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:
Note: This topic is of key importance for CFOs using or considering a subscription-based business model and for CIOs tasked with aligning technology to revenue recognition. Part 2 of this topic is 4 Key Executive ASC 606 Lessons Microsoft is Teaching Us.
On July 20, 2017, Microsoft announced a very successful Q4 FY17 where they announced both successful GAAP and non-GAAP results.
· Revenue was $23.3 billion GAAP, and $24.7 billion non-GAAP
· Operating income was $5.3 billion GAAP, and $7.0 billion non-GAAP
· Net income was $6.5 billion GAAP, and $7.7 billion non-GAAP
· Diluted earnings per share was $0.83 GAAP, and $0.98 non-GAAP
In HPE’s General Session and subsequent presentations, several key themes emerged in HPE’s positioning. The most obvious is that, in consolidating HPE’s offerings to servers, storage, and networking, the company is now focused on being the arms dealer for hybrid IT support. This is based both on the core HPE portfolio of technology and services as well as removing the business services and complementary technologies that were previously seen as competitive to potential HPE competitors. This fundamental change should serve HPE well.
tl;dr: in the world of 2017 where these practical BI issues still reign supreme, a practical Michael Saylor has shown up to preach on MicroStrategy’s capabilities. Both the stock market and MicroStrategy competitors should take notice.
On April 19th, MicroStrategy World 2017 had its executive keynote session in DC. I’ve attended MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) World in the past as an industry analyst and was interested in seeing how the keynote would come across from afar as an Amalgam Insights (AI) Principal Investigator.
Recently, Amalgam Insights (AI) had the opportunity to attend Domopalooza in Salt Lake City. Without a doubt, it was one of the most star-studded and entertaining end user events AI has attended in recent memory. Between Kesha, Jason Derulo, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Miguel, Fivethirtyeight’s Nate Silver, Chicago Cubs President Theo Epstein, and Pixar President Ed Catmull, the celebrities were out in force. With the famous people and the hyperbolic claims made on stage that “WE ARE MAKING HISTORY HERE!” it is easy for a jaded industry pundit such as myself to discount the hype and wonder what makes Domo different.
But between the hype, the party, the music, the free-flowing drinks, and the bright lights, Domo also has an excited customer base that was hungry for product announcements and gave strong feedback to new Domo features.
And there were some significant announcements, such as:
Domo’s planned “Mr. Roboto,” to use predictive analytics and machine language to support both an Alert Center for anomaly detection as well as a data science capability that currently looks like a predictive analytics and algorithm toolkit to support business performance challenges.
Domo Business-in-a-Box, a set of pre-built dashboards created to support major business departments, functions, and use cases across the entire organization. AI believes these dashboards will provide a shortcut for enterprises to quickly translate enterprise data into relevant and contextualized departmental insights.
Domo Everywhere, which serves as Domo’s foray into embedded BI with White Label, Embed, and Publish options. AI believes that this capability is important in providing ubiquitous analytics and to allow end users to take advantage of business insights without having to always go back to any specific platform or software solution.
As well as feature improvements such as increased chart options, time-series and period based views, data slicing, and the industry pundits’ favorite: Domo Data Lineage, which got a fair amount of attention in its ability to track data sources, actions, quality, and timeliness. Although Domo is portraying Data Lineage as a feature enhancement for Domo Analyzer, AI believes that Domo will be pleasantly surprised at the enterprise need and interest for Data Lineage, as data governance and data trust have been increasingly trendy concerns for enterprise analytics.
Domo’s Playbook
In speaking with Domo executives, salespeople, and customers, AI also started to see a consistent playbook emerge around Domo that demonstrated how, beyond the hype, the platform started to work as a business insight platform compared to other cloud BI or traditional BI products. Behind the hype, here is what actually seems to be happening for Domo at a high level to gain enterprise adoption.
1) Domo speaks to an executive or key business manager who is stuck with some manual process that requires excessive spreadsheet or Microsoft Access usage. These use cases tend to be focused on marketing, sales, operations, or finance use cases that align with current trends in enterprise performance management
2) Domo is initially implemented through self-service capabilities by line of business decision makers who are able to integrate data with little to no IT support. Once Domo conducts deeper due diligence on the enterprise-wide need for analytics, an analytics or IT management takes the lead within the organization to connect Domo with data from the rest of the company.
3) Domo product deployment and implementation is generally accepted by customers to be simpler than traditional performance management systems such as Hyperion or Cognos as well as simpler than other traditional BI systems.
4) Once Domo is in place, the executive stakeholder and IT manager work together in bringing all relevant departmental data into Domo by hunting down the spreadsheets and local dark data that have traditionally driven the manual process.
5) After this initial implementation and win, Domo gets additional attention internally based on the ease of creating report, the efficacy that these departments see in supporting analytic insights, and the usage rates associated with Domo
This roadmap may not sound like rocket science, but the devil has always been in the details. By connecting the dots between executives, IT, implementation roadblocks, data ingestion, and employee utilization rates, Domo has quickly grown to a $120 million+ annual run rate over the past several years.
AI Observations on the State of Domo
AI notes that Domo has some very specific strengths as a business-oriented insight solution. Its DNA makes it very focused on user interaction, collaboration, and graphic design which results in a front-end product that can be extremely engaging compared to other perceived competitors in the cloud BI space such as Birst, GoodData, and Looker as well as data discovery competitors such as
Qlik and Tableau. One of the most clever things Domo has done is to create “Cards” to display specific data, where each card shows how often the data is being accessed and provides guidance on whether end users are using the data that they should be aware of. Domo’s App Design Studio also can publish with Adobe Illustrator, which provides massive graphic advantages over a variety of other analytic app studios. (And was highlighted on the keynote stage in showing an application built by GE Digital’s Kim Schuhman.)
GE Digitals Kim Schuhman presenting Domo app developed with Adobe Illustrator
However, Domo has also invested mightily in its own back end technologies as well, including a high performance massively parallel processing columnar database, data warehousing, and 450+ native integrations. AI wonders if Domo needs to continue investing in all of these areas on an ongoing basis or whether it would be more fruitful for Domo to create high-value named partnerships, such as Tableau has created with Informatica or GoodData has created with HP Vertica, to solve some of the back-end and integration challenges. At the end of the day, AI is impressed with Domo’s focus on data collection, process improvement, and user engagement areas where they are truly excellent.
That aside, Domo has built a full-fledged business intelligence platform with a strong focus on supporting usability and adoption. With a loyal customer base, a user experience that seems popular both with end users and with report builders, and an aggressive product roadmap to accelerate time-to-value and integrate machine learning into the platform, AI believes that Domo is well positioned to continue competing in the business intelligence and analytics markets by combining analytic consumption, business process alignment, data aggregation and data integration.
Accounting has often been called the language of business and it is invaluable in managing the day-to-day financial costs, inputs, outputs, and outcomes associated with business activity. However, as companies start to understand the impact that non-financial drivers ranging from manufacturing outputs to headcount to service transactions to asset utilization rates affect the health of the business, executives have had to broaden the scope of considerations needed to track the health of the company.
As they have done so, businesses have had to shift even their financial departments to focus not just on dollars and cents, but to production units, employees, transactions, uptime, turnover, and loyalty. In doing so, the language of business has started to shift from accounting to a new paradigm of data.
