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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SAP Leonardo will harness machine learning to help customers drive automation and innovation. Here’s a closer look at what’s available and what’s coming.

When SAP introduced Leonardo on May 18 at its Sapphire Now event in Orlando, executives insisted that “no single technology can deliver digital innovation on its own.” Yet it’s clear that machine learning is a cornerstone technology that SAP is counting on to help customers come up with innovative new products, new business processes and even new business models.

Leonardo was described as a framework that brings machine learning, big data, analytics, IoT, S4/Hana and the SAP Cloud Platform together with process and industry knowledge and design-thinking methodologies. That’s a lot to consider. As the data-to-decisions analyst at Constellation Research, I focused on learning more about the machine learning aspects of Leonardo. Here’s what I found out.

SAP's goal with machine learning is to turn all applications into intelligent, highly automated
applications with five to seven years.

SAP Standardizes on Google TensorFlow

SAP already had machine learning technologies on hand, including the Automated Predictive Library (APL) gained through its KXEN acquisition and the Predictive Analytics Library (PAL) built into SAP Hana. But Juergen Mueller, chief innovation officer, announced at Sapphire that SAP has settled on Google’s TensorFlow library as its standard for development.

Mueller cited Google’s leadership in machine learning during a joint appearance with Google executive Francisco Uribe, and he said that TensorFlow deep learning capabilities, in particular, would power Leonardo speech recognition, image recognition, text translation, and natural language services. What’s more, Mueller said SAP is working directly with Google’s machine learning team, not just using the open source TensorFlow libraries that are available to anybody.

In a deeper, one-on-one discussion, Dr. Markus Noga, SAP’s vice president of machine learning, told me that APL and PAL are fine for tabular and time-series data and traditional analytics scenarios. TensorFlow, he said, is being applied to challenges including natural language processing, image and video recognition, and unstructured data such as invoice images, PDF documents, email and broadcast video. He also told me that the work with Google began many months before the partnership was formally announced at the Google Cloud Next 17 event in March.

SAP Plans Waves of ML-Powered Applications

Just how will SAP make ML capabilities accessible? Well, in order to jump start innovation, Noga said SAP took an application-led approach, applying ML to common business processes supported in SAP software. The goal was to rethink business processes by automating repetitive, tedious tasks using machine learning while leaving the exceptions and harder corner cases to humans. At Sapphire, SAP unveiled the first of at least three planned waves of machine-learning powered applications:

• SAP Cash Application: Automates the tedious payment-to-invoice matching process, relying on ML to learn from historical payment patterns and automatically clear payments.
• SAP Fraud Management: Employs predictive algorithms to reduce false positives that derail legitimate transactions and false negatives that let fraudulent transactions go through.
• SAP Resume Matching: Uses ML to automate resume screening and match best candidates to jobs descriptions without bias, thereby speeding the recruiting process.
• SAP Brand Impact: Applies deep-learning-based recognition to spot brand and product logos within images and videos, statistically measuring impressions and the return on investment on sponsorships and advertising.
• SAP Service Ticketing: Taps ML to automatically classify, route and respond to inbound social media posts, e-mails, and other customer inquiries.
• SAP Customer Retention: Mines history and monitors digital interactions to capture churn indicators and predict customer behaviors such as cancellations.

As shown in the slide below, which was shared at Sapphire, SAP will soon launch a second wave of applications, including procurement and supply chain apps. A third wave (release date unspecified) will bring the total to nearly 20 apps. Noga described the apps as Lego-like components designed to “snap into place” alongside existing SAP applications. The SAP Cash App, for example, integrates with S4/Hana, while SAP Service Ticketing integrates with the Hybris Service Cloud.

These aren’t apps that are ready to run “out of the box.” They have to be configured for each individual customer. SAP has developed pretrained models based on aggregated data, but Noga said each deployment is fine tuned per customer based on their specific data. “We’ll have large, shared models and small, customer-specific models,” he told me.

SAP has released a first wave of ML-enabled "apps," listed in blue, and it has two more waves of
these "snap-in" process components in the works.

Leonardo ML Services Will Support Custom Apps

SAP says customers will also be able to design and develop custom apps using the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning services. At this writing, ten Leonardo Machine Learning APIs are available on the SAP API Business Hub. The idea is to combine your data – the higher the scale, the better – with these services to “add intelligence to your application.”

As described by SAP executives, you won’t need data scientists to build ML-powered custom apps. Rather, developers will invoke services through APIs and add small snippets of code. In a solution briefing at SAP.com/ML, the company cited multiple use case scenarios.

• Manufacturers can use image classification and image feature-extraction services to support quality inspections while service organizations can use these services to inspect assets for wear or defects and automatically order required parts.
• Brands can use natural language services to monitor social media and detect what customers are saying about your products or brand and identify trends that might shape future products.
• Retailers can use image recognition to enable customers to upload images to simplify product searches
• Logistics and sales can use ML services to anticipate changes in demand or inventory requirements.

My Take on SAP Leonardo Machine Learning

I appreciate that SAP has couched this as a machine learning initiative rather than contributing to today’s rampant “artificial intelligence” hyperbole. I also appreciate that SAP has partnered with Google and is using TensorFlow, a leading, open-source library, rather than falling prey to not-invented-here thinking and coming up with a proprietary approach.

If the experience of BASF is any indication, customers can look forward to substantial benefits from the ML-powered apps. BASF was a beta customer and development partner for the SAP Cash Application. Speaking at Sapphire, Wiebe van der Horst, CIO at the chemical company, said SAP R3 is able to automatically match only about 40% of payments to invoices out of the box. By adding hard-coded rules, BASF has achieved automation rates as high as 70%, but that has required time-consuming maintenance of rules. Using the SAP Cash Application, Van der Horst says BASF has automated as much as 94% of payment-to-invoice matching.

What’s not clear, and what will have to be validated by customer experience, is just how much effort will be required to implement and customized the ML-powered app components or to build custom apps with ML services from the SAP Cloud Platform. “It was a good engagement with SAP, but we were very early,” said Van der Horst. “With the packaging into Leonardo, it should be much easier to deploy.”

What also has yet to be seen is how quickly SAP customers will embrace Leonardo and just how differentiating these capabilities can be for customers and for SAP. Noga was refreshingly honest when he admitted that SAP’s data will ultimately stand as the differentiator. Any company can make use of TensorFlow because it is open source, he said. Any company can use GPUs to power deep learning, as SAP is exploring on its cloud platform. And any company can go to Open.ai and download whitepapers to learn how to best use machine learning, he said.

“But not every company has an Ariba network transacting more than $900 billion in commerce annually, or a Concur serving 47 million business travelers per year, or a Fieldglass placing more than 3 million freelancers in positions every year,” said Noga.

Throw in S4/Hana, Business ByDesign, SuccessFactors and SAP’s other, data-generating assets, and there’s good reason to expect that SAP will be able to come up with powerful shared models that will fuel customer-specific innovation.

Related Reading:
Oracle Launches Adaptive Intelligent Apps for CX
Inside Salesforce Einstein Artificial Intelligence
Google Cloud Invests In Data Services and ML/AI, Scales Business

Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity SAP ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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Learn how to be a kickass boss without losing your humanity live from the main stage at Constellation's Connected Enterprise 2017. We are excited to share that Kim Scott, author of “Radical Candor,” will be joining us at this year’s event in Half Moon Bay.
 

Bad bosses kill innovation, stifle growth, increase costs, and create instability. Well-meaning people become terrible bosses without even realizing it! Some may say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This advice may work for your personal life, but it can be a disaster when adopted by managers. Kim will share her top principles to help strong leaders become effective bosses to inspire and build up their teams during her keynote. 
 
Beyond being an inspiring author, Kim is also the co-founder and CEO of Candor, Inc. Prior to founding Candor, Inc., Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and several other Silicon Valley companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University, developing the course “Managing at Apple,” and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google, among other roles. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School and her BA from Princeton University. Kim and her husband, Andy Scott, are parents of twins and live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
If you missed it, Kim joined us on DisrupTV. Check it out for a sneak peek at some of what she’ll discuss at the show.
 
You don’t want to miss this great keynote! Be sure to secure your spot for Constellation's Connected Enterprise, CCE 2017, by July 21 to get the best discount on passes. See you in October!

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 Ceridian’s yearly analyst meeting in New York, held May 24th till 25th 2017, at the W Union Square in New York. The analyst meeting was very well attended with close to 30 analysts in the audience.

 

So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)



 

[Factual Correction: Ceridian does NOT miss Onboarding, its available, see below.]

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):



 

Progress Report - Ceridian pushes onwards across the board from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? Here you go: 

Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:


 

Ossip opens CENaday17 (picture credit to Lisa Sterling)

Suite strengthening – When comparing the major HCM players, Ceridian has the most functionality on a single platform, given assets in HR Core, Payroll, and WFM. Ceridian has acknowledged that it lacked in Talent Management and with the announcement of Ceridian Learning has closed one more functional gap on Talent Management (it now has Recruiting, Onboarding, Performance and Compensation Management, the remaining ones are Succession and Career Planning, and Ceridian has plans for them as well). In the area of user experience Ceridian has moved most of their user interface to HTML5, which gives it a consistent look & feel across browsers and platforms. As a remarkable engineering feat, Ceridian was able to bring the critical scheduling functionality to HTML5 as well, and with that eliminating one of the last bastions of Microsoft Silverlight (Ceridian’s previous user interface platform). Good to see for users who are in for a much more 21st century experience than with Silverlight. 


 

5 Dayforce Differentiators

Predictive Analytics – An area all HCM vendors are playing some sort of catch up is in the area of helping users make better decisions and Ceridian is releasing its predictive analytics offering with recommendations (lime many other vendors have) on flight risk. It speaks for the honesty / modesty of the vendor not to be tempted to call this Artificial Intelligence (AI) as many vendors, especially startups do these days. Now it will be important to quickly add further areas helping users to make better decisions around HR questions.


 

Dayforce in 1 Slide

Developer and Partner Ecosystems – All SaaS vendors need to grow and nurture ecosystems – both from a developer and partner perspective. Ceridian was behind in this area when it comes to developers, and is addressing this now with the launch of the Ceridian Developer Network. A demo of the community and documentation pages looked compelling – now it will be interesting to see adoption and what developers will build. They will come from partners, where Ceridian has created more traction as well, sharing a few partner under NDA, NetSuite being the one we can mention here.


 

MSS in Dayforce

MyPOV

Good to see Ceridian make progress across the board. It didn’t make the Top 3 – but a new (and of course faster) implementation methodology is another key area that the vendor is rolling out. A key ingredient for fast go lives is to have more integration options available out of the box, and Ceridian has not less than 1400 today. Both impressive and a sign of complexity of HR solutions and a key reason why implementations take long. Now it will be key to see if Ceridian can bring implementation times further down. Good to see the addition of Learning, as well as the ecosystem progress. W

On the concern side Ceridian will have to consider some technology decisions in regards of potentially choosing an IaaS vendor as partner, it needs to move into Hadoop / MapReduce area (to power e.g. Benchmarking, DaaS and more). And conversational user interfaces are emerging, a key usability improvement – as language is a more natural way to interact with software than through a keyboard and mouse. To be fair, these are challenges for most vendors in the industry at the moment.

But for now, and overall, good progress by Ceridian, which is at the verge of finishing the transition from a mostly mainframe based service bureau to enterprise SaaS vendor. Only 25% of the Ceridian business are still in payroll bureau and that area is shrinking quickly. That has been replaced by a single system that for a North American target user, only lacks very small talent management automation pieces. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Future of Work Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Data to Decisions Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Sales Marketing Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR Chief Information Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Experience Officer

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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I wonder what the gender ratio was for attendees at this week’s Infosys Confluence in San Francisco? To my eye, it seemed typical of technology events; perhaps at best 15% women in the crowd.  And yet Confluence turned out to have the most gender-aware content I have ever seen in an IT conference. 

On Tuesday morning, HPE CEO Meg Whitman took the stage for a keynote fireside chat with Infosys Americas president Sandeep Dadlani.  They got onto equality, and Whitman was forthright about the hiring challenge.  She said if businesses wanted to have fifty percent of management positions filled by women, they had to make the effort to “look across the whole slate” of candidates. It’s really only a matter of commitment and time.  The most important metric in executive recruitment is the time taken to fill a senior vacancy, and it’s merely easier to find men.  Whitman’s clarity reminded me of a salient point made crystal clear by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.  When asked if affirmative action policies meant jobs going to less qualified candidates, she replied that if we all agree the sexes are equally able, then reaching quota only meant making the effort to go out and find the qualified women.  They’re there!

In the Infosys Foundation session “Preparing America for Tomorrow”, the founder of Code.Org, Hadi Partovi, reported they were close to the milestone of 20 million students coding on the platform. Of those, 10 million are girls, and 10 million are Black or Hispanic.  The Confluence crowd was rapt in this achievement.

And in a quite amazing closing keynote, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger traversed many big questions, urging us all to step up to the urgent global issues of today, including equality.  He questioned the moral bearings of male politicians who come late to women’s rights because they happen to have daughters and see the sexism they suffer.  Sully argues from first principles that men should care about equality because it’s about humanity.  I could not agree more.

Infosys should be congratulated for embracing the often-touchy topic of gender in technology, and curating such frank and progressive discussion.  The whole IT sector should be spurred to engage with equality.  It’s not taboo! And it’s not just about those of us working in the industry, but rather all the people touched by our products and services.  As real power migrates from management ranks out into machines, gender and minority awareness must figure more in AI strategy and in algorithm design, where the question of bias is still not properly recognised.

Future of Work infosys Chief Executive Officer Chief People Officer

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 Infosys’ yearly user conference Confluence in San Francisco, held from May 24th till 26th 2017 at the Moscone West. The conference was well attended with a good mix of customers, partners and influencers. 

 

So, look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)

 

 

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
 

 

Event Report - Infosys Confluence 2017 - AI is coming from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? 

 

Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3

 

Infosys really wants to be a Products AND Services company – We have written about the early stages and first initiatives of Infosys building software products, pretty much since the arrival of Vishal Sikka. Last year it was a clear message of services and products, this year it was even more in the direction of products, with an event at Moscone West – where usually the product vendors show up. And with brining all products under one overall leader and product strategy lead, Infosys is now also taking the organizational steps towards more products in its future. All customers we spoke to are positive on this development. Sikka shared that the products have already helped Infosys to save over 10k positions from a productivity perspective. A good start. 

 

Sikka opening his keynote

Nia is Mana and more – Last year Infosys launched Mana, its Machine Learning platform. Recently Mana became Nia with additional assets from Skytree, robotic process automation capabilities and OCR functions being added. The extensions all make sense, and Sikka shared that there are now over 120+ Nia engagements across 50+ customers. That is traction, but Infosys needs more of that, especially customer adoption Nia that are confident to share the main keynote stage. We will see what next year will bring. 

 

Dadlani shares his Unlimit - learning to bike

Innovation across the portfolio – All key products in the Infosys portfolio showed progress with new releases and capabilities. What stuck out are the new Panaya ALM related Release Dynamix (RDx) offering, with the traditional focus on quality (here is the press release). And a new open source based platform to build next generation platforms with oecloud.io. Makes sense for Infosys to productize its platform – though it’s not clear at the moment which and how many and when the Infosys products will uptake a common platform like e.g. opensouce.io (more can be found here). Not mentioned in the keynote (sic!) was a new data lake offering, running on AWS Cloud, an important component of almost any next generation application project (press release here).

 

Infosys Renew Progress

 

MyPOV

A good Confluence event by Infosys, that is rapidly reinvent itself. Changes are not only coming with products, but also with the plans to onshore more services, with the ambition to hire 10k+ employees in the US, starting in Indiana. Infosys is as well ramping up its ambitions and capabilities around Digital project. So, innovation and new practices on all fronts, good news for customers. Also good to see that Sikka can an update on last year's leitmotiv - ZeroDistance - which seems to have made a difference for customers and Infosys. This year's theme of "unlimit" was a good theme, too - basically Infosys is trying to inspire customers to think about next generation applications in the age of unlimited storage (BigData, data lakes) and almost no cost compute (for ML / AI).

On the concern side Infosys needs to successfully navigate the challenges that the SI business faces with the raise of SaaS, the needed re-skilling and potential location challenges coming to the outsourcing business from the Trump administration in the near future. On the product side Infosys needs to take the last step and issue roadmaps and add release numbers / versions to its products – in the public communication. And last but not least – more customers live on products, as customer references are the ‘mother milk’ for a product company’s success.

But for now – another good Confluence for Infosys, that is inspiring its customers and getting more attention from partners than before. At least there were more exhibiting and having HPE CEO Meg Whitman there is certainly a sign for traction in the partner space. Stay tuned for more.

 

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below, it's about the Day #1 keynote, the Day #2 keynote is here and the 10 Questions I had before SapphireNow are here. (if it doesn’t show up – check here).

 

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