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Workday Surprises the IPO Market and Acquires Adaptive Insights

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Operating Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Technology Officer, Accounting Directors and Managers, Sales Operations Directors and Managers, Controllers, Finance Directors and Managers, Corporate Planning Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Workday snatched Adaptive Insights away from the public markets only days before IPO, acquiring a proven enterprise planning company, a trained enterprise sales team, and a team deeply skilled in ERP and enterprise application integration.

Top Takeaway:  Amalgam believes Workday’s acquisition of Adaptive Insights provides a net-win for current Adaptive Insights customers, Workday customers seeking more resources dedicated both to financial planning and workforce planning, and Adaptive Insights partners looking for enterprise product enhancements.

On June 11, 2018, Workday announced signing a definitive agreement to purchase Adaptive Insights, a cloud-based business planning platform. Workday will pay about $1.55 billion to fully acquire all shares of Adaptive Insights. This acquisition occurs only three days before Adaptive Insights was scheduled for a $115 million IPO on Thursday, June 14th, which was estimated to value the company at $705 million. This IPO was expected to be successful based on Adaptive Insights’ strong subscription revenue & revenue renewal metrics described in the S-1. With this acquisition, Tom Bogan will continue to lead the Adaptive Insights business unit and report to Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri and the Adaptive Insights team is expected to remain relatively intact.

Amalgam provides further details in the Market Milestone Workday Acquires Adaptive Insights and Gets a Leg Up On Oracle NetSuite where we explore:

  • Adaptive Insights as a pure-play Cloud EPM player
  • Adaptive Insights’ relationship with NetSuite
  • What Workday gains by purchasing Adaptive Insights
  • What Adaptive Insights’ customers and partners should expect
  • Who wins and loses from this acquisition
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SaaS Vendor and Expense Management on Display at Oktane 18

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, IT Asset Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Okta is a key enabler for the discovery and management of SaaS, which is a necessary enabler for establishing the SaaS inventory and user identities needed to optimize costs. Amalgam noted that several leading SaaS vendor management solutions including Flexera, Torii, and Zylo attended Oktane 18 to speak to savvy IT executives seeking to control SaaS and Cloud expenses.

Top Takeaways: In the past year, the SaaS Vendor Management market has quickly expanded in quality, showing the increasing demand for solutions and maturity of this market. As Oktane has evolved into a hub for SaaS management, this show allows SaaS Vendor Management providers to speak to relevant digital innovators and architects responsible for being IT financial stewards. In the past year, the SaaS Vendor Management market has quickly expanded in quality, showing the increasing demand for solutions and maturity of this market.

At Oktane 18, Amalgam spoke with three leading SaaS Vendor Management solutions: Flexera/Meta SaaS, Torii, and Zylo. From Amalgam’s perspective, one of the most interesting aspects of these meetings was how each vendor had a different focus and perspective despite the fact that these vendors theoretically “do the same thing.” The side-by-side comparison of these vendors provided interesting differentiation in a market that is quickly expanding. To see how these vendors differed and to find out about an additional Baker’s Dozen of vendors that Amalgam tracks as SaaS Vendor Management solutions or products with a SaaS Vendor Management component, Click here to read the full report.

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Why Oktane Has Become The Most Important SaaS Event of the Year

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Security Directors and Managers , Security Operations Directors, IT Architects, IT Strategists, Identity and Access Directors and Managers, Software Engineers, Cloud Strategists

Why This Matters: Cloud and digital strategists who are not attending Oktane risk missing out on key SaaS and IT management strategies emerging in an end-user centric model of IT.
Continue reading Why Oktane Has Become The Most Important SaaS Event of the Year

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Informatica Prepares Enterprise Data for the Era of Machine Learning and the Internet of Things


From May 21st to May 24th, Amalgam Insights attended Informatica World. Both my colleague Tom Petrocelli and I were able to attend and gain insights on present and future of Informatica. Based on discussions with Informatica executives, customers, and partners, I gathered the following takeaways.

Informatica made a number of announcements that fit well into the new era of Machine Learning that is driving enterprise IT in 2018. Tactically, Informatica’s announcement of providing its Intelligent Cloud Services, its Integration Platform as a Service offering, natively on Azure represents a deeper partnership with Microsoft. Informatica’s data integration, synchronization, and migration services go hand-in-hand with Microsoft’s strategic goal of getting more data into the Azure cloud and shifting the data gravity of the cloud. Amalgam believes that this integration will also help increase the value of Azure Machine Learning Studio, which now will have more access to enterprise data.
Continue reading Informatica Prepares Enterprise Data for the Era of Machine Learning and the Internet of Things

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Tangoe Makes Its Case as a Change Agent at Tangoe LIVE 2018


Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Controllers, Comptrollers, Accounting Directors and Managers, IT Finance Directors and Managers, IT Expense Management Directors and Managers, Telecom Expense Management Directors and Managers, Enterprise Mobility Management Directors and Managers, Digital Transformation Managers, Internet of Things Directors and Managers

On May 21st and 22nd, Amalgam Insights attended and presented at Tangoe LIVE 2018, the global user conference for Tangoe. Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor with over $38 billion in technology spend under management.

Tangoe is in an interesting liminal position as it has achieved market dominance in its core area of telecom expense management where Amalgam estimates that Tangoe manages as much technology spend as its five largest competitors combined (Cass, Calero, Cimpl, MDSL, and Sakon). However, at the same time, Tangoe is being asked by its 1200+ clients how to better manage a wide variety of spend categories, including Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, IoT, managed print, contingent labor, and outsourced contact centers. Because Tangoe is in this middle space, Amalgam finds Tangoe to be an interesting vendor. In addition, Tangoe’s average client is a 10,000 employee company with roughly $2 billion in revenue, placing Tangoe’s focus squarely on the large, global enterprise.

In this context, Amalgam analyzed both Tangoe’s themes and presentations in this context. First, Tangoe LIVE started with a theme of “Work Smarter” with the goal of helping clients to better understand changes in telecom, mobility, cloud, IoT, and other key IT areas.

Tangoe Themes and Keynotes

CEO Bob Irwin kicked off the keynotes by describing Tangoe’s customer base as 1/3rd fixed telephony, 1/3rd mobile-focused, and 1/3rd combined fixed and mobile telecom. This starting point shows Tangoe’s potential in growing simply by focusing on existing clients. In theory, Tangoe could double its revenue and spend under management without adding another client based purely on this point alone. This fact alone makes Tangoe difficult to measure, as much of its potential growth is based on execution rather than the market penetration that most of Tangoe’s competitors are trying to achieve. Irwin also brought up three key disruptive trends of Globalization, Uberization (real-time and localized shared services), and Digital Transformation. On the last point, Irwin noted that 65% of Tangoe customers were currently going through some level of Digital Transformation.

Next, Chief Product Officer Ivan Latanision took the stage. Latanision is relatively new to Tangoe with prior experience with clinical development, quality management, e-commerce, and financial services which should prove useful in supporting Tangoe’s product portfolio and the challenges of enterprise governance. In his keynote, Latanision introduced the roadmap to move Tangoe clients to one of three platforms: Rivermine, Asentinel, or the new Atlas platform being developed by Tangoe. This initial migration will be based on whether the client is looking for deeply configurable workflows, process automation, or net-new deployments with a focus on broad IT management, respectively. Based on the rough timeline provided, Amalgam expects that this three-platform strategy will be used for the next 18-24 months. Then, starting sometime in 2020, Amalgam expects that Tangoe will converge customers to the new Atlas platform.

SVP of Product Mark Ledbetter followed up with a series of demos to show the new Tangoe Atlas platform. These demos were run by product managers Amy Ramsden, Cynthia Flynn, and Chris Molnar and demonstrated how Atlas would work from a user interface, asset and service template, and cloud perspective. Amalgam’s initial perspective was that this platform represented a significant upgrade over Tangoe’s CMP platform and was on par with similar efforts that Amalgam has seen from a front-end perspective.

Chris Molnar Presents Cloud Management

Product Management guru Michele Wheeler also came out to thank the initial customers who have been testing out Atlas in a production environment. Amalgam believes this is an important step forward for Tangoe in that it shows that Atlas is a workable environment and has a legitimate future as a platform going forward. The roadmap for Tangoe customers has been somewhat of a mystery in the past only because there was a wide variety of platforms to integrate and aggregate from the M&A activity that Tangoe had previously participated in. Chief of Operations, Tom Flynn completed the operational presentation by providing updates on Tangoe’s service delivery and upgrades. Flynn had previously acted as Tangoe’s Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel, which makes this shift in responsibility interesting as Flynn now gets to focus on service delivery and process management rather than the governance, risk management, and compliance issues where Flynn previously was guiding Tangoe.

Thought Leadership Keynotes at Tangoe LIVE

Tangoe also featured two celebrity keynotes focused on the importance of innovation and preparing for the future. Amalgam believes these keynotes were well-suited for the fundamental challenge that much of the audience faced in figuring out how to expand their responsibilities beyond the traditional view of supporting network, telecom, and mobility spend to the larger world of holistic enterprise technology spend. Innovation expert Stephen Shapiro provided the audience with a focus on how to thinking outside of the boundaries that we lock ourselves into by looking at other departments, industries, and categories for new solutions. Business advisor and industry analyst Maribel Lopez followed up on this theme the next day by framing our current challenge of technology as both the Best of Times and the Worst of Time in determining how technology can effectively empower workers. By providing a starting point for achieving the goal of digital mastery, Lopez challenged the audience to take on the challenge of controlling technology and maximizing its value rather than becoming overwhelmed by the variety, scale, and scope of technology.

Amalgam’s Role at Tangoe LIVE

Amalgam Insights also provided two presentations at Tangoe LIVE: “Budgeting and Forecast for Technology Trends” and “The Convergence of Usage Management and IoT,” which was co-presented with Tangoe’s Craig Riegelhaupt.

In the Budgeting and Forecast presentation, Amalgam shared key trends that will affect telecom and mobility budgeting over the rest of 2018 and 2019 including:
USTelecom’s Petition for Forbearance to the FCC, which would allow large carriers to immediately raise the resale rate of circuits by 15% and potentially allow them to stop reselling circuits to smaller carriers altogether
• Universal Service Fee variances and the potential to avoid these costs by changing carriers or procure circuits more effectively
• The 2 GB limit for rate plans and how this will affect rate plan optimization
• The T-Mobile/Sprint Merger and its potential effects on enterprise telephony
• The wild cards of cloud and IoT as expense categories
• Why IoT Management is the ultimate Millennial Reality Check

Amalgam’s Hyoun Park speaks at Tangoe Live

Amalgam also teamed up with Tangoe to dig more deeply into the Internet of Things and why IoT will be a key driver for transforming mobility management over the next five years. By providing representative use cases, connectivity options, and key milestone metrics, this presentation provided Tangoe end users with an introductory guide to how their mobility management efforts needed to change to support IoT.

Tangoe’s Center of Excellence and Amalgam Insights’ Role

At Tangoe LIVE, Tangoe also announced the launch of the Tangoe Center of Excellence, which will provide training courses in topics including inventory management, expense management, usage management, soft skills, & billing disputes with a focus on providing guidance from industry experts.

As a part of this launch, Tangoe announced that Amalgam Insights is a part of Tangoe’s COE Advisory Board. In this role, we look forward to helping Tangoe educate its customer base on the key market trends associated with managing digital transformation and creating an effective “manager of managers” capability to effectively support the quickly-expanding world of enterprise technology. These classes will start in the Fall of 2018 and Amalgam is excited to support this effort to teach best practices to enterprise IT organizations.

Conclusion

Tangoe LIVE lived up to its billing as the largest Telecom and Technology Expense Management user show. But even more importantly, Tangoe was able to show its Atlas platform and provide a framework for users that are being pushed to support change, transformation, and new spend categories. Amalgam believes that the greatest challenge over rest of this decade for TEM managers is how they will support the emerging trends of cloud, IoT, outsourcing, and managed services as all of these spend categories require management and optimization. In this show, Tangoe LIVE made its case that Tangoe intends to be a platform solution to support this future of IT management and support its customers across invoice, expense, service order, and usage management.

Although Tangoe’s official theme for this show was “Work Smarter,” Amalgam believes that the true theme for this show based on keynotes, roadmap, sessions, and end user questions was “Prepare for Change” with the tacit assumption of doing this with Tangoe. In facing this question head on and providing clear guidance and advisory, Tangoe made a compelling case for managing the future of IT at Tangoe LIVE.

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Outsourcing Core IT When You Are Core IT

Today, I provided a quick presentation on the BrightTALK channel on Outsourcing Core IT when you ARE Core IT. It turns out that one of the takeways from this webinar is about your risk of being outsourced based on your IT model. First, your fear and approach to outsourcing really depend on whether you are part of core IT, enabling IT, or transformational IT:

Operational IT is a cost-driven, commoditized, and miserable IT environment that does not realize that technology can provide a strategic advantage. In this world, a smartphone, a server running an AI algorithm, and a pile of paper clips are potentialy all of equal value and defined by their cost. (Hint: This is not a great environment to work in. You are at risk of being outsourced!)

Enabling IT identifies that technology can affect revenues, rather than just over head costs. This difference is not trivial, as the average US employee in 2012 made about $47,000 per year, but companies brought in over $280,000 per employee each year. The difference between calculating the value of tech at roughly $20 an hour vs. roughly $140 an hour for each employee is immense!

And finally, there is Transformational IT, where the company is literally bet on new Digital Transformation and IT efforts are focused on moving fast.

These are three different modes of IT, each requiring its own approach to IT outsourcing. To learn more, check out the embedded webinar below to watch the entire 25-minute webinar. I look forward to your thoughts and opinions and hope this helps you on your career path. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at hyoun @ amalgaminsights . com!

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EPM at a Crossroads Part 1: Why Is EPM So Confusing?

This blog is the first of a multi-blog series explaining the challenges of Enterprise Performance Management aka Financial Performance Management, Business Performance Management, Corporate Performance Management, Financial Planning and Analysis, and Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting. Frankly, this list of names alone really helps explain a lot of the confusion. But one of the strangest aspects of this constant market renaming is that there are software and service vendors that literally provide Performance Management for Enterprises (so, literal Enterprise Performance Management) that refuse to call themselves this because of the confusion created by other industry analysts.

This blog series and the subsequent report seek to be a cure to this disease by exploring and defining Enterprise Performance Management more carefully and specifically so that companies can start using common-sense terms to describe their products once more.

Key Stakeholders: CFO, Chief Accounting Officer, Controllers, Finance Directors and Managers, Treasury Managers, Financial Risk Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: The need for true Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) has increased with the emergence of the strategic CFO and demands for cross-departmental business visibility. But market confusion has made EPM a very confusing term. Amalgam Insights is stepping up to fix this term and more accurately define the tasks and roles of EPM.

So, Why is Enterprise Performance Management So Confusing?

The market of Enterprise Performance Management has been a confusing one to follow over the past few years. During this decade, the functions of enterprise planning and budgeting have quickly evolved as the role of the CFO has transformed from chief beancounter to a chief strategist who has eclipsed the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer as the most important C-Level officer in the enterprise. The reason for this is simple: a company only goes as far as money allows it to.

The emergence of the strategic CFO has led to four interesting trends in the Finance Office.

  1. Financial officers now need to access non-financial data to support strategic needs and to track business progress in areas that are not purely financial in nature. This means that the CFO is looking for better data, improved integration between key data sources and applications, and more integrated planning between multiple departments.
  2. “Big Data” also becomes a big deal for the CFO, who must integrate relevant supply chain and manufacturing data, audio & video documents, external weather and government data, and other business descriptors that go outside of the traditional accounting entries used to build the balance sheet, income statement, and other traditional financial documents. To integrate the gigantic data volumes and non-traditional data formats associated with Big Data, planning tools must be scalable and flexible. This may mean going beyond the traditional OLAP cube to support semi-structured and unstructured data that provides business guidance.

  3. A quantitative approach to business management also requires a data-driven and analytic view of the business. After all, what is the point of data if it is not aligned and contextualized to the business. Behind the buzzwords, this means that the CFO must upgrade her tech skills and review college math including statistics and possibly combinatorics and linear algebra. In addition, the CFO needs to track all aspects of strategic finance, including consolidation & close, treasury management, risk management, and strategic business modeling capabilities.

  4. Finally, the CFO must think beyond data and consider the workflows associated with each key financial and operational task. This means the CFO is now also the Chief Process Officer, a role once assigned to the Chief Operating Officer, because of the CFO’s role in governance and strategy. Although accountants are not considered masters of operational management and supply chain, the modern CFO is slowly being cornered into this environment.

These drivers of strategy, data, and workflows force CFOs outside of their accounting and finance backgrounds to be true business managers. And in this context, it makes sense that Enterprise Performance Management is breaking up into multiple different paths to support the analytics, machine learning, workflows, document management, strategy, qualitative data, strategy, and portfolio management challenges that the modern strategic CFO faces.

Finance and accounting are evolving quickly in a world with new business models, massive data capacities, and complex analytical tools. But based on this fragmentation, it is difficult to imagine at first glance how any traditional planning and budgeting solution could effectively support all of these new tasks. So, in response, “EPM” solutions have started to go down four different paths. In upcoming reports, I’ll explain the paths that modern EPM solutions are taking to solve the strategic CFO’s dilemmas.

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Cloud Foundry Provides an Open Source Vision for Enterprise Software Development

From April 18-20, Amalgam Insights attended Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 in our hometown of Boston, MA. Both Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli and Founder Hyoun Park attended as we explored the current positioning of Cloud Foundry as an application development platform in light of the ever-changing world of technology. The timing of Cloud Foundry Summit this year coincided with Pivotal’s IPO, which made this Summit especially interesting. Through our attendance of keynote sessions, panels, and the analyst program, we took away several key lessons.

First, the conflict between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes is disappearing as each solution has found its rightful place in the DevOps world. My colleague Tom Petrocelli goes into more detail in explaining how the perceived conflict between Cloud Foundry’s initial containerization efforts and Kubernetes is not justified. This summit made very clear that Cloud Foundry is a very practical solution focused on supporting enterprise-grade applications that abstracts both infrastructure and scale. Amalgam takes the stance that this conflict in software abstraction should never have been there in the first place. Practitioners have been creating an artificial conflict that the technology solutions are seeking to clarify and ameliorate.

At the event, Cloud Foundry also announced heavy-hitting partners. Alibaba Cloud is now a Gold member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. With this announcement, Cloud Foundry goes to China and joins the fastest growing cloud in the world. This announcement mirrors Red Hat’s announcement of Alibaba becoming an Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider last October and leads to an interesting showdown in China as developers choose between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to build China’s future of software.

In addition, Cloud Foundry Foundation announced Cloud.gov as the 8th certified provider of Cloud Foundry. This step forward will allow federal agencies to use a certified and FedRAMP Authorized Cloud Foundry platform. The importance of this announcement was emphasized in an Air Force-led session on Project Kessel Run, which is focused on agile software for the Air Force. This session showed how how Cloud Foundry accelerated the ability to execute in an environment where the average project took over 8 years to complete due to challenges such as the need to ask for Congressional approval on a yearly basis. By using Cloud Foundry, the Air Force has identified opportunities to build applications in a couple of months and get these tools directly to soldiers to create culture that is #AgileAF (which obviously stands for “Agile Air Force”). The role of Cloud Foundry is accelerating one of the most challenging and governed application development environments in the world accentuated the value of Cloud Foundry in effectively enabling the vaunted goal of digital transformation.

From a technical perspective, the announcement that really grabbed our attention was the demonstration of cfdev in providing a full Cloud Foundry development experience on a local laptop or workstation on native hypervisors. This will make adoption far easier for developers seeking to quickly develop and debut applications as well as to help developers build test and sandbox environments for Cloud Foundry.

Overall, this event demonstrated the evolution of Cloud Foundry. The themes of Cloud Foundry as both a government enabler and the move to China were front and center throughout this event. Combined with the Pivotal IPO and Cloud Foundry’s ability to work with Kubernetes, it is hard to deny Cloud Foundry’s progress as an enterprise and global solution for application development acceleration and in working as a partner with other appropriate technologies.

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Market Milestone: ServiceNow Buys VendorHawk and SaaS Management Comes of Age

Industry: Software Asset Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, IT Asset Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers
Why It Matters: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now a strategic IT component. As enterprise SaaS doubles in market size over the next three years, this complex spend category will continue to expand beyond the ability to manually manage it
Top Takeaways: With this acquisition, ServiceNow will have a cutting-edge & converged Software Asset Management solution for both SaaS and on-premises applications in 2019. Enterprise organizations managing over $25,000 a month should consider an enterprise SaaS vendor management solution to optimize licenses, de-duplicate vendor categories, and gain enterprise-grade governance.

With ServiceNow’s acquisition of VendorHawk, the era of SaaS Vendor Management is emergent.

ServiceNow Acquires VendorHawk

On April 25th, 2018, ServiceNow announced its acquisition of SaaS Vendor Management solution VendorHawk in an all-cash transaction scheduled to close in April. This acquisition highlights the increasingly strategic role of SaaS from an IT service management perspective and validates the need for Software Asset Management solutions to support SaaS. In addition, this acquisition continues a string of acquisitions that ServiceNow has made over the past year including acquisitions of:

• Qlue, an artificial intelligence framework for customer service
• Telepathy, a design firm focused on massive adoption of applications
• SkyGiraffe, a no-code mobile app development platform used to make all ServiceNow applications mobile-friendly

The VendorHawk acquisition falls in line with these acquisitions in that VendorHawk will help enterprises to support the widespread adoption of SaaS.
Continue reading Market Milestone: ServiceNow Buys VendorHawk and SaaS Management Comes of Age

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Skillsoft Perspectives 2018 – A Vision For The Future of Corporate Learning

Key Stakeholders: CHRO, Chief Learning Officers, Talent Acquisition Directors and Managers, Learning & Development Directors, Training Managers, Corporate Education Managers, LMS Managers

On April 11th – 13th, Amalgam Insights attended Skillsoft Perspectives as both analysts Hyoun Park and W. Todd Maddox, Ph.D. looked at the latest advances in Skillsoft’s platforms, key narratives from Skillsoft’s customers and partners, and opportunities for pushing the future of corporate learning. Amalgam spoke with key executives and customers while attending keynote sessions and even presenting as well. Continue reading Skillsoft Perspectives 2018 – A Vision For The Future of Corporate Learning