Salesforce Einstein Airplane – Courtesy of Salesforce
Key Takeaway: Amalgam believes that the go-live date of myEinstein will be the most important date for Enterprise AI in 2018 as it represents the day that AI will become practical and available to a broad business audience across industries, verticals, company sizes, and geographies.
On November 6, 2017, Salesforce [NYSE:CRM] announced the launch of myEinstein: services based on Salesforce’s Einstein machine learning platform to support point-and-click-based and codeless AI app development. This announcement was one of several new services that Salesforce built across platform (mySalesforce and myIoT), training (myTrailhead), and user interface development (myLightning).
As the fall season of tech conferences starts to wind down, something is quite clear – machine learning (ML) is going to be everywhere. Box is putting ML in content management, Microsoft in office and CRM, and Oracle is infusing it into, well, everything. While not a great leap forward on the order of the Internet, smartphones, or PCs, the inclusion of ML technology into so many applications will make a lot of mundane tasks easier. This trend promises to be a boon for developers. The strength of machining learning is finding and exploiting patterns and anomalies. What could be more useful to developers?
Amalgam Insights recently attended Sage Intacct Advantage. In the past, Intacct got AI’s attention for its strong technology foundation that positions it well for a future of predictive analytics, ease of integration, and machine learning while maintaining the core financial responsibilities associated with being a nominative mid-market ERP solution.
Sage has traditionally been known as a more traditional application company with an established customer base and geographic footprint, which left industry observers with questions of whether there would be significant conflict within cultures and whether observer favorite Intacct would be absorbed into a Sage organization that has traditionally been quiet in its interactions with industry analysts.
During a discussion with analysts, Sage Intacct EVP Rob Reid explained the key business reason for the acquisition. Intacct had been considering an IPO that would have likely resulted in roughly $100 million being raised to support Intacct’s subsequent international expansion. Although this would have been a strong monetization event for all stockholders, the work needed to build a footprint in a variety of new countries would have been both significant and challenging. In contrast, being acquired by Sage for $850 million allowed Intacct investors and stockholders to monetize shares and to access Sage’s significant global footprint.
In speaking with Sage Intacct’s executive team, both Reid and Sage President Blair Crump emphasized that Sage Intacct would be left as an independent organization from a product development perspective. AI believes this is especially important in allowing Sage Intacct to further expand its cloud-based capabilities for core verticals of SaaS, non-profit, and professional services and to accelerate time-to-value for new Sage Intacct capabilities.
With Sage’s acquisition of Intacct in July and the renaming of Intacct to Sage Intacct, AI was curious to see how Sage Intacct differed from the previous Intacct in four areas:
Innovation
Executive Commitment
Partner relationships
Customer for Life Initiatives
Innovation
Since Sage Intacct initially got AI analysts’ attention for its pace of innovation and solution flexibility relative to its competitors, AI was interested in seeing how the software provider sought to maintain its innovation post-acquisition.
At the event, Sage Intacct announced enhancements across key verticals to support board meetings in nonprofit organizations, project management for professional services, and contract management for SaaS organizations. The nonprofit Board Book, in particular, was differentiated for its integration with GuideStar to provide benchmark and best practice metrics for nonprofit finance and operations tracking.
CTO Aaron Harris stated that Pacioli is intended to be a “the first digital assistant designed for CFOs” including a bot built to support the CFO with the ability to self-learn and to provide relevant context for revenue and financial anomalies. Although it’s too early to see how successful Sage Intacct will be in developing Pacioli, Amalgam believes that Sage Intacct’s strong focus on supporting dimensionality and related metadata across its entire product will accelerate development. In addition, Harris revealed that Sage had already been working on AI that will be brought into the Pacioli development process in projects such as the Pegg Chatbot. Between the announcements by Intacct and Infor and the work done by Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle, it has been a big year for bringing AI into the world of enterprise applications.
Amalgam notes that with the integration of AI, the user interface for applications is going to go through a sea-change that will make the rise of mobility look trivial in comparison. AI provides the opportunity to enhance expert judgment, develop individualized interfaces based on personality and work habit preferences, and to serve as a true assistant to the employee rather than a complex system that has to be continually re-configured and interfaced to provide repeatable business outputs. Based on the AI projects announced in 2017, Amalgam sees that 2018 and 2019 will be as important to the infancy of true enterprise AI as the late 2000s were for the early establishment of the app development, security, governance, and management of mobile apps.
Executive Commitment
It is not uncommon to see executives leave an organization either after IPO or acquisition. One of the most interesting moments at the industry analyst portion of the event was when Rob Reid called out his entire management team to show that they were all committed to the organization. Although nothing in life is guaranteed, it seemed that key Sage Intacct executives had incentive to stay on board for the next two-three years, meaning that there should be no immediate changes either to roadmap or executive commitments to the Sage Intacct community.
Partner Relationships
With the acquisition by Sage, it was valid for Sage Intacct customers to wonder whether Sage products would replace the ecosystem of partners that Sage Intacct had previously developed. To answer this question, at least in part, Sage Intacct invited ADP to the product roadmap portion of the Analyst event to show continued support of this relationship even as Sage provides Sage People based on the Fairsail acquisition earlier this year.
Amalgam looks forward to seeing this continued openness with partners such as ADP, Adaptive Insights, and FloQast as the integration capabilities of Sage Intacct in supporting best-in-breed mid-market solutions is an important aspect of Sage Intacct’s strength as a cloud solution. With this acquisition, it makes sense for Sage Intacct to support the use of Sage One if a potential client is not ready for Intacct and for Sage People when appropriate. If anything, Amalgam believes that Sage must be patient in allowing Sage Intacct customers to choose their own technology portfolios.
Customer for Life Initiatives
Amalgam tracks Customer for Life programs as part of its coverage of SaaS management and the changing role of the CIO office in managing technology as a set of strategic alliances. Amalgam has been analyzing Sage Intacct’s Customer for Life program and is currently working on a document regarding this specific approach as a result of the unusually successful renewal and broad-based approach that this software provider takes.
When questioned by Amalgam about the current stage of the Customer for Life program, Kathy Lord replied that the Sage Intacct program has not been affected by the acquisition and that the Sage Intacct approach is actually seen as a standard to be pursued across Sage. Amalgam looks forward to seeing whether this results in increased customer success investment or a perceived change in sales or service from Sage in general and looks forward to both briefings and public filings that make mention of any changes in this regard.
Conclusion
Overall, Amalgam believes that Intacct continued to show its leadership as a mid-market ERP solution and, more important to AI, as a cloud vendor that is providing leadership in building the next-generation of app platforms. Amalgam is bullish on Sage Intacct, but believes that it is integral for Sage to allow Intacct to continue on its own business path while providing the developmental and organization resources needed for Sage Intacct to maintain its growth.
In late September, prior to Oracle Open World, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) held an event to announce its consumption pricing model of Universal Credits and the ability to reuse existing software licenses across Oracle’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) middleware, analytics, and database offerings. The Universal Credits represent a fundamental change in cloud pricing as they will allow Oracle Cloud customers to switch between Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS services. In addition, Larry Ellison also unveiled a “self-driving” database that would greatly reduce the cost of administration. Continue reading With Oracle Universal Credits, the Cloud Wars Are Truly On
Last week, I attended Strata Data Conference at the Javitz Center in New York City to catch up with a wide variety of data science and machine learning users, enablers, and thought leaders. In the process, I had the opportunity to listen to some fantastic keynotes and to chat with 30+ companies looking for solutions, 30+ vendors presenting at the show, and attend with a number of luminary industry analysts and thought leaders including Ovum’s Tony Baer, EMA’s John Myers, Aberdeen Group’s Mike Lock, and Hurwitz & Associates’ Judith Hurwitz.
From this whirwind tour of executives, I took a lot of takeaways from the keynotes and vendors that I can share and from end users that I unfortunately have to keep confidential. To give you an idea of what an industry analyst notes, following are a short summary of takeaways I took from the keynotes and from each vendor that I spoke to:
Keynotes: The key themes that really got my attention is the idea that AI requires ethics, brought up by Joanna Bryson, and that all data is biased, which danah boyd discussed. This idea that data and machine learning have their own weaknesses that require human intervention, training, and guidance is incredibly important. Over the past decade, technologists have put their trust in Big Data and the idea that data will provide answers, only to find that a naive and “unbiased” analysis of data has its own biases. Context and human perspective are inherent to translating data into value: this does not change just because our analytic and data training tools are increasingly nuanced and intelligent in nature.
Behind the hype of data science, Big Data, analytic modeling, robotic process automation, DevOps, DataOps, and artifical intelligence is this fundamental need to understand that data, algorithms, and technology all have inherent biases as the following tweet shows: Continue reading 28 Hours as an Industry Analyst at Strata Data 2017
On the week of September 25th, 2017, Microsoft made a huge announcement at its annual Ignite and Envision conference. Microsoft has become one of a small number of companies that is demonstrating quantum computing. IBM is another company that is also pursuing this rather futuristic computing model.
For those who are not up-to-date on quantum computing, it uses quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement to develop a new way of computing. Current computers are built around tiny electron switches called transistors that allow for two states, which represent the binary system we have today. Quantum computers leverage quantum states that give us ones, zeros, and combinations of one and zero. This means a single qubit, the quantum equivalent of a bit, can represent many more states than the bit can. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification but quantum computing promises to deliver more dense and exponentially faster computing.
There are a number of problems with practical quantum computing. The hardware is still in a nascent stage and must be cooled to a temperature that is quite a bit colder than deep space. This makes it much more likely that quantum computing will be purchased via a cloud model than on-premises. The other inhibitor is that there is no standard programming model for quantum computing. IBM has demonstrated a visual programming model that shows how quantum computing works but is clearly not going to be a serious way to write real programs. Microsoft, on the other hand, showed a more standard looking curly bracket programming language. This application layer makes quantum computing more accessible to existing programmers who are more used to the current model of computing.
When quantum computing becomes practical – I would predict that is at least 5 years away, perhaps longer – it won’t be for everyday computing tasks. The current model is already more than adequate for those tasks. It’s also unlikely that the capabilities of quantum computers, especially the information dense qubit, and costs will have much a place in transactional computing. Instead, quantum computing will be used for analyzing very large and complex data sets for simulation and AI. That’s fine because the AI and analytics market is still new and the future needs are not yet completely known. That future computing needs is what quantum computing is meant to address. Even today’s big data applications can stretch computing capabilities and force batch analytics instead of real-time for some use cases.
Microsoft’s entry into what has been an otherwise esoteric corner of the computing world signals that quantum computing is on the path to being real. It has a long way to go and many obstacles to overcome but it’s no longer just science fiction or academic. It will be years but it is on the way to becoming mainstream.
Note: This post was originally posted on Tom’s Take
This past week (September 25 – 27, 2017) Microsoft held its Ignite and Envision Conferences. The co-conferences encompass both technology (Ignite) and the business of technology (Envision). Microsoft’s announcements reflected that duality with esoteric technology subjects such as mixed reality and quantum computing on equal footing with digital transformation, a mainstay of modern business transformation projects. There were two announcements that, in my opinion, will have the most impact in the short-term because they were more foundational.
The first announcement was that machine learning was being integrated into every Microsoft productivity and business product. Most large software companies are adding machine learning to their platforms but no company has Microsoft’s reach into modern businesses. Like IBM, SAP and Oracle, Microsoft can embed machine learning in business applications such as CRM. Microsoft can also integrate machine learning into productivity applications as can Google. IBM can do both but IBM’s office applications aren’t close to having the market penetration of Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft has the opportunity to embed machine learning everywhere in a business, a capability that none of their competitors have. Continue reading Microsoft Infuses Products with Machine Learning and the Social Graph
On September 13th, 2017, Riverside Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, announced the acquisition of Calero Software from Clearlake Capital. Calero manages more than $6 billion of annual telecom, mobility, and cloud spend for more than 3,000 customers in 40+ countries and provides managed mobility services for more than 400,000 devices, making it one of the largest technology expense management solutions overall behind Tangoe’s $38 billion+ in technology expense management and Flexera’s $13 billion+ in software expense management. (Cass does not break out its telecom spend, but Amalgam believes it to be similar in scale to Calero.)
This blog covers Amalgam’s perspective on:
Why Clearlake sold Calero?
Who is Riverside Partners, a relatively new player in the TEM space?
If you are interested in any of these topics, please sign up to attend by clicking on the webinar title link. And if you are interested in a deeper dive of any of these topics, please email Amalgam’s Director of Client Services, Lisa Lincoln.
For more information on each webinar, please look below:
Upcoming Webinars (All Times in Eastern Time Zone):
Recommended Audience: Telecom Directors and Managers, Network Directors and Managers, Mobility Directors and Managers, IT Procurement, IT Finance, IT Architects
Amalgam Insights has been covering the Telecom Expense Management (TEM) market for over a decade. In May of 2017, Gartner released “Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services, 2017”. In this guide, Amalgam believes that eight key vendors were overlooked that can provide enterprise-grade services and represent billions of dollars in technology spend including:
* A pioneer in Robotic Process Automation
* The largest standalone TEM in Europe
* A SaaS solution partnering with IBM, Unisys, and Verizon
* A Fortune 1000-focused vendor with 100% referenceable clients
* A fast-growing technology management platform built on ServiceNow
* A commercial and government-focused vendor with over 4 million lines under management
* The largest Australian provider with over 500,000 items under management
* One of the Bay Area’s best rated places to work with IoT, data center, & SD-WAN management offerings
Recommended Audience: Chief Data Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, Analytics & BI Managers, Analytics & BI Program Leaders, Enterprise Information Management Managers, Enterprise Architects, Enterprise Applications Managers
Amalgam Insights believes that the key to success for artificial intelligence is embedded AI aligned to role-specific and industry-specific challenges. The goal is to provide focused outputs that enhance the best judgment of subject matter experts. This leads to a core mission of Amalgam Insights: improving the consumption of enterprise technology. Based on these assumptions, Role-Based Expert Enhancement Platforms (REEPs) are the future of embedded Artificial Intelligence.
Based on interviews with dozens of enterprise application platform users, application vendors, and machine learning providers, Amalgam Insights describes how lessons from embedded BI and application analytics can be used to create the next-generation of embedded AI and embedded machine learning applications.
Recommended Audience: CIO, CFO, Procurement officers, IT Finance, IT Sourcing.
Telecom Expense has traditionally been the most challenging of IT costs to manage. With the emergence of Software-as-a-Service, Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things, and software defined networks, the rest of the IT world is quickly catching up.
This webinar will provide best practices for expanding your existing telecom expense management program into a bigger IT management program to take advantage of the robust capabilities and vendor management experience already in TEM. This presentation will include anonymized end user examples and a list of IT, cloud, and telecom management vendors with experience in managing non-telecom expense categories.
Recommended audience: CIO, CFO, Chief Procurement Officers, Finance Directors and Managers, Controllers, IT Procurement, Procurement Directors and Managers, Sales and Marketing Operations Directors and Managers
In this webinar, Amalgam introduces a new set of solutions focused on enterprise SaaS expense management, a $40 billion+ global market that is largely unmanaged at this point.
Amalgam estimates that less than 5% of SaaS spend is currently centrally managed. The other 95% is hiding in expense reports and one-off accounts that escape corporate control. No rules, no buik discounts, no disputes, no contract enforcement or negotiations.
Stop the insanity! Learn which vendors to consider to manage an expense that may now represent $5,000 or more per employee in your organization.
Recommended Audience: CIOs, CFOs, Enterprise Architects, IT Project Managers, IT Procurement, IT Service, IT Finance
Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service is growing rapidly as companies replace obsolete data center servers and storage with “The Cloud.” As companies use more services from multiple regions and even multiple vendors, Cloud Computing becomes yet another management headache where discounts, service levels, and IT governance can go unenforced.
This webinar provides key tips on the Cloud Service Management market, including the drivers, best practices and top vendors including, but not limited to:
