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New Offering Launch - Oracle Exadata X8 - How a 10 year delivers the next generation compute platform

New Offering Launch - Oracle Exadata X8 - How a 10 year delivers the next generation compute platform

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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Few products in cloud software / platforms are around for 10 or more years, Oracle Exadata just turned ten years old and joined that illustrious club. Let's look at what the underlying importance and relevance for enterprises is.
 

What are the key trends?

For a product to make it to 10 years, it must have gone with the trends of time, in this case staying with the computing trends that power enterprise workloads. There are a number of trends that are changing the enterprise computing landscape – let's look at the most pertinent ones:
 
  • Heterogeneous Computing Demands. CxOs are confronted with rapidly changing computing demands. Barely having satisfied the business need for big data, the computing requirements that CIOs must answer stretch from support for machine learning to speech recognition for internal and external digital assistant / chatbot solutions, all the way to the edge of the enterprise. New computing platforms have entered the data center—for instance, with the advent of large GPU racks to run machine learning. A never-before-seen platform diversity manifests itself at the edge of the enterprise to support the Internet of Things (IoT). And the pace of change is not slowing down, as shown by new demands for additional workforce support (e.g., augmented/mixed/virtual reality) and new user experience support (e.g., holographic displays).
     
  • The Need for a Single Control Pane. The era of CxOs simply accepting that new products bring a new control pane is history. CxOs operating next-generation applications[i] must run them as efficiently as possible, via a single control pane. This not only allows for more efficiency to manage infrastructure but also is the best way to manage a heterogeneous landscape effectively. Ramping down and ramping up resources as demand requires cannot be done from a "zoo" of instrumentation. At the same time, the automation of resource scaling is essential, so humans can focus on oversight instead of spending time and energy on operational tasks.

  • Degrees of Cloud Skepticism. Although many next-generation application use cases are best (and sometimes only) operated in the cloud, there is still a degree of skepticism over computing in the public cloud. It ranges from rational challenges (such as whether IaaS vendor data instances are available inside of a necessary jurisdiction) to reasonable challenges (hardware write-downs and connections to existing on-premises computing resources, such as mainframes) to less rational concerns (for instance, regarding data safety). Nonetheless, it means that CIOs need to implement and operate workloads in local data centers for at least the next decade.
Figure 1 – The six Next Generation Computing Platform Trends
Source – Holger Mueller, Constellation Research
 
Other relevant trends are the pressure to achieve high data center utilization, the rising complexity of the IT organizations, and compliance pressure. 
 

What is it?

Oracle Exadata X8 is an engineered appliance / server system that has been engineered to run Oracle workloads best. First and foremost, the Oracle Database, but also Oracle's portfolio of SaaS applications.
Oracle has continued to upgrade Oracle Exadata over the decade of its existence. Key recent innovations on the hardware side are flash memory to support in-memory columnar storage, hot swappable flash storage and 25 GigE client networking. On the software side Oracle has ensured that Exadata works best with the software innovations of the Oracle Autonomous Database, the support of automatic indexing and on the services side the support for Exadata Cloud Service and Exadata Cloud at Customer.
 
Figure 2 – The capability growth of Oracle Exadata
 
Source: Oracle
 
What sets Oracle V8 apart from other next generation compute planes is the 100% Identicality between running Exadata on premises and running Exadata in the Oracle Cloud. No other vendor has the same physical hardware on both sides of the computing equation between on premises and the public cloud.
 
High Identicality gives CxOs the confidence that they can move compute loads across the compute architectures, across on premises and the cloud without having to make any changes. Identicality on the hardware side ensures that there is no residual risk of hardware related incompatibility that is possible in purely software abstraction solutions. This matters to enable key next generation computing best practices like bursting workloads and achieving cross platform high availability.
 

Why does it matter?

There as number of reasons why CxOs care about viable Next Generation Computing platforms:
 
Old-Guard Vendors Are No Longer Viable
Humans are driven by habits, and CxOs are no exception. If they could still procure all of their computing needs from the vendors they dealt with in the 1990s, the majority of CxOs would likely do so. The problem with these "old-guard" vendors is that they have failed to innovate, are no longer viable from a cost perspective and often have switched to business models that are perceived as extortion. Therefore, innovation and commercial necessities require CxOs to deal with a new set of computing vendors.
 
Cost Pressure
For decades now, CxOs have been asked to do more with less, especially on the IT side. For a long time, the benefits of Moore's Law have bailed out CIOs because they were able to offer better computing power at the same costs or equal computing at lower costs. But Moore's Law is running out of runway, and at the same time new next-generation application use cases require innovative new platforms that charge a premium.
 
The Innovation Imperative
While software is eating the world, enterprises are turning into software companies, and, as such, they need to innovate faster than ever. This makes CxOs look for winning platforms and ideally allows them to move workloads as seamlessly across them as possible. As enterprises flock to platform-as-a-service (PaaS)[ii] products to help them build these next-generation applications,[iii] workload portability is a key acquisition criterion and overall success factor for the selection of a PaaS[iv] platform.
Additionally, CxOs face challenges due to lack of skilled workers and contractual challenges that limit them to outdated and older platforms.
 
Figure 3 – The Five Buyer Challenges
Source: Holger Mueller, Constellation Research

Advice for CxOs

The following recommendations can be made for CxOs looking at their computing architecture:
 
Enable enterprise acceleration. Enterprises need to move faster than ever before, and IT/computing infrastructures cannot remain the shackles on agility that they have been in the past. This is why CxOs look for next-generation computing platforms that allow them to transfer workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa without having to make changes. This is a key strategy to help the technical side of an enterprise contribute to the overall objective and necessity of enterprise acceleration.
 
Select companies that have the greatest capability of identicality. Identicality is the key to workload portability. The higher the identicality between an on-premises architecture and a cloud architecture, the better the chances to move workloads seamlessly. This argument is intuitively clear to CxOs leading the transformation, and platforms with high identicality are therefore clearly preferred. Even better when vendors state that they designed for identicality and want to keep identicality high — as high as technically feasible. As stated in this report, Oracle excels at Identicality between Exadata on-premises, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer platforms.
 
Evaluate Oracle Exadata as existing Oracle customers. As most customers run the Oracle Database in one way or another, it is important that they familiarize themselves with the most prominent member of the Oracle Cloud at Customer product family, Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer. Being able to lower TCO, reduce support and maintenance, fit sizing to the average load of the machine, burst to the cloud for peaks and transfer loads between Oracle Cloud and on-premises are substantial benefit drivers that CxOs cannot ignore. Experienced Oracle customers know that the best deals are usually available in Q4.
 
Consider Oracle's option as a prospect. Database and tech stack migrations are challenging, so non-Oracle customers will look at Oracle Cloud at Customer with some distance. The benefits of Oracle Exadata on premises are substantial are substantial, though, and CxOs need to talk with their respective cloud and technology stack vendors about what they can do in this regard. Should the projected gap of future roadmap become too large, and the potential cost savings with Oracle Exadata substantial enough, it is time to pay attention, but consider a potential migration.
 
Take a stance on commercial prudence. No matter which vendor, enterprises need to make sure they pay for value. For Oracle Exadata, CxOs need to pay attention that licenses and services (for instance, costs to burst to the cloud) are still providing their enterprise with an attractive TCO. As with all services-related offerings, prices will fluctuate, need to be contractually agreed as long as desired and need to be constantly monitored to avoid negative commercial surprises.
 
Oracle has invested for a long time, and practically gave up on short-term, incremental growth areas in the marketplace to get its systems engineered from the silicon all the way to the SaaS application suite products together in one technology stack. Oracle has always kept the ability to deploy the same infrastructure on-premises, likely to anticipate customer demands as well as knowing that Oracle's IaaS offering was the last of the Oracle "as-a-service" products to reach maturity. This has put Oracle Exadata in a favorable position compared with the competition for next-generation computing architectures because it gives CxOs the highest flexibility to fluidly deploy workloads across the cloud and on-premises.[v]
 

MyPOV

It is good to see enterprise IT vendors pursuing diverse strategies, and we can see the major players following distinct strategies. Diverse strategies mean different value propositions for enterprises, and that means more choice, which consequently gives CxO more options to differentiate and accelerate their enterprise with information technology.
The current three approaches are:
 
  1. The software only approaches that Google Cloud (with Anthos) and IBM (with IBM Cloud Private) pursue.
  2. The partner hardware strategy that Microsoft is using with Azure Stack. (It is too early to know where AWS will end up with Outposts).
  3. And there is Oracle who is building the vertically integrated product stack from silicon, across all ISO / OSI layers to the user click in a SaaS application.

Oracle Exadata X8 is the manifestation of the merits of that strategy, as Oracle has designed Exadata X8 highest Identicality, so that it can run the Oracle Autonomous Database in the best and most efficient way from on-premises to the Oracle Cloud. It is unlikely the competition will even make the attempt that they can run the Oracle Database better than Oracle. Effectively this means that Oracle Database customers will have compelling reasons to remain … Oracle customers.

So for now it is congratulations to Oracle with Oracle Exadata X8 – we will see soon how well the market will receive this new offering.
 
 
[i] Holger Mueller, "The Era of Infinite Computing Triggers Next-Generation Applications," Constellation Research, June 1, 2018. https://www.constellationr.com/research/era-infinite-computing-triggers-next-generation-applications
[ii] For more best-practice considerations for PaaS, offerings, see: Holger Mueller, "As PaaS Turns Strategic, So Do Implementation Considerations,"  May 9, 2018. https://www.constellationr.com/research/paas-turns-strategic-so-do-implementation-considerations
[iii] For more on next-gen applications and PaaS offerings, see: by Holger Mueller, "Why Next-Gen Apps Start with a Next-Gen Platform as a Service," April 5, 2018. https://www.constellationr.com/research/why-next-gen-apps-start-next-gen-platform-service
[iv] For a Constellation ShortList™ on PaaS vendors, see: Holger Mueller, "Constellation ShortList™ PaaS Tool Suites for Next-Gen Apps," August 22, 2018. https://www.constellationr.com/research/constellation-shortlist-paas-tool-suites-next-gen-apps
[v] For more details see: Holger Mueller, "Constellation ShortList™ Next-Generation Computing Platforms" February 12th 2019, https://www.constellationr.com/research/constellation-shortlist-next-generation-computing-platforms
 
Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work Big Data 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

Salesforce to Acquire Tableau: Why Now and What’s the Path Forward?

Salesforce to Acquire Tableau: Why Now and What’s the Path Forward?

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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Salesforce $15.7 billion mega acquisition will add revenue and blunt a Microsoft competitive threat, but long-term benefits will depend on deeper integration and additive innovation.

Salesforce is spinning its mega acquisition of Tableau Software as the number-one CRM vendor buying the number-one business intelligence (BI) and analytics vendor. It’s a big deal that was likely hastened by last week’s acquisition of Looker by Google. In the short term, it will give Salesforce more revenue, but in my view, the success and ultimate value of the proposed $15.7 billion deal will depend on what Salesforce and Tableau can do together and whether Tableau can accelerate its move into the cloud.

Tableau fills a competitive gap for Salesforce that Einstein Analytics hasn’t filled. Einstein Analytics (which originated as Salesforce Wave Analytics in 2014) is still very new, and it’s not widely adopted by Salesforce customers. What’s more, Einstein Analytics has been largely aimed at CRM-centric analytic needs, whereas Tableau gives it broad, multi-purpose analytical capabilities that are already widely adopted and highly regarded.

A key challenge, however, is that only one third of Tableau customers, at best, are running in the cloud. So either Tableau has to accelerate its move into the cloud or Salesforce has to develop more of a hybrid strategy. The latter would go against Salesforce’s longstanding “no software” ethos, although even cloud player Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made accommodations for on-premises deployments in recent years.

 

One thing that Salesforce and Tableau have in common (other than tens of thousands of customers) is Microsoft as a formidable rival. Microsoft goes after Salesforce primarily with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and it goes up against Tableau primarily with Power BI. In both cases, Microsoft stresses its broader platform, including Office 365, Azure, the LinkedIn graph, and its broad data-management portfolio, but the real weapon on both fronts is the blunt instrument of competitive pricing. Microsoft effectively discounts its CRM and analytics offerings knowing it can count on long-term benefits, stickiness and profits from each customer and byte of data that ends up on Azure.

Competing against Microsoft Power BI is one thing, but cloud competition is about to get tougher with Google’s acquisition of Looker, announced last week. And with both Google and Microsoft now strongly pursuing the BI and analytics market, it likely won’t be long before AWS steps up its game from its current, less-than-competitive QuickSight offering.

Tableau needed a deep-pocketed parent to help it compete against these new competitors. A key area of investment important to both Salesforce and Tableau is augmented analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft has been adding augmented capabilities to Power BI, and it highlights the connection to the rest of its AI portfolio. Leveraging one set of AI and augmented analytics investments across Salesforce and Tableau should provide economies of scale that will help both parties innovate.

MyPOV on How to Better Serve Customers Together

I appreciate that Salesforce is promising to maintain Tableau as an independent business, just as it did when it acquired Mulesoft last year. Salesforce is far better than most companies at retaining the leadership, talent and values of the companies it acquires. A big part of Tableau’s strength has been its culture, and I see Salesforce as more likely than any other suitor to retain that energy.   

As I noted above, investments in AI and augmented analytics are an obvious place to start on future innovation. But with trends moving toward low-latency demands and predictive and prescriptive recommendations, I see analytics as destined to be more frequently embedded into applications. Not just OEM apps, but software apps that customers build themselves. Salesforce and the Force.com platform are both good fits for accelerating Tableau’s embedding strategy. Microsoft is pursuing these trends with its Power Apps, Flow and Power BI Embedded capabilities, and Salesforce and Tableau would do well to exploit their strengths.

As for how Salesforce and Tableau could improve and take advantage of integration, a few areas should be addressed to better serve customers. For starters, Tableau must evolve its self-service strengths and provide more tools and controls for centralized governance. The company started down this path a few years ago with data-certification capabilities, and it’s expected to add a data catalog this year.  Salesforce and Tableau together could do more to address centralized data modeling, ensuring reusability and a single version of the truth. Here’s where Looker has strengths, offering an old-school semantic modeling environment built for modern cloud data architectures.

The addition of Tableau also raises questions anew for Salesforce as to how deeply it will invest in data-management capabilities. Last year’s Mulesoft deal upped Salesforce API-oriented integration capabilities, but AWS, Google and Microsoft offer end-to-end database, data warehouse, data integration and high-scale data platform capabilities that give customers one-stop-shop opportunities while also fueling AI capabilities. Salesforce has to decide whether to take a Switzerland approach -- working with all the major clouds and third-party vendors -- or whether it’s going to also offer its own data platforms and services. Perhaps it could choose a middle ground by focusing exclusively on analytics, acquiring, say, Snowflake, and perhaps a bit more in the way of big data and data integration capabilities.

These are interesting times, and I am hearing echoes of the BI and analytics consolidation that happened just over a decade ago. There is a danger that history could repeat itself, as when BusinessObjects, Cognos and Hyperion were acquired in 2007/2008 by SAP, IBM and Oracle, respectively. Back then, many predicted that these massive consolidators would push independents out of business, but that’s not what happened. That’s exactly when Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and other innovators emerged and it was mostly downhill from there for the incumbents.

The lesson for Salesforce is that it can’t count on the power of its platform to retain and win new Tableau customers; the product must remain competitive on its own merits, and that will require investment and the spark of innovation that got Tableau where it is today.    

Related Reading:
Google to Acquire Looker: First Salvo in a New Round of BI and Analytics Competition
Tableau Advances the Era of Smart Analytics
MicroStrategy Embeds Analytics Into Any Web Interface

 

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Google to Acquire Looker: First Salvo in a New Round of BI and Analytics Competition

Google to Acquire Looker: First Salvo in a New Round of BI and Analytics Competition

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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Google announced May 6 its intention to acquire Looker, in a $2.6 billion, all-cash deal that will see the business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics vendor become, upon the close of the deal, part of the Google Cloud. The move is not totally unexpected, as Looker was a close partner with Google, but it's the first shot that will likely see Google buy more and, most likely, a competitive response from Amazon Web Services.

Looker competes with BI and analytics vendors ranging from IBM, Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft PowerBI to Microstrategy, Oracle and SAP. Looker's strengths include its centralized data-modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on top of modern cloud databases, including Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake. There's speculation that Snowflake, which is currently independent, might be a next aquisition target for Google.

Looker has been a significant partner for Google, and with each delployment, customers bring significant amounts of data for analysis onto the Google Cloud. The model for Google going forward is likely to be similar to the way Microsoft promotes Power BI at competitive prices, knowing that there's a payoff in bringing more data onto the cloud platform, making it stickier and driving ongoing storage fees.

With Microsoft promoting Power BI and Google soon promoting Looker, watch for AWS to respond by building or buying an analytics and BI offering that's more attractive and comprehensive than QuickSight, which has thus far, in Constellation's estimation, failed to capture much marketshare.

Established BI and analytics vendors have already been responding to the competitive pressure of Power BI by diversifying and deepening their capabilities, variously adding data-management, data-prep, data catalog, and advanced analytics capabilities. Competitors to Looker will point out that LookML coding is not exactly business-user friendly. What's more, the company has not pursued much in the way of augmented analytics or advanced analytic capabilities, though these are strong suits for Google where it could advance Looker functionality. What's more, Looker is dependent on the underlying database for performance, and customers running on Redshift or other clouds may have concerns about the acquisition by Google.

Google's move will surely spark even more intense competition, and perhaps consolidation among BI and analytics vendors.

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Identity is dead

Identity is dead

Steve Wilson
Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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First published April 2018. 

For at least five years there has been a distinct push within the identity management industry towards attributes: a steady shift from who someone is to what they are.  It might have started at the Cloud Identity Summit in Napa Valley in 2013, where Google/PayPal/RSA veteran Andrew Nash, speaking on a panel of “iconoclasts” announced that ‘attributes are more interesting than identity’.  A few months earlier, the FIDO Alliance had been born. On a mission to streamline authentication, FIDO protocols modestly operate low down the technology stack and leave identification as a policy matter to be sorted out by implementers at the application level. Since 2013, we’ve also seen the Vectors of Trust initiative which breaks out different dimensions of authentication decision making, and a revamp of the US Federal Government Authentication Guide NIST SP 800-63 which decomposes the coarse old Levels of Assurance. 

Across cyberspace more broadly, provenance is the hottest topic.  How do we know what’s real online? How can we pick fake accounts, fake news, even fake videos?

Provenance in identity management is breaking out all over, with intense interest in Zero Knowledge Proofs of attributes in many Self Sovereign Identity projects, and verified claims being standardised in a W3C standards working group. 

These efforts promise to reverse an inexorable complication. Identity has long been over-analysed and authentication over-engineered.  The more strongly we identify, the more we disclose, and the unintended consequences just keep mounting.  

Yet it doesn’t have to be so. Here’s what really matters:  

  • What do you need to know about someone or something in order to deal with them?
  • Where will you get that knowledge?
  • How will you know it’s true?

These should be the concerns of authentication.  It’s not identity per se that usually matters; instead it’s specific attributes or claims about the parties we're dealing with. Furthermore, attributes are just data, and their provenance lies in metadata.

The conventional wisdom in IDAM now is that few transactions really need your identity.  So why don’t we just kill it off?  Let’s instead focus on what it is that parties really need to know when they transact, and work out how to deliver that knowledge in our transaction systems.

IDAM has been framed for years around a number of misnomers. “Digital identity” for instance is nothing like identity in real life, and “digital signatures” are very strange signatures.  Despite the persistent cliché, there are no online “passports”.

But the worst misnomer of all is the Identity Provider, an abstraction invented over a decade ago to try and create a new order (dubbed at the time, the "Identity Metasystem").  Now, I agree in theory that bank accounts for example may be regarded as “identities”, and it follows that banks could be regarded as “identity providers” (IdPs). But these conceptual models have proved sterile. How many banks in fact see themselves as “identity providers”? No IdPs actually emerged from well-funded programs like Identrus or the Australian Trust Centre, and only one bank ever set up as an IdP in the GOV.UK Verify program. If Identity Providers are such a good idea, they should be widespread by now in all advanced digitizing economies!

The truth is that Identity Providers, as imagined, can’t deliver. Identity is in the eye of the Relying Party. The state of being identified is determined by a Relying Party (RP) once it is satisfied that enough is known about a data subject to manage the risk of transacting with them.

Identity is metaphorical shorthand for being in a particular relationship, defined by the RP (for it is the RP that carries most of the risk if an identification is faulty).  Identity is not the sort of good or service that can be provided; it is a state that is defined and conferred by RPs. The metaphor of identity provision is all wrong; canonical Digital Identity is a false idol.

We hardly ever need to know "who people are" online (or in real life for that matter); we just need to know certain specifics about them. So let’s get over identity, and devote our energies to critical infostructure to supply the reliable data and metadata so urgently needed for an orderly digital economy.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Distillation Aftershots Tech Optimization Future of Work Security Zero Trust Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Privacy Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer

Recap - Telemedicine panel at So.Cal HIMSS

Recap - Telemedicine panel at So.Cal HIMSS

David Chou
David Chou
CIO
Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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I had the opportunity to moderate the telemedicine panel at the Southern California HIMSS event on 5/23/19. We had an outstanding list of panelist:

Zia Agha, MD, Chief Medical Officer & EVP, Clinical Research, Medical Informatics & Telehealth, West Health

William Jih, MD, MBA, Medical Director, Population Health & Strategy, Loma Linda University Medical Center

Michael Pfeffer, MD, FACP, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer for the UCLA Health Sciences

Omid Toloui, MBA, MPH, Vice President, Digital Health, CareMore

 

Virtual Care Trend

  • Five years ago, it would have been a differentiator if you had a virtual care service offering, now it is an expectation from the patient community.
  • Roughly 14% growth in Telehealth adoption.
  • Poll from MGMA in 2018  - 39% of physicians do not offering telehealth option.  There are still a lot of doubters in the physician community.
  • Technology is the easy part of the telemedicine program design.

Challenges with Virtual Health programs

  • Health systems do not have a consistent workflow designed for telemedicine, departments specialties utilizing the telemedicine solutions are all unique, making it difficult when creating the telemedicine technology solution.
  • Physicians are still skeptical about using a computer screen to diagnose the patient.
  • Physicians feel that the loss of touch and senses hinders their ability to make the best clinical decision. 

Chou’s Overview:

  • Telemedicine should be used to augment care. The medical community has to understand that technology is not going to be a replacement for clinicians.
  • Lack of education on telemedicine training.  The use of technology must be incorporated into the medical school curriculum as we live in the digital world.   Next generations of caregivers are digital natives, and they expect that the use of technology to be pervasive in providing care.  Currently, the medical school curriculum does not have a focus on how the use of technology for physicians.
  • Key concerns still exist with uncertainty around reimbursement and physician skeptics, which does not help with adoption.
Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience AR Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

SAP #SAPPHIRENOW - Healthcare CIO POV

SAP #SAPPHIRENOW - Healthcare CIO POV

David Chou
David Chou
CIO
Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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Great event at SAP SAPPHIRENOW with an emphasis on customer experience and the integration of Qualtrics.  The integration of Qualtrics will be the key.  Where is Qualtrics used in healthcare currently?  The healthcare clients that I have spoken to are utilizing Qualtrics mostly for HR employee engagement and surveys for the research department.  The next phase for Qualtrics is to persuade the health system to use the platform from a patient/customer engagement tool.

What’s next for SAP and the Healthcare CIO?

  1. ERP optimization is a big theme for healthcare provider systems.  Every hospital system in North America is going through an evaluation of their ERP system.  Organization are looking to either upgrade their current system or evaluating a potential change to the next generation cloud platform offering.  This is an opportunity for SAP to grab the healthcare ERP industry, but the challenge is that SAP is not currently on the shortlist for the North American healthcare provider CIOs at the moment.
  2. SAP Intelligent Enterprise.  SAP business object has a great presence throughout the healthcare industry.  The key is to convert these customers to the intelligence platform and will the North American healthcare providers trust SAP as the data platform of choice.

3. Global Healthcare Market.  SAP has done a great job globally in healthcare.  Great customers in the UK, EU, and China has allowed SAP in growing incrementally globally.  I have seen a few healthcare organizations utilize SAP as the main clinical and back office system and that momentum may continue to grow as they focus on building out the platform more.  

 

 

 

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

Qlik #Qonnections – CIO Point of View

Qlik #Qonnections – CIO Point of View

David Chou
David Chou
CIO
Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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Big Announcements

  • Qlik SaaS and Multi-cloud offering. 
  • Attunity acquisition and platform integration.

Healthcare CIO Point of View

  • When we think of Qlik, it is still a BI platform while the company’s strategy is to transform Qlik to be a data platform.

  • I like the Attunity acquisition because the challenge for every organization’s data transformation is the data integration effort. Hopefully, Attunity will deliver the results as promised.  The key challenge for healthcare providers is data mapping and integration with enterprise healthcare applications.  Will Attunity figure out this out quick and will the existing healthcare clients look to Qlik as an enterprise solution versus a visualization product?

  • Great announcement of supporting multi-cloud and SaaS offering.  Enterprise clients that are currently on-premise will have to rely on the expertise of Qlik resources or partners for the migration which CIO should explore deeper.  It is not an easy migration and I believe we are in the early stages of having a migration playbook.
  • Qlik product sponsorships typically start at the departmental level for the majority of healthcare clients.  Qlik must work towards getting more executive sponsorship at the CIO level in order to align with the strategy of transitioning to a data platform.
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DisrupTV: Changing and Reinventing as a CIO, Innovation Inside a Health System & 2019 Healthcare Trends

DisrupTV: Changing and Reinventing as a CIO, Innovation Inside a Health System & 2019 Healthcare Trends

David Chou
David Chou
CIO
Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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DisrupTV 142 - Changing and reinventing as a CIO, innovation inside a health system, and 2019 healthcare trends. 

We had a great show on DisrupTV with three healthcare provider thought leaders. DisrupTV caught up with Anna Thurman (Division CIO, Commonspirit Health) and she talked about the art of reinvention, which is necessary for both IT and healthcare. Her focus as a leader and a professional is to challenge herself daily for her to keep up with the technology trends.  Anna’s primary focus as the division CIO is the employee satisfaction of her team.  Anna works diligently to ensure that her team is engaged and excited as the organization is transforming and restructuring with the merger with Dignity health to form Commonspirit Health. One healthcare trend that Anna is focusing on in Nebraska is telemedicine, and they are working towards how they can extend the care in the rural regions of the community.  Constellation recommends the virtual care model utilizing telemedicine technology as a requirement for health systems.   The key theme for health systems is to extend the reach of care focusing on wellness and prevention of patient readmission.  Virtual care used to be a competitive advantage for a health system and now we are seeing it as the norm.

Innovation from Within

Tom Stafford, CIO at Halifax Health, focuses his energy on internal innovation from his team.  He has focused on interoperability of his enterprise application system and now is working towards generating revenue from his IT operations.  Tom’s team has done a tremendous job of managing IT that they are starting to sell hosting services and application support for their MEDITECH EMR.  The Halifax IT team has done a tremendous job of keeping the system stable, and that is a crucial theme for Tom as a leader at Halifax Health.  Stability is not just a theme for technology uptime, but Tom has focused on keeping stability within his team by making it a productive environment where the employees want to stay long term. 

2019 Healthcare Trends

I had the opportunity to be on DisrupTV as a client, but this was the first time for me on the show as a Constellation team member. I shared the 2019 healthcare trends that we are focusing on, which includes the focus for healthcare providers on operational efficiencies involving the back office ERP system. Healthcare organizations are also focusing on creating a 360-degree view of the patient with an emphasis on keeping sensitive information secure.  

This is just a small glimpse at the great advice shared during the show. Please check out the latest healthcare astrochart, which plots the big business and IT trends by adoption and business impact here.

 

 

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Progress Report - Workday Innovation Summit 2019 - Doubling Down on AI and Skills

Progress Report - Workday Innovation Summit 2019 - Doubling Down on AI and Skills

Holger Mueller
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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We had the opportunity to attend Workday's yearly analyst meeting, now known as Workday Innovation Summit, held from April 22ndtill 24th 2019 at the stunning scenic Cavallo Point, across from San Francisco. The analyst summit was very well attended by analysts and influencers.

 

 
 
Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here):
 
 
Want to read on? Here you go:

Innovation across the 4 Focus Areas – It is clear that Workday is no longer only about HR and Finance, but that the Planning and Analysis functionalities have become peers. And no surprise as e.g. Adaptive Insights has more customers than Workday HCM and Finance combined. It's good to see the fundamental aspects of business being the leitmotiv of a vendor, starting with Planning, then executing (for Workday primarily in Finance and HR) and being able to analyze performance before re-planning again, based on the latest analytical insights. In each of the four areas Workday is showing solid progress. The most important work though is happening on the platform side with the move to public cloud, where Workday partners with AWS and has almost 10 customers live.   

 
Workday Innovation Summit Holger Mueller Constellation Research
Bhusri in the Q&A

Workday doubles down on Skills in HCM  – Workday unveiled the Skills Cloud last year at Workday Rising. A multi-year journey that started with the acquisition of Personify 4 years back. You have to give Workday kudos for persistency and bringing this capability to maturity. Now Workday is doubling down on skills, adding a Skills Miner to talent marketplaces and overall talent management functions. Good to see re-use and leverage, that is what customers want as it drives efficiencies. On the other side skills are an area that has not delivered in the enterprises in the past and is even a tad more than boring. If Workday can really get a renaissance for skills going, it will be better for workers and enterprises.

 
Workday Innovation Summit Holger Mueller Constellation Research
McGann and the Skills Cloud

Good progress on Workday Cloud Platform – Another key area of technology innovation is Workday's Platform as a Service (PaaS), Workday Cloud Platform. Workday is coming relatively late to the PaaS game as a SaaS vendor, but has now realized how critical the capability is. As new technologies allow enterprises to re-write business best practices and disrupt markets, PaaS is the key tool to enable this new and innovative processes. Many new best practices experiments / projects will fail from a business adoption perspective (not the technical one), but it is crucial for SaaS vendors to be part of the experimentation, as when these projects succeed, they form the field for creating new business best practices for productization. And Workday Cloud Platform is making good progress – on track for the key "Build" scenario with Workday 34.
 
 
Workday Innovation Summit Holger Mueller Constellation Research
The Workday Cloud Platform Marketecture

Solid belief in AI / ML – Workday, starting with CEO Bhusri from the top, strongly believes in the transformational power of AI / ML. We think that is the right direction, particularly for HR, as most of the HR transactions are … simple and coming from Employee (ESS) and Manager Self Service (MSS). Being able to automate, accelerate and improve them will be happening early and HCM is likely the first area of all enterprise software to see most transactions being suggested, augmented or even made by AI / ML. Workday is taking the traditional approach to AI / ML by using the public cloud for learning, but then transferring the model to separate customer environments. That's a proven process, but usual manual, often executed one client at a time and is slow. But it's a start, actually the common start across enterprises software vendors.   

 
Workday Innovation Summit Holger Mueller Constellation Research
Chakraborthy and a key innovation area for ML - Self modifying UX
 
MyPOV
 
Almost a 'boring' tech summit, when it comes to new products / innovation, with the absence of ''flashy" announcement (one interesting one was under NDA and will be unveiled by Workday later in the year). But it means that Workday is holding the course and delivering value across the products. Good software is like wine, it takes time to mature and become good / great. And I like the persistence of Workday. When things fail or are hard, Workday does not squirrel away to the next hot topic, but doubles down and delivers. That's a rare trait amongst enterprise software vendors. Good to see the progress on the HR side, especially with Workday starting to tackle its last remaining large blank (and with this functional) area – Workforce Management.

On the concern side,  Workday's move to the public cloud is … slow. When asked, Bhusri foresees probably two more hardware refresh cycles in the Workday data centers… translated, that means he sees full public cloud 4-6 years out. Operationally that maybe fine, but from the AI / ML perspective obstructional to implement any deep learning on customer data. Workday is to a certain point lucky, as HR and Finance are somewhat moving slower than e.g. Commerce, IoT etc. I also missed (at least a demo refresh / update) on voice as the new UX, as this is most transformation for the sporadic nature of HCM interactions.  

But overall an impressive event, as Workday is innovating across the board. The foundational DNA and course are in the right direction, now we have to see if Workday is sailing fast enough. Future will tell.

 
Want to learn more? Checkout the Wakelet below (if it doesn't show up – check here).
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.


 
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Event Report: FinancialForce.com Doubles Down On Customer-Centric ERP #FFCommLive19

Event Report: FinancialForce.com Doubles Down On Customer-Centric ERP #FFCommLive19

R "Ray" Wang
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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PSA, Subscription Billing Power Customer Centric ERP

Almost 500 customers, partners, and influencers joined the FinancialForce.com team in Las Vegas. May 8th to 10th, to experience the latest in PSA and customer-centric ERP.  CEO Tod Nielsen

Photo: @rwang0

FinancialForce.com kicked off its user conference at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on May 8 to 10, 2019. 

Figure 1.  Event Report: #FFCommLive19 FinancialForce.com Doubles Down On Customer-Centric ERP

  • Customer momentum continues to grow. Over 300 customers signed up in the past 12 months with FinancialForce.com. Customer satisfaction topped at 9.01/10.00 in surveys.
  • Professional Services Automation (PSA) serves as a key differentiator.  PSA investment reflects strong customer input.  Improved analytics, skills hierarchies and skill sets, delivered services forecasting, mobile expense, and new Gantt were delivered in the past 12 months.  On the roadmap includes revenue recognition forecasting, Gantt/project management, Workspaces, resource requests in planners and integration with Slack, Zimit, Jira, Conga, and other partnerships.
  • Services and subscription billing improves in feature parity.  Customers were excited for the consolidated invoice capabilities, and ability to override fiscal periods, GL Account and FX rate.  New support for partial billed contracts helped many professional service based customers.  Expected features in future release include PSA to Billing documents, SCM to Billing documents, consolidated invoice – schedule consolidation process, enhancements to billing document (deriving due dates, credit note improvements, etc) and support for inter-company in billing documents.
  • Revenue recognition and forecasting built for the modern CFO.  Features delivered in the past year included a much sought after historical currency rate for revenue recognition in foreign currencies, improved PSA to revenue management, and setting opening balances for revenue recognition.  Future roadmap features include enterprise mass automation, new RM to FFA setup, new revenue dashboards powered by Einstein (Waterfall, ASC606), and time series predictions on revenue trends.
  • Accounting and finance continue march towards feature parity with legacy ERP vendors.  Key enhancements in the past year included allocations on a proportional basis, collections Workspace V1, configurable e-mail reminders, financial reporting and analytics.  New capabilities will include e-Payment integration, more workspaces, prepaid expense, bank recon enhancements, Auto-FX rate and rate type, improved reporting powered by Einstein, and as of date aging powered by Einstein.
  • Order and inventory management gains fundamental capabilities.  Fixed asset creation for capital equipment purchases, increased flexibility for quote line selection and importing, and invoice line selection flexibility topped the list of delivered features in 2018.  In the next 12 months key feature enhancements include RMA, more multi-lingual support, procurement manager workspace, blanket POs, category-based purchasing, purchasing accruals, and sales operations workspace.
  • New ISV partnerships show traction in ecosystem development. FinancialForce.com added payments vendor Asperato, CPQ player Zimit, and CLM provider Conga.

Figure 2.  Chief Product And Strategy Officer Dan Brown Shares The FinancialForce Roadmap

Photo: @rwang0

Figure 3.  FinancialForce.com Delivered Solid Enhancements In The Past 12 Months

Photo: @rwang0


Figure 4. Twitter Moments for #FFCommLive19


The Bottom Line: Services-Based ERP Vendors Should Consider FinancialForce.com For Vendor Selection

Under Chief Product and strategy Officer, Dan Brown's leadership, the team delivered four releases in the past 12 months with  strong investments in product areas, new language packs, consolidated invoicing, and better integration with ecosystem partners.   The tighter focus on customer-centric ERP has improved feature build out for services based ERP customers. Services oriented customers who seek a cloud-based ERP with professional services automation (PSA), services and subscription billing, revenue recognition and forecasting, and order and inventory management should consider FinancialForce.com in short lists.

Your POV.

Are you ready to move to the Cloud for your ERP replacement and renewal?  Do you need PSA? Are you more services oriented? Where do you see opportunities for replacement?   Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Please let us know if you need help with your Digital Business transformation efforts. Here's how we can assist:

  • Developing your digital business strategy
  • Connecting with other pioneers
  • Sharing best practices
  • Vendor selection
  • Implementation partner selection
  • Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
  • Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales .

 

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