Larry Dignan

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…...

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Zoom Video Communications' first quarter results were better than expected and CEO Eric Yuan said the company will continue to invest in AI "to help make interactions more meaningful and communications more effective."

The company reported first quarter earnings of $15.4 billion, or 5 cents a share, on revenue of $1.1 billion, up 3% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.16 a share. Wall Street was expecting Zoom to report earnings of 99 cents a share on revenue of $1.08 billion.

Zoom is a key future of work play and appears to be gaining some enterprise traction. The company, which recently closed the purchase of Workvivo, said it had 215,900 enterprise customers in the first quarter, up 9% from a year ago. Zoom added that it had 3,580 customers contributing more than $100,000 in trailing 12 months revenue. Average monthly churn in the first quarter was 3.1%, down 50 basis points from a year ago.

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In prepared remarks, Yuan said outlined Zoom's AI strategy, which includes ZoomIQ with generative AI for chat and email composing as well as meeting summaries. Zoom also invested in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. He said:

"Our partnership with Anthropic further bolsters our federated approach to AI by allowing Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, to be integrated across Zoom’s entire platform."

Kelly Steckelberg, CFO of Zoom, said the company is seeing growth in Americas with macro economic headwinds in the rest of the world.

As for the outlook, Zoom raised its guidance. For the second quarter, Zoom said revenue will be between $1.11 billion and $1.115 billion. Non-GAAP earnings will be between $1.04 to $1.06 a share.

For fiscal 2024, Zoom is projecting between $4.65 billion and #4.48 billion with non-GAAP earnings between $4.25 and $4.31 a share.

Future of Work Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Sales Marketing Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer Chief Experience Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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Constellation Research's Healthcare Transformation Summit pulls together healthcare CXOs, analysts, startups, and big thinkers to share ideas under Chatham House rules. As a result, these takeaways are anonymized and high-level observations.

Here's a look at some of the key items from the Healthcare Transformation Summit.

1. Healthcare isn't immune from broader trends, but in many ways is saddled with more technical debt. The challenge for healthcare is scaling and adopting to an aging population, lifestyle attitudes, government policy, automation, AI and technological change and evolving landscape of health and safety laws.
2. Some of the hot button issues facing the healthcare industry include:

• Medicaid's funding crisis.
• Talent and staffing burnout.
• Automation of routine tasks with AI.
• Optimizing healthcare for telehealth.
• Redefining nursing workflows and processes.
• Consumerism.
• Integrated care.
• A patient journey that moves across multiple digital domains and silos.

3. Immersive AI will retool healthcare. It's early, but the combination of augmented reality and AI will be revolutionary.
4. Generative AI will increasingly take some of the front-end healthcare roles and drive virtual medicine, but integration, data and privacy issues loom. How Generative AI Has Supercharged the Future of Work
5. The five senses have almost been replicated with smell and taste the final frontiers.
6. Digital assets in healthcare will bring new monetization models with unique data sets, network and data, longitudinal data sets, derived data advantage and new classes of data.
7. Insurance will see new monetization models. Today, insurance premiums represent monetization, but the future will include credit service, reselling market assurance, cash value guarantees, independent valuation services and fractional ownership.
8. Healthcare has technical debt challenges with massive electronic health record deployments and systems, which are the equivalent to ERP for other industries.

Data to Decisions Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization AR Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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Dell Technologies updated its Dell APEX multicloud platform with Microsoft and Red Hat offerings, storage and data mobility services and compute and PC-as-a-service updates. Dell Technologies said it will connect its on-premises object storage with Databricks' Lakehouse Platform.

The APEX updates, announced at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, came as Chairman and CEO Michael Dell and co-chief operating officer Chuck Whitten walked through the company's portfolio, innovation and customers including the likes of Hyundai.

"Technology is at the center of all the significant opportunities in every domain," said Michael Dell, who noted the company ships 2 units per second and 179,000 orders per day through its supply chain.

Dell also talked about artificial intelligence's leap and how data and infrastructure will drive generative AI advances. "We are going to need new architectures with higher speeds and efficiency," said Dell. He said AI models will be deployed at the edge that are proprietary as well as open source.

"We hear your loud and clear about your future with generative AI," said Dell.

Whitten said customers are trying to solve for the future of work, multicloud deployments, scaling edge infrastructure, generative AI and security.

Here's the rundown of Dell Technologies World announcements:

• Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure connects Microsoft's native management tools, Azure Arc infrastructure and governance across Dell on-premises infrastructure and Azure.
• Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift aims to simplify container application development with Kubernetes. Customers will be able to run containers and virtual machines with unified experience and support for various CPUs, workloads and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware will enable the ability to deploy vSphere on an integrated system with Dell software-defined storage. The offering also connects with Dell APEX Private Cloud and Dell APEX Hybrid Cloud.
• Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud will connect with AWS, Azure and Dell APEX File Storage for AWS. Customers will be able to tune cloud strategies across multiple cloud and on-premises storage environments.
• Dell APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud combines data protection storage for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
• Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage is SaaS that simplifies and secures management of Dell APEX Block and File Storage. It combines with Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes, a service that provides storage management, data replication, mobility and observability.
• Dell APEX Compute delivers bare metal compute in data centers, edge environments or colocation facilities.
• Dell APEX PC-as-a-Service (PCaaS) aims to deploy PCCs with predictable costs. The service covers the entire Dell portfolio.

As for the Databricks partnership, the companies said Dell's enterprise storage platforms will connect to Databricks Lakehouse Platform. Dell can connect Databricks in the public cloud with Dell object storage in multiple environments.

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite dell Chief Information Officer Chief Experience Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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Supply chain and customer experience are typically viewed as two different disciplines, but Walmart and Target are illustrating how they're blending together.

Walmart has been talking about omnichannel retail for years and its tech team has consolidated apps, installed a multi-cloud approach and invested heavily in supply chain automation and logistics. The upshot is that Walmart's stores, apps and commerce engine are unified. Today, those investments are paying off because Walmart tends to benefit during economic uncertainty.

Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, said on the company's first quarter earnings conference call:

"The omnichannel model we're building continues to resonate with customers and members. As expected, a higher mix of sales in the food and consumables categories negatively affected gross profit, but strong expense management and progress with our newer mutually reinforcing businesses helped us grow profit ahead of sales at 17.3%."

McMillon added that customers are buying private brands, trading down and cutting discretionary spending. As a result, Walmart is managing inventory tightly as well as expense management. It is also boosting productivity and operating margins via automation.

At its investor meeting in April, Walmart walked analysts through its ambient distribution center and market fulfillment centers, which use automated storage and retrieval systems. "It's about creating a supply chain that's better, not just bigger," said McMillon. "We're excited about how our new capabilities will help our associates by making some of our more physically demanding jobs into more rewarding, higher skilled career paths."

Walmart is realizing that its supply chain game directly impacts the customer experience--especially for digital business. Walmart's e-commerce comparable sales were 27% higher in the first quarter compared to a year ago.

And the big benefit is that the more Walmart optimizes its supply chain the more it increases margins. And customers get goods fresh and fast since Walmart is increasingly about grocery. Walmart CFO John David Rainey said, "we want our ROI to go up every year."

At Walmart's April investor meeting, Rainey said the company's investment in automation, robotics and software are exceeding productivity targets by as much as 30%. Walmart said by the end of the year, 65% of its stores will be serviced by automation and 55% of its fulfillment center volume will be automated.

Target is also connecting the dots between supply chain, automation and customer experience. Target Chief Operating Officer John Mulligan said on the retailer's first quarter earnings call that his company is also investing in automation. He said:

"With this modernization effort, our primary goal is to reduce those labor demands on our stores. We achieved that result by moving work upstream to a distribution center where we can apply the appropriate processes, technology, tools and automation to accomplish the work at scale. This results in higher labor efficiency for the company overall, while allowing our store team members to spend more time in the front of our stores with our guests. In the upstream distribution centers, we've opened over the last two years, we've implemented technology and capabilities that improve how product is sorted and loaded onto trailers headed for our stores. These improvements reduce the necessary time for the store team to unload the trailer and for them to move the inventory to where it's needed in the store."

Target is also deploying automation for the shipment of quantities smaller than a full case. The automated system makes the shipment easier to unload. Target is also upgrading legacy distribution centers and deploying tools for faster store replenishment, said Mulligan.

While sortation centers are not highly automated, Target is using "sophisticated process logic" to sort packages and provide better experiences. Last mile delivery is also a focus for Target, which owns Shipt. Target is using larger trucks for last mile deliveries as well as a standardized way to load them.

Mulligan said:

"While there are many different ways our team is working to gain efficiencies and deliver value to the business, all of our projects have some things in common. First and foremost, they're all designed and implemented with a focus on our guest and continuing to build their engagement with Target. In keeping with that guest focus, we design processes and deploy technology and automation as a way to highlight the human element in our business rather than minimizing it."

Ultimately efficiency and experience are blending together for retailers. Walmart CFO Rainey said:

"Retail has changed a lot in the last 5 to 10 years, and the change over the next 5 to 10 years is likely to be just as significant. Customers are demonstrating preference for multichannel offerings, convenience, value and selection, and up to this point, for most, it's proving challenging to provide all of these things at attractive economics. What's important to understand is this, the investments we've made in people, price, e-commerce, and the high value technology capabilities are why we are at an inflection point today. The benefit of any technology platform is being able to scale it at a lower marginal cost."

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• Constellation ShortList™ Customer Experience (CX) Operations Services: Global

Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Sales Marketing Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Tech Optimization Data to Decisions B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience business Marketing eCommerce Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service AI Analytics Automation Machine Learning Generative AI Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Growth Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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Alibaba Group said it will spin off its Cloud Intelligence Group within the next 12 months as a stock dividend distribution to shareholders.

Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba, said the intention for its cloud unit is "to become an independently publicly listed company." Alibaba had previously announced plans to form a series of companies that will become independent companies. Other spinoffs will include its international commerce unit as well as its logistics group among others.

The company's cloud unit, which includes Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk, a productivity and collaboration suite, delivered fiscal first quarter revenue of $3.58 billion, down 3% from a year ago. Stripping out intersegment revenue at Alibaba, the cloud unit had revenue of $2.71 billion, down 2%, with adjusted EBITA of $56 million.

Overall, Alibaba reported fiscal first quarter net income of $3.2 billion on revenue of $30.3 billion, up 2% from a year ago.

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Alibaba Cloud said the decline in revenue "reflected delays in delivery of hybrid cloud projects given the COVID-19 resurgence in January, normalization of CDN demand compared to the same period last year, as well as the impact from a top customer phasing out using our overseas cloud services for its international business due to non-product related reasons."

Alibaba said it is working to diversify cloud revenue from non-Internet industries such as financial services, retail, media and automotive. As of March 31, Alibaba Cloud derived 55% of its revenue from non-Internet based companies.

The plan for Alibaba Cloud going forward is to continue to diversify its revenue and deliver compute for machine learning and generative AI. In April, Alibaba Cloud outlined its latest large language learning model (LLM) and plans to use its generative AI throughout its product suite. The Alibaba Cloud LLM, Tongyi Qianwen, will be similar to other generative AI services where there's a base model that can be customized for business use cases.

So far, Tongyi Qianwen has received more than 200,000 beta testing requests from enterprise users. Alibaba has also used Tongyi Qianwen in its DingTalk suite.

It remains to be seen how Alibaba's cloud unit fares as an independent company. Alibaba Cloud has recently cut prices on multiple instances by as much as 50%. The goal is to increase public cloud adoption in China and gain share.

Alibaba said it is currently seeking external strategic investors in the Cloud Intelligent Group before the spinoff. In addition, the cloud spinoff will be subject to restructuring of assets and liabilities, contracts and incentive plans.

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Matrix Commerce Sales Marketing Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Automation Disruptive Technology 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

Larry Dignan

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…...

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Cisco reported better-than-expected third quarter earnings and raised its fourth quarter outlook as its networking portfolio revenue surged 29% from a year ago.

The company reported fiscal third quarter earnings of 78 cents a share on revenue of $14.6 billion, up 14% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1 a share. Wall Street was expecting Cisco to report a third quarter adjusted profit of 97 cents a share on revenue of $14.38 billion.

Cisco projected fourth quarter revenue growth of 14% to 16% with non-GAAP earnings of $1.05 a share to $1.07 a share. For fiscal 2023, Cisco projected revenue growth of about 10%. For fiscal 2024, Cisco said non-GAAP earnings will outpace modest revenue growth due to strong comparisons.

Speaking on an earnings conference call, CEO Chuck Robbins said the company's transition to software is accelerating with software revenue checking in at $4.3 billion in the third quarter. Forty two percent of Cisco's revenue is software.

Robbins also said that it has a big opportunity in security, and it will outline new products at its Cisco Live conference. Robbins also said Cisco is moving rapidly to leverage generative AI in its own products.

Cisco's results were helped in part by moves last year to simplify its supply chain, so it had the parts to build its networking gear. Lead times for product shipments have improved 40% over the last two quarters. Going forward, Cisco customers are likely to digest systems that have been bought.

"As we expected, the actions we took in supply chain last year have paid off," said Robbins. "Customers continue to invest in key technologies core to their overall strategy. We will end the fiscal year with double our normal backlog."

Cisco's networking unit was the star of the quarter with revenue up 29% from a year ago. Demand was strong across multiple switch and router products. Cisco's Secure, Agile Networks unit delivered third quarter revenue of $7.55 billion. Secure, Agile Networks consists of hardware and software for switching, enterprise routing, wireless and compute products. Robbins said Cisco is in a much better position to play a role in AI workloads than it was with the cloud transition. 

Cisco saw gains in other product lines except for collaboration sales, which fell 13% from a year ago.

 

Tech Optimization cisco systems SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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SoftwareOne Holding AG, which provides software and cloud services, said it has acquired Beniva Consulting Group to expand into ServiceNow implementations. SoftwareOne's cloud and software services have revolved around Microsoft and SAP Cloud deployments.

With the purchase, SoftwareOne enters the services market for ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB), IT and operations management (ITOM), cloud advisory and application services. SoftwareOne already provides IT asset management services (ITAM).

ServiceNow, which is holding its Knowledge 2023 conference this week, has been expanding its total addressable market via a platform that accelerates value from ERP systems. Beniva, founded in 2016 and based in Calgary, has been riding that workflow and automation wave as a ServiceNow partner.

• ServiceNow outlines generative AI roadmap, bring your own LLMs
• ServiceNow expands finance, supply chain process, workflow automation
• ServiceNow Offers AI-Powered Service Operations for Modern ITOps

According to SoftwareOne, Beniva will bring 75 cloud technology experts and directors to the company's software and cloud services practice. The Beniva purchase will also expand SoftwareOne's portfolio of services, increase its ITAM addressable market from $2 billion to $7 billion and be accretive to margins. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Beniva derives 60% of its revenue from ServiceNow deployments and has practices in process automation with RPA (robotics process automation) with UIPath, Microsoft's Power Automate and ServiceNow RPA.

SoftwareOne also reported its first quarter results. The company said first quarter revenue was CHF 239.4 million ($266.45 million), up 4.5% from a year ago, with adjusted EBITDA of CHF 39.6 million ($44.1 million). The company also said it was implementing a program to deliver CHF 50 million in annual savings as well as a CHF 70 million share buyback program. SoftwareOne added that up to 50% of cost savings a year will be re-invested in strategic growth areas.

Brian Duffy, CEO of SoftwareOne, joined the company in early May and said he will be spending the next few weeks meeting the global team. Duffy was most recently President of Cloud for SAP and responsible for scaling "RISE with SAP" to move customers to the cloud.

Duffy said SoftwareOne has a big opportunity in cloud and will focus on customer success and enhancing partner relationships.

SoftwareOne reiterated its 2023 outlook, which calls for double-digit revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin of 24% to 25% of revenue.

Tech Optimization SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

Larry Dignan

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…...

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ServiceNow said customers will be able to bring their own large language models to its platform, but the real returns are likely to come from industry and customer specific generative AI models.

CJ Desai, ServiceNow's Chief Product Officer, outlined the company's platform roadmap. ServiceNow's latest Utah release is live now with Vancouver scheduled for September. A Washington DC release lands in 2024.

"GenAI is a catalyst for our platform. It's an augmentation of our platform that's good for our customers," said Desai, speaking at ServiceNow's Financial Analyst Day on Tuesday. "Customers can bring their own LLM and we will provide you with a connector just like we integrate with systems of record. The value for our customers is domain specific LLMs for our workflows and use cases." Indeed, ServiceNow said it would use Nvidia infrastructure to develop LLMs for its platform. 

ServiceNow expands finance, supply chain process, workflow automation | ServiceNow Offers AI-Powered Service Operations for Modern ITOps

In September, ServiceNow's Vancouver release will include generative AI enhanced Virtual Agent Q&A experiences, summarized search results and accelerated configuration and extension tools. In 2024, the Washington DC release will include complete self-service, automated knowledge creation for agents and generative AI for admins and builders.

Desai said ServiceNow's platform capabilities built on its data model and code base speeds up innovation and enables the company to use generative AI throughout its portfolio. In addition, ServiceNow has invested in AI for years, often through acquisitions. ServiceNow has been expanding into new use cases, processes and industries such as financial services, telecom and media, manufacturing, public sector, healthcare and life sciences to increase its total addressable market.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said the company "is the center of the great reprioritization in the enterprise." McDermott said ServiceNow has evolved from mostly talking to CIOs to CEO-level conversations. "We're getting market pull from CEOs," said McDermott. "Just a few years ago they were trying to figure out what ServiceNow does. They want collaboration. They want integration. With AI, the IT strategy is the business strategy."

McDermott added that the company is landing more CEO conversations because enterprises are looking to consolidate tech vendors to take costs out. "Point solutions have gone out of favor and platforms, especially if cloud based, are ruling the day," he said.

Indeed, those CEO conversations are part of the reason why ServiceNow is focusing on finance and supply chain processes at Knowledge 2023. Those processes include a lot of manual work that generative AI can replace and automate. In addition, CEOs are looking to streamline ERP processes, but migrations take too long to truly transform to a clean core ERP instance.

ServiceNow is looking to transform and mitigate the risk with ERP migrations. Nevertheless, the company frequently noted that it is not replacing ERP but building a force multiplier to make systems of record more productive.

Other items of note from the Financial Analyst Day:

• ServiceNow operates its own data centers and has 34 globally to date.
• Executives demonstrated new workflows for finance and supply chain as well as generative AI capabilities.
• Once ITSM is live at an enterprise, additional ServiceNow applications deliver time to value faster with implementations that take anywhere from 8 weeks to 16 weeks.
• The company referenced an average selling price uplift as it sells more of the platform to enterprises. Desai said ServiceNow is delivering strong value.
• 66% of ServiceNow's existing customer base spent incremental dollars with the company in 2022.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity servicenow AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service GenerativeAI Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Product Officer

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Tableau Pulse, Tableau GPT and a new VizQL Data Service will enable customers to deliver metrics and insights, natural language explanations, and event and workflow triggers in the context of work.

Tableau was founded 20 years ago, and in its earliest days it disrupted the market with data visualization. It helped spark a movement toward self-service dashboards that changed business intelligence. Flash forward to 2023 and it’s not uncommon to hear comments about dashboards being dead.

At its annual user conference, held May 9-11 in Las Vegas, Tableau introduced a battery of new capabilities that will help customers deliver insights in the context of work rather than through dashboards. It’s important to note that Tableau is going beyond dashboards, not leaving them behind, as the death of dashboards has been greatly exaggerated. But with the announcements of Tableau Pulse, Tableau GPT, and the VizQL Data Service the company is pursuing the fast-growing embedded analytics trend that’s all about delivering concise insights where people work rather than through dashboards and reports.

Tableau Pulse: A Stethoscope for Business

Tableau Pulse, as pilot tested by John Lewis Partnership, blends analyst-definedmetrics, business context, sparkline visualizations and generative AI explanations in card views that can be pushed to targeted users through email, Slack, or web landing pages.

Organizations have been investing in analytics and BI for a long time, yet deployments too often suffer from low adoption. Tableau Pulse, expected to preview in Q4, is a cloud-based service that starts with an-AI based understanding of how individual users and teams interact with data and Tableau analytics. Importantly, Pulse introduces a metrics layer and simple authoring user interface (UI) that enables analysts to define business measures and add business context, such as whether an increase or decrease in a particular metric is a good or bad thing. To avoid the cold start challenge, Pulse is said to leverage existing curation and configuration of measures already set up in Tableau.

The Pulse UI is also used to author simple cards (shown above) that combine sparkline visualizations and concise, natural language descriptions. These descriptions, which will be generated by Tableau GPT (detailed below), get to the point about good or bad changes, with root cause analysis as to why they are changing. Rather than asking users to seek out these insights, Pulse cards will be proactively delivered to targeted users via email, Slack, a Web-based landing page, and/or a mobile experience. It’s a form of embedding that brings urgent, business-relevant insights to users rather than asking them to log into an analytics and BI platform and interpret a dashboard.

Tableau GPT: Better Explanations for Trustworthy Facts

Tableau has addressed three key concerns about the use of generative AI: data security, trust and human oversight.

Much has been written about what generative AI does well (language generation) and what it does not do well (math, for one). Tableau emphasized that it will point Tableau GPT at the Tableau analytics engine as the source of facts and mathematical analysis. Tableau GPT will then use a choice of underlying large language models, including OpenAIs as well as others, to explain those trustworthy facts in nuanced natural language. Tableau GPT will also enable users to ask questions in truly natural language, rather than unnatural “query speak” that’s only natural for SQL-savvy users.

Tableau offered three reassurances about how Tableau GPT will work. First, customer data will never be sent outside the “Salesforce trust boundary,” meaning LLMs won’t be able to train on customer data. Second, the language generated by Tableau GPT will always be grounded in facts and analyses done by the Tableau Analytics Engine – so the LLM can’t “hallucinate” and make up facts, Tableau insists. Third, humans will always remain in the loop, so “think Iron Man” (a human assisted by technology) “not terminator” (a robot with its own agenda). 

Tableau GPT, which is also set to preview in Q3, will be a behind-the-scenes service that will be available for both exploratory self-service analysis, including natural language query that’s handled by Ask Data today, and by the coming Tableau Pulse service.

VizQL Data Service: Headless BI liberates insights from the Front End

The VizQL Data Service, expected in 2024, will advance Tableau's embedded analytics capabilities.

In another sign of an embrace of the embedded BI trend, Tableau is planning to support so-called “headless BI” with the VizQL Data Service, expected to preview in 2024. VizQL will decouple Tableau’ back-end analytics engine from the front-end visualization, dashboarding and authoring interfaces. Using APIs, developers will use VizQL to programmatically deliver Tableau insights within chatbots, workflows, and third-party apps to drive and automate data-driven action based on analytic triggers (human oversight and interaction with visualizations optional).

 

The VizQL Data Service is complemented by a new usage-based licensing model, which supports ephemeral user, and by an embedded playground with no-code, drag-and-drop development options.

 

Constellation’s Analysis

 

Personalized insights and exception-based alerting are nothing new, but with its metrics layer, understanding of business context, and use of generative AI through Tableau GPT, Tableau Pulse has the potential to stand on the shoulders of prior efforts and bring business utility to the next level. In truth, Tableau first-generation augmented features including Ask Data, Explain Data, and Data Stories, had mixed success, so we’re eager to see how eagerly and widely customers will adopt these second-generation capabilities.

 

Also yet to be determined is how these new features will be packaged and priced. Tableau Pulse, for one, is a cloud-based service that will be coupled exclusively with Tableau Cloud (and not available with Tableau Server), though it’s not yet know whether it will be a standard or optional (extra cost) feature. Tableau GPT will likely be available both through Tableau Cloud and Tableau server, but feature vs. option decisions and pricing have yet to be determined.  VizQL pricing and packaging decisions also are yet to be made, but I’d expect this to be exposed through Tableau Embedded.

 

For now what we do know is that Tableau, and analytics and BI deployments in general, are breaking out of the self-service reporting and dashboarding mold in a big way.

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Larry Dignan

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…...

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ServiceNow is expanding its financial and supply chain workflows on its platform as it aims to automate more processes such as accounts payable and procurement.

At its Knowledge 2023 conference in Las Vegas, ServiceNow outlined the new workflows. As previously reported, the race to automate business processes is on as multiple vendors are aiming to be the automation platform of choice.

ServiceNow also is layering generative AI features into its workflow automation platform.

ServiceNow is increasingly using its workflow automation platform to expand into new use process use cases. ServiceNow is actively courting finance, procurement and supply chain leaders.

Related research: Time for Software Architecture to Catch Up With the Event-Driven World | ServiceNow Offers AI-Powered Service Operations for Modern ITOps

The new finance and supply chain workflows include:

• Accounts Payable Operations (APO), which will automate the accounts payable process. APO eliminates the need to manually enter data or reconcile invoices against purchase orders and goods delivered. ServiceNow said there will also be a single view that incorporates ESG, legal and compliance.
• Clean Core ERP with App Engine, which uses ServiceNow's low-code tools to identify legacy ERP technical debt that can be removed, replaced or automated. This move has two objectives including making ERP migrations more efficient and highlighting ServiceNow as an automation platform that rides on top of ERP systems.

"Finance and supply chain are key processes ripe for automation," said Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang. "These processes are often highly defined and regulated, which make them great candidates for automation in this exponential year of efficiency."

Not surprisingly, ServiceNow outlined its generative AI case. The company outlined its Generative AI Controller and Now Assist Search that will bring generative AI to enterprise applications. ServiceNow and Microsoft also expanded their existing strategic partnership to connect the Now Platform to Azure OpenAI Service.

The ServiceNow Generative AI Controller allows customers to connect ServiceNow instances to both Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and OpenAI API large language models. The AI controller also has built-in actions to integrate generative AI to answer questions, summarize and generate content and plug into ServiceNow's Virtual Agent. 

Now Assist for Search provides natural language responses based on a customer's knowledge base. It will be available throughout Portal Search, Next Experience and Virtual Agent. 

Among the other announcements from ServiceNow at Knowledge 2003:

• ServiceNow Cloud Observability brings in Lightstep's observability metrics, tracing and logging into one system that can provide insights and actions across tools, processes and people.
• ServiceNow Employee Growth and Development uses AI to close talent gaps and identify what skills will improve businesses. The platform also has guided career paths, development goals and learning resources.
• ServiceNow Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report, which uses data to determine the focus and objectives of new programs, progress made and processes and policies to advance DEI.
• ServiceNow.org launched to enable nonprofits to manage resources better with a focus on use cases such as disaster deployment, refugee resettlement and volunteer management.
• ServiceNow Global Impact Report is targeted at ESG and targeting sustainability and social goals with business metrics and objectives.

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