts and that's not going to scale well with LLMs and generative AI applications. "Whenever you use software in the cloud or any kind of service, you trust that the vendor will be good custodians of your data. That's a problem," said Fulkerson. "You could be working with trusted third parties vulnerable to attacks. The problem then gets compounded in the context of cloud and collaboration."
In other words, trust needs to be verifiable and cryptographically assured so data can be shared in a way that solves problems, said Fulkerson.
Poddar added that auditing and following the data trail will also become critical in the age of generative AI. "We guarantee at all times that your data is used only in the way you permit and that it is verifiable by you, auditable by you, and you retain control," said Poddar.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
IBM reported better-than-expected third quarter results as software revenue grew 8%.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $1.7 billion, or $1.86 a share, on revenue of $14.8 billion, up 4.65% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter were $2.20 a share.
A consensus of Wall Street analysts estimated that the company would earn $2.13 per share on $14.73B in revenue.
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, said the company was seeing clients adopt its watsonx AI and data platform. That adoption is also generating consulting revenue.
The company reported that third quarter consulting revenue was up 6% and infrastructure sales fell 2%.
As for the outlook, IBM said it expects 2023 revenue to be up 3% to 5% in constant currency.
In prepared remarks, Krishna said:
"AI is projected to add $16 trillion to the global economy by 2030. Keep in mind that AI for business is different than AI for consumers given their need for more accurate results, trusted data and governance tools. AI techniques such as foundation models, large language models and generative AI, give businesses the ability to create 100 AI models from a single data set. Early client engagements experience a 70 percent faster time to value. That is why we are seeing a
lot more interest from business in using AI to boost productivity and reduce cost. Productivity gains will come from enterprises turning their workflows into simpler, automated processes with AI."
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
ServiceNow raised its outlook for 2023 as its third quarter subscription revenue grew 27% and the company ended the quarter with 49 customers with more than $20 million in annual contract value.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $242 million, or $1.17 a share, on revenue of $2.29 billion, up 25% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the quarter were $2.92 a share. Analysts were expecting non-GAAP third quarter earnings of $2.55 a share.
As for guidance, ServiceNow projected fourth-quarter subscription revenue of $2.32 billion to $2.325 billion. For 2023, ServiceNow projected subscription revenue of $8.625 billion to $8.64 billion, up 25.5%.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said the company's platform play for transformation and AI is rolling. "This is a highly unique, differentiated company that is reshaping business as the intelligent super platform for the enterprise."
The company is gaining wallet share and has 1,789 customers with more than $1 million in annual contract value.
On a conference call with analysts, McDermott said the following:
"All of our workflow businesses were in 14 or more of the top 20 deals, ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, security and risk, customer, employee, and creator. Within our technology workflows, security and risk had a very strong quarter, with 10 deals over 1 million. Employee workflows had a stellar quarter with seven deals over 1 million and one deal over 10 million."
ServiceNow's federal business posted its best quarter in the company's history. "We had 19 federal deals over 1 million, including three deals over 10 million," he said.
"GenAI represents 36% of AI spending overall. We believe every dollar of global GDP will be impacted by AI over the next several years. This isn't a hype cycle. It is a generational movement."
"GenAI represents a tailwind of growth for ServiceNow. We have over 300 customers in our pipeline from every industry, every buying center and every stage of testing. Our GenAI SKU drove the highest number of customer requests for a pre-release product in our history."
"All CEOs right now are either in a move to increase productivity or take costs out. And obviously, while doing so, they also have the added challenge of new business model innovation."
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
The post-AI business model will revolve around vast unique data sets and collectives that create value chains that monetize new services. The companies that are successful will lead in the future.
That's the upshot from Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang. Speaking at Connected Enterprise 2023, Wang said:
"We don't have enough data to make AI work. Billions of dollars will be wasted on AI implementation without a data strategy."
The issue is that enterprises will need more data to train models so you can actually trust AI. As a result, companies will start sharing data in collectives and create value chains.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Constellation Research analysts outlined a series of predictions for the years ahead at Constellation Research Connected Enterprise 2023.
CEO Ray Wang was moderating an early panel at CCE with our merry band of analysts about predictions. He was put on the spot and asked about ERP in the next 10 years. Wang's reply: "It'll still be here."
His other takeaway is that a mentor once told him that predicting the future is possible if you go back 30 to 50 years, examine what happened and change names around.
With all those caveats in mind, here are a few of trends to ponder.
Leading enterprises are consolidating data in lakehouses and data fabrics that are far more flexible than the data warehouses of yore. That move will be a necessary step to making use of all your data—structured, semi-structured, unstructured—to drive AI.
Boundaries between analytics/BI and predictive data science are already eroding. As we move into GenAI, those boundaries will disappear. We’ll want to ask, “what happened, why did it happen, what’s next and what should we do about it?”
A big progressive vision for data protection is emerging.
There's an urgent need to get the data you need in real time at the edge.
The quality of metadata to tell you if it’s true.
Safety to data infrastructure needs to be taken seriously. It's like clean drinking water.
My time frame is a bit shorter but here are a few working theories for the next 12 months and change.
Generative AI in enterprise moves from productivity to more growth, transformation.
There will be vendor consolidation. Enterprises were doing it, but M&A will pick up.
Automation will move beyond low hanging fruit. What are pitfalls?
Few enterprises have their data games down. As result we GenAI backlash because it's highly unlikely that enterprises will acknowledge they don't have their data acts together.
Smaller vendors may be in trouble. IT spending reflection of S&P 500, customers are consolidating vendors and a lot of debt will be refinanced.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Microsoft reported better-than-expected fiscal first quarter results as its cloud services posted strong growth led by Azure revenue, which was up 29% from a year ago.
The cloud software giant reported first quarter earnings of $22.3 billion, or $2.99 a share, on revenue of $56.5 billion, up 13% from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting Microsoft to report first quarter earnings of $2.65 a share on revenue of $54.50 billion.
In a statement, CEO Satya Nadella said copilots "are making the age of AI real" for consumers and enterprises. CFO Amy Hood said Microsoft Cloud revenue of $31.8 billion, up 24% from a year ago, drove the quarter.
Speaking on Microsoft's earnings conference call, Nadella said that Azure is gaining share due to OpenAI, model training and new infrastructure. He said:
"Azure again took share as organizations bring their workloads to our cloud. We have the most comprehensive cloud footprint with more than 60 data center regions worldwide, as well as the best AI infrastructure for both training and inference. And we also have our AI services deployed in more regions than any other cloud provider. This quarter, we announced the general availability of our next-generation H100 virtual machines."
Nadella added that 40% of the Fortune 100 is in preview with Microsoft's copilots.
Hood said Microsoft Cloud gross margins will remain flat with a year ago, but the company continues to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure. She gave the following guidance:
Productivity and Business Processes second quarter revenue will grow between 11% and 12%.
Office 365 revenue growth will be up 16% in the second quarter.
Intelligent Cloud revenue in the second quarter will grow between 17% and 18% or $25.1 billion to $25.4 billion. "Revenue will continue to be driven by Azure, which as a reminder can have quarterly variability, primarily from our per-user business and from in-period revenue recognition, depending on the mix of contracts," said Hood. "In Azure, we expect revenue growth to be 26% to 27% in constant currency, with an increasing contribution from AI. Growth continues to be driven by Azure consumption business and we expect the trends from Q1 to continue into Q2. Our per user business should continue to benefit from Microsoft 365 suite momentum, though we expect continued moderation in seat growth rates, given the size of the installed base."
PC units for Windows appear to have stabilized.
By the numbers:
Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue was up 15% fueled by Office 365. Office Consumer revenue growth in the first quarter was up 3%.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is innovating across its portfolio. Ruth Porat, President, Chief Investment Officer and CFO, said the company was seeing "momentum in Cloud."
On a conference call, Porat said:
"We are pleased with the ongoing customer engagement with GCP and Workspace and the potential benefit of our AI solutions including infrastructure and services such as Vertex AI and Duet. We continue to invest aggressively given the significant potential we see while remaining focused on profitable growth. In terms of expenses and profitability, we're pleased with our operating performance. As we have repeatedly stressed, we remain focused on durably reengineering our cost base to create investment capacity to support our growth priorities, most important of which is with AI."
Pichai said that Google Cloud continued to see cusotmers optimize spending, but the pipeline of AI projects is growing. He said:
"We had definitely started seeing customers looking to optimize spend. We leaned into it to help customers given some of the challenges they were facing. And so that was a factor. But we are definitely seeing a lot of interest in AI. There are many, many projects underway now, just on Vertex alone, the number of projects grew over 7x. And so we see signs of stabilization, and I'm optimistic about what's ahead."
Other items include:
YouTube ad revenue was $7.95 billion, up from $7 billion a year ago.
Search revenue surged to $44 billion, up from $39.54 billion a year ago.
Alphabet ended the quarter with 182,381 employees, down from 186,799 a year ago.
US revenue was up 9% from a year ago with EMEA and APAC up 17% and 14%, respectively.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
Ingram Micro's Chief Digital Officer Sanjib Sahoo said his company is approaching its transformation through a lens of DigiOps, which should prioritize business value and then looks to technologies to enable it.
Sahoo said Ingram Micro's focus has been on DigiOps, which "balances the art of the possible with the art of the feasible." Like DevOps, DigiOps looks to develop technology and then operationalize it. The twist is that DigiOps is business to technology instead of technology to business.
"Every single release or sprint we do has to create value for customers," said Sahoo. "Getting to DigiOps is about culture and developing real P&L responsibility. How much operating income am I generating? Am I growing margins? Is revenue growing?"
He added:
"Technology is always focused on what's possible. Operational folks say 'that's OK, but here's how to do it.' Otherwise, you build the best technology with no adoption."
Sahoo said that DigiOps has a heavy component of culture and leadership because it revolves around bringing together business and technology as well as change. It requires a mix of compassion and prodding to get results. "The future is humans, machines and spirit. You must want to learn new things," said Sahoo.
What Ingram Micro is trying with DigiOps represents a broader pivot to focus transformation and IT on real business value. The future metrics are going to look a lot more old school. Think less about release cycle times and total cost of ownership and more about operating income, margins and revenue growth.
"Technology doesn't matter. You have to iterate and focus on value," said Sahoo.
Other takeaways:
Invest in your data infrastructure. Ingram Micro is investing in data infrastructure to create a data mesh and a foundation to build customer experiences.
Business transformation is about evangelizing a story and telling narratives to get employee engagement. "We have to evangelize a story and why we need a change mindset," said Sahoo. "We took an approach to get employees excited. The experience comes first and automation and technology follow. If the story is about automation first, you'll fail."
Mindset matters. Employee roles will change, and the kind of jobs will change due to generative AI.
Leadership lessons. Sahoo said some of the leadership lessons he has picked up include:
"Communicate with compassion and execute with passion."
You need balance between a bias for action and a bias for results.
Leaders need to develop new skillsets including RQ (relationship quotient), CQ (compassion quotient) as well as the emotional quotient.
Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
About Larry Dignan:
Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning.
He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.
Constellation Insights does the following:
Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...
IBM said it acquired Manta Software, a data lineage startup, so it can add data lineage tools to its watsonx lineup.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Manta Software, founded in 2016, is based in Prague.
According to IBM, the plan is to use Manta Software's ability to map data flows, sources and dependencies and enable watsonx to boost transparency of data used in models and systems and provide an audit trail.
IBM and Manta have been partners since June 2022.
Manta Software customers include Bank of Montreal, T-Mobile and J.B. Hunt.
In a blog post, IBM Tarun Chopra, Vice President, Product Management, Data and AI of IBM Software, said Manta Software is the eight acquisition of 2023.
