Sports has increasingly become a showcase for back-end business capabilities that have long eschewed the spotlight: analytics, data, accounting, etc…
This recent ESPN article on the Knicks showcases the importance of their contract pro and combining strategic procurement (contract negotiations, KPIs, expiration dates, payment terms, vendor and client responsibilities) with the accounting knowledge to enforce and fully leverage those terms. And the Knicks’ player procurement Brock Aller gets a nice glow-up here because of his expertise across these areas in his complex spend category: player contracts and options.
Basketball has increasingly made “cap-ology” or the management of each team’s salary cap an important topic, as it often defines the practical limits of how much a professional basketball team can choose to improve. There is a practical lesson here for strategic IT procurement (or really all procurement) professionals on how to structure, reallocate, and maximize IT investment on a fixed budget or within a budget cap. I especially like the use of laddered rates, date-specific cutoffs and performance, and the use of commoditized or overlooked assets to trade for cash or optionality are all mentioned or hinted at here.
Even if I’m not a fan, the resurgence of the New York Knicks is a great case for how procurement and accounting need to work more closely together, ideally with a bridge person, to maximize value.
Author: admin
This Week in Enterprise Tech, Week 3
This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by the DX Report’s Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park, explores six big topics for CIOs across innovation, the value of data, strategic budget management, succession planning, and enterprise AI.
1) We start with the City of Birmingham, which is struggling with its SAP to Oracle migration. We discuss how this IT project has shifted from the promise of digital transformation to the reality of being in survival mode and the cautions of mistaking core services for innovation.
Article link: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/birmingham_city_council_to_spend/
2) We then take a look at Salesforce’s earnings, where the Data Cloud is the Powerhouse of the earnings and CIOs are proving the value of data with their pocketbooks and the power of the purse. We break down the following earnings chart.
3) We saw NVIDIA’s success in AI as a sign that CIO budgets are changing. Find out about the new trend of CIO-led budgets that are independent of the traditional IT budget, as well as Charles’ framework of separating the efficiency bucket from the innovation bucket from his first book, The Quantum Age of IT.
Article link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-ai-investment-is-surging-to-nvidias-benefit-5611ffc5?mod=djemCIO
4) One of the hottest companies in enterprise software sees a big leadership change, as Frank Slootman steps down from Snowflake and Sridhar Ramaswamy from the Neeva acquisition takes over. We discuss why this is a good move to avoid stagnation and discuss how to deal with bets in innovation.
Article link: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/28/new-snowflake-ceo-says-ai-will-keep-him-busy-for-many-years-to-come.html
5) Continuing the trend of innovation management, we talk about what Apple’s exit of the electric car business means in terms of managing innovative moonshots and what CIO’s often miss in terms of setting metrics around leadership and innovation culture.
Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/business/dealbook/apple-car-project-to-drive-wider-innovation.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share
6) And finally, we talk about the much-covered Google Gemini AI mistakes. We think the errors themselves fall within the range of issues that we’ve seen from other large language models, but we caution why the phrase “Eliminate Bias” should be a massive red flag for AI projects.
Article link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085445/google-ceo-gemini-ai-diversity-scandal-employee-memo
This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:
Charles Araujo of The DX Reportand
Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights
Welcoming This Week in Enterprise Tech
Today, we are kicking off a new podcast with our Chief Analyst Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo. Together, we are looking at the biggest events in enterprise technology and discussing how they affect the CIO’s office. We’re planning to bring our decades of experience as market observers, hands-on technical skills, and strategic advisors not only to show what the big stories were, but also the big lessons that IT and other technical executives need to take from these stories.
If you want to learn how to avoid the biggest mistakes that CIOs will make across strategy, succession planning, innovation, budgeting, and integrating AI into existing technology environments, subscribe to our new video and podcast efforts! Check out Week 1 right here.
This week, we discuss in this episode the philosophy of fast-rising Zoho, an enterprise application company that has grown over 10x over the past decade to become a leading CRM and analytic software provider on a global basis based on our recent visit to Zoho’s Analyst Event in McAllen, Texas. Find out how “transnational localism” has supported Zoho’s global rocket-ship growth and what it means for managing your own international team.
We then TWIET about the Apple Vision Pro and how Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google have been pushing the boundaries of extended reality over the past decade as well as what this means for enterprise IT organizations based on Apple’s track record.
And finally we confront the complexities of Cloud FinOps and managing cloud costs at a time when layoffs are common in the tech world and IT economics and financial management are becoming increasingly complex.
Amalgam Insights Debuts 2022 Vendor SmartList for Global Wireless Expense Management Leaders
Today Amalgam Insights publishes its latest Vendor Smartlist to support the Chief Information Officer, Global Wireless Expense Management Leaders for 2022. This report addresses the pain points organizations experience in trying to effectively manage the cost of employee smartphones, tablets, and laptops, as well as corporate Internet of Things sensors across multiple countries and regions. To check out the report, fill out the form below to get this report sent to your email address, then read on to find out what to expect.
The need for device oversight has grown even more critical throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations must re-align spending in line with budgets in the face of a 30% increase in device spend in 2021. When it comes to wireless expense management (WEM), Amalgam Insights notes the IT Rule of 30, which states that any unmanaged IT spend category will average 30% bloat and enterprise mobility is no exception. Enterprises turning to an appropriate vendor can potentially reduce overspending and free internal employees, but these results are dependent on choosing vendors that have relevant experience.
Knowing which WEM provider to choose poses a conundrum for organizations. Amalgam Insights aims to solve this problem with Global Wireless Expense Management Leaders for 2022 by delivering independent insights and recommendations, along with in-depth vendor profiles of the eight largest standalone vendors managing wireless expenses based on spend under management and geographic footprint. Importantly, Amalgam Insights does not rank vendors. Instead, analysts focus on the differentiators among providers such as global coverage, ancillary spend coverage, governance and compliance, integrations, payment processing, automation strategy, and device lifecycle management.
“The Amalgam Insight Vendor SmartList focuses on specifying how vendors differentiate themselves in crowded markets where vendors can sound very similar,” says Amalgam Insights CEO and Principal Analyst Hyoun Park. “By focusing on unique or rare capabilities, CIOs can use the Vendor SmartList to make better decisions compared to raw rankings, reviews, or 2×2 matrices.”
Kelly Teal, Senior Research Analyst at Amalgam Insights, agrees.
“As the cost of doing business fluctuates due to global inflation, global organizations must assess the need to optimize wireless devices, services, applications, and support spend. Understanding the ways different global WEM vendors work with enterprises will help end-users identify the best approach for them and optimize spending.”
This report features Asignet, Calero-MDSL, Cass Information Systems (NASDAQ: CASS), Mindglobal, One Source Communications, Sakon, Tangoe, and Upland Software (NASDAQ: UPLD). Organizations may access the Global Wireless Expense Management Leaders for 2022 using the form below.
Start with a purpose: What your side hustle can teach you about launching a business
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
10 effective methods for staying productive while working remotely
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Strategies for getting detailed, actionable feedback from your customers
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Todd Maddox Explains Why Extended Reality (xR) Technologies Will Disrupt Corporate L&D
Research Fellow Todd Maddox, Ph.D. has just published a new Analyst Insight: Leveraging Learning Science: Why Extended Reality (xR) is Poised to Disrupt Corporate Learning and Development.
In this Analyst Insight, Todd Maddox, Ph.D. provides guidance on why Augmented and Virtual Reality are set to disrupt corporate learning. This report focuses on a learning science evaluation of the potential for extended reality (xR) technologies to disrupt corporate L&D and show how xR technologies have the potential to improve the quality and quantity of training, to accelerate learning and enhance retention in all aspects of corporate learning to provide the following benefits: Continue reading Todd Maddox Explains Why Extended Reality (xR) Technologies Will Disrupt Corporate L&D
Tom Petrocelli Releases Groundbreaking Technical Guide on Service Mesh
On April 2, 2019, Amalgam Insights Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli published Technical Guide: A Service Mesh Primer, which serves as a vital starting point for technical architects and developer teams to understand the current trends in microservices and service mesh. This report provides enterprise architects, CTOs, and developer teams with the guidance they need to understand the microservices architecture, service mesh architecture, and OSI model context necessary to conceptualize service mesh technologies.
In this report, Amalgam Insights provides context in the following areas: Continue reading Tom Petrocelli Releases Groundbreaking Technical Guide on Service Mesh
Todd Maddox Reveals How Collaborative Video-Based Practice Effectively Trains People Skills: A Brain Science Analysis
Amalgam Insights Brain Science Research Fellow Todd Maddox has released new research on the Rehearsal website focused on the role of collaborative video-based practice and its role in teaching people skills (also known as soft skills). Continue reading Todd Maddox Reveals How Collaborative Video-Based Practice Effectively Trains People Skills: A Brain Science Analysis