Search Results for: red hat

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, IT Finance Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers, Telecom Expense Directors and Managers, IT Operations, IT Strategy, FinOps Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: SaaS expenses add up fast, especially when employees use more than one app for the same purpose. In the time of COVID-19, it’s critical to pare down costs and save jobs.

Top Takeaway: In cash-strapped environments, Software as a Service is an area of spend that is ripe for review based on employee flux, new application needs, and a round of quarantine-induced Shadow IT.

Managing IT in the Time of Corona calls for inquiry into a number of areas. So far, we’ve talked about the six overall stages of COVID IT management, ways to adjust telecom and network resources for the rest of 2020 (and beyond), and controlling wireless expenses as 40% of staff or more work from home. The next category to assess? Software as a Service, or SaaS. Digging into this facet of the technology environment will uncover which apps employees use so the enterprise can make some crucial decisions: what stays, what goes, what needs new contract terms. This action is essential as the world heads toward a recession of unknown length and impact. IT, financing and procurement must do their part now to help the business batten down the hatches. Analyzing the current state of SaaS, and then streamlining it, will address this need.

No One Wants to Lose

Before you start, understand that employees will want to cling to their apps – and SaaS vendors will want to keep your organization as a customer. The IT team and its colleagues will have to walk a fine line between keeping staff happy and protecting the business’s bottom line. The reason why boils down to one reality – that people are perhaps even more attached to their apps than to their mobile devices. That’s because apps serve specific purposes and solve particular problems.

At the same time, the last thing SaaS vendors want, or need, right now is to lose clients. COVID-19 already has given rise to the highest jobless rate in over 80 years. Companies throughout the United States are motivated to retain as many customers as possible and that goes for the SaaS world as well. In fact, this segment of technology well could be the most relationship-dependent. Again, apps are personal and SaaS profitability is dependent on medium-to-long term relationships. SaaS companies need time to prove the indispensability of their software and earn the long-term contracts and relationships that lead to profit. This means that SaaS companies have incentives to work with enterprises seeking to organize and reduce costs.

Don’t Fear ‘DISRUPT’ion
Before deciding which apps make sense to keep, and which need to hit the highway, “DISRUPT” your environment with the following assessment:

Discover new apps. Find out what’s residing in the enterprise and whether it is IT-approved.
Inventory all licenses. Understand what the organization is paying for each month, and evaluate whether the licenses match up with employee numbers and roles.
Spend and usage visibility. Does the IT team have this level of insight? If not, who does?
Recycle licenses. Where can IT re-allocate use of a license instead of paying for an additional one?
Unite SaaS categories. Simply put, consolidate vendors. Many apps serve a similar purpose. Choose the best one for the organization and eliminate the rest.
Prune unused services. On a similar note, get rid of any SaaS employees do not use. Why pay something for nothing?
Training and enablement. Educate employees so they know how to make the most of the SaaS for which the company is paying. This will ensure the organization and its people use the app to its full advantage.

The “DISRUPT” phase of a SaaS assessment may take several months to complete. But it’s just the first step in a series of actions IT needs to take to better prepare the organization for predicted economic headwinds.

Follow These Steps
The steps below provide a mix of recommendations for reducing what the organization spends on SaaS, and for (re)negotiating with vendors. After you benchmark your spend, take the rest of these steps in the order that makes the most sense for your business leading up to the final negotiation process.

Step 1: Benchmark March and April’s Spend
Next comes the much-discussed benchmarking phase we’ve been driving home for the past couple months. As we note in previous blogs on COVID IT, benchmarking March and April 2020 usage and spend is a must. Glossing over, or skipping this step, would prove fatal to effective IT expense management in the face of a looming recession. You do not want to optimize on pre-COVID-19 assumptions. The sooner IT can pinpoint how COVID has affected the organization, the sooner it can react – all based on data.

Pro tip: Take advantage of free offers. For instance, G2 Track is providing a 90 day free trial of its software expense platform. 

Step 2: Prepare for Tough Negotiations
Identify the software vendors with which the organization spends the most money. If your organization is tight for cash, take the following steps. (Note: Amalgam Insights considers these to be extreme measures appropriate only in a pandemic recession or when the survival of the business is at stake.) For each of those providers, choose a “credible threat.” In other words, be ready to move to an app that does the same job as the current one, and be prepared to use that readiness in negotiations. Also, back up all data residing in the current software. Do all this in case it becomes necessary to walk away from negotiations because the vendor won’t work with you. And then make your demand or request, which may include postponed payments or a payment holiday. As a non-software example, consider how Starbucks sought a rent “vacation” for 12 months.

Step 3: Escalate Negotiations in Your Largest SaaS Vendors to the Executive Level
Here, teaming with your CFO on outreach to SaaS vendors’ top leaders should prove really helpful. The CFO office should send a letter to all vendors stating that there is a formal effort to reduce costs and providing guidance both on the current company situation and need for financial relief. Start with the sales and accounts teams so as not to damage good relationships, but be prepared to escalate the conversation. Once the vendor sees that executives are actively reviewing spend for all major accounts, negotiations often get easier. Citing circumstances including COVID-19, the probable recession and high unemployment may help, but credible backing and financial documentation from the CFO cements the seriousness of the requests at hand.

Throughout all the activity, maintain consistency in requests among vendors. The idea is not to play favorites or be a bully. To avoid that, standardize the wording on all negotiation documents and emphasize how much the organization values partnership with its SaaS vendors.

Step 4: Delay, Discount, Deny
Once SaaS providers finally have your business – which usually comes after a prolonged period of time – they know their best interest lies in keeping you as a customer. And in these tough times, these vendors often are willing to make concessions in the interest of long-term relationships. To get the outcome you want for the organization, start with a win-win approach. Offer various carrots such as lengthening the contract, serving as a customer reference, introducing their account team to other people in your business who could use the product, and so on. Ideally your organization and the SaaS vendor will be able to create a tighter relationship that provides quid pro quo benefits.

However, if the vendor will not play ball, it may be time to prove how far you’re willing to go. First off, you may have to show the vendor your books and prove why the organization is asking for new terms. If that doesn’t do the trick, figure out how to push back. Potential tactics include:
• Delaying payments and audits
• Discounting reduced payments
• Disputing excess capacity and unknown charges

Make sure the organization’s usage aligns correctly to the terms of the deal with the SaaS vendor.

Step 5: Rein in Employees
COVID-19 and its subsequent economic effects have made one thing blatantly clear: the SaaS party is over. In these critical times, the business must pare down what it pays for and enforce that change. No longer may employees choose their own separate SaaS vendors. And no longer may they may use 10 apps that does the work of one. Money and jobs are at stake.

So, to rein in employees, categorize apps by whether they are a priority, a luxury or a vanity.

Priority Apps: These apps are mission-critical, show well-articulated value and are widely adopted across the organization.
Luxury Apps: These apps tend to facilitate work, but they have inconsistent value and employees struggle to adopt them.
Vanity Apps: These apps do not contribute to work outcomes, and defining their value proves difficult. Staff only use them in niche instances.

Once all apps are categorized, it becomes easy to whittle down the number and type. Staff will want to push back but if the organization is footing the bill, its best interest is the priority.

Step 6: Think Differently
The key question to ask is, what can IT, finance and procurement do to minimize the organization’s risk and manage cash well? Before stepping into the (figurative) negotiation room, find the answer by analyzing the areas outlined below:
• Reconsider spend and license minimums (the organization may actually have a chance to save money by using an app in a different way, for instance)
• Enact scheduled audits and peak/valley exceptions• Shift from per-user to use case or revenue share (this would eliminate per-user scaling, which adds up quickly)
• Look for leeway (find out if the SaaS vendor has any flexibility on its payment terms, or whether it offers financing. Multiple large technology companies desperate to keep users in the time of Corona are putting up billions of dollars in financing.)
• Include COVID-19-specific clauses (act-of-god type of verbiage can provide a way out if no other path comes of negotiations.)

Conclusion
Together, some or all of these tools and strategies should result in positive change as the organization trims its SaaS expenses. With any luck, negotiations will go smoothly and all parties will exit feeling better about the long-term outlook. We’ve presented the worst-case scenario options in hopes they will lie fallow, but being prepared is better than being surprised.

***If you are seeking outside guidance and a deeper dive on your IT environment, Amalgam Insights is here to help. Click here to schedule a consultation.

***Join us at TEM Expo on July 14 to learn more about how to prepare for COVID IT and take immediate action to cut costs.

***And if you’d like to learn more about this topic now, please watch our webinar.

• The birth and death of Big Data in supporting massive scale as the terabyte shifted from an intimidating amount of data to a standard unit of measurement
• The evolution of cloud computing from niche tool to a rapidly growing market that is roughly $150 billion a year now and will likely be well over a trillion dollars a year by the end of the 2020s
• The Internet of Things, which will enable a future of distributed and specialized computing based on billions of processors and build on this decade’s massive progress in creating mobile and wireless smart devices.
• The democratization of artificial intelligence tools including machine learning, deep learning, and data science services and platforms that have opened up the world of AI to developers and data analysts
• The use of CRISPR Cas9 to programmatically edit genes, which has changed the biological world just as AI has changed the world of technology
• Brain biofeedback and Brain-Computer Interfaces, which provide direct neural interfaces to control and affect a physical environment.
• Extended Reality, through the development of augmented and virtual reality which are starting to provide realistic sensory simulations available on demand

When we started Amalgam Insights, we oh-so-cleverly chose the AI initials with the understanding that artificial intelligence (the other AI…), data science, machine learning, programmatic automation, augmented analytics, and neural inputs would lead to the greatest advances in technology. At the same time, we sought to provide practical guidance for companies seeking to bridge the gaps between their current data and analytics environments and the future of AI. With that in mind, here are 8 predictions we’re providing for 2020 for Analytics Centers of Excellence and Chief Data Officers to keep in mind to stay ahead while remaining practical.

1. In 2020, AI becomes a $50 billion market, creating a digital divide between the haves and have nots prepared to algorithmically assess their work in real time. Retail, Financial Services, and Manufacturing will be over half of this market.

2. The data warehouse becomes less important as a single source of truth. Today’s single source replaces data aggregation and duplication with data linkages and late-binding of data sources to bring together the single source of truth on a real-time basis. This doesn’t mean that data warehouses aren’t still useful; it just means that the single source of truth can change on a real-time basis and corporate data structures need to support that reality. And it becomes increasingly important to conduct analytics on data, wherever the data may be, rather than be dependent on the need to replicate and transfer data back to a single warehouse.

3. Asking “What were our 2020 revenues?” will be an available option in every major BI solution by the end of 2020, with the biggest challenge then being how companies will need to upgrade and configure their solutions to support these searches. We have maxed out our ability to spread analytics through IT. To get beyond 25% analytics adoption in 2020, businesses will need to take advantage of natural language queries and searches are becoming a general capability for analytics, either as a native or partner-enabled capability.

4. 2020 will see an increased focus on integrating analytics with automation, process mapping, and direct collaboration. Robotic Process Automation is a sexy technology, but what makes the robots intelligent? Prioritized data, good business rules, and algorithmic feedback for constant improvement. When we talk about “augmented analytics” at Amalgam Insights, we think this means augmenting business processes with analytic and algorithmic logic, not just augmenting data management and analytic tasks.

5. By 2025, analytic model testing and Python will become standard data analyst and business analyst capabilities to handle models rather than specific data. Get started now in learning Python, statistics, an Auto Machine Learning method, and model testing. IT needs to level up from admins to architects. All aspects of IT are becoming more abstracted through cloud computing, process automation, and machine learning. Data and analytics are no exception. Specifically, Data analysts will start conducting the majority of “data science” tasks conducted in the enterprise, either as standalone or machine-guided tasks. If a business is dependent on a “unicorn” or a singular talent to conduct a business process, that process is not scalable and repeatable. As data science and machine learning projects start becoming part of the general IT portfolio, businesses will push down more data management, cleansing, and even modeling and testing tasks to the most dependable talent of the data ecosystem, the data analyst.

6. Amalgam Insights predicts that the biggest difference between high ROI and low ROI analytics in 2020 will come from data polishing, not data hoarding. – The days of data hoarding for value creation are over. True data champions will focus on cleansing, defining, prioritizing, and separating the 1% of data that truly matters from the 99% more suited to mandatory and compliance-based storage.

7. On a related note, Amalgam Insights believes the practice of data deletion will be greatly formalized by Chief Data Protection Officers in 2020. With the emergence of CCPA along with the continuance of GDPR, data ownership is now potentially risky for organizations holding the wrong data.

8. The accounting world will make progress on defining data as a tangible asset. My expectations: changes to the timeframes of depreciation and guidance on how to value specific contextually-specific data such as customer lists and business transactions. Currently, data cannot be formally capitalized, meaning asset. Now that companies are generally starting to realize that data may be their greatest assets outside of their talent, accountants will bring up more concerns for FASB Statements 141 and 142.

The brain science of learning suggests that the most effective workforce training tools engage the worker in a way that directly and naturally maps onto the relevant learning and memory systems in the brain.

PTC’s Vuforia Expert Capture uses augmented reality technology to meet these needs by curating subject matter experts’ knowledge and presenting that information to workers in a way that minimizes cognitive load while simultaneously engaging experiential and behavioral skills learning systems in the brain.

This speeds time to productivity, trains subject matter and behavioral skills expertise, all while reducing training costs. To describe how this works, I’ve recently written a Market Milestone describing the brain science and use cases that Expert Capture is best suited for. To access this report, which has been licensed by PTC, at no cost, please visit https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/ar/report/brain-science-behind-augmented-reality

Practice: Accounting Tech

Key Stakeholders: Chief Financial Officers, Chief Accounting Officers, Vice President of Finance, Vice President of Accounting, Corporate Controllers, Financial Close Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers, Finance Directors and Managers, Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Financial Analysts, Staff Accountants

Why This Matters: Transaction matching, a key function in the account reconciliation process, is one of the most time-consuming challenges for timely financial close. Amalgam Insights estimates that 80% of mid-market companies currently conduct transaction matching either manually or with only the assistance of ungoverned spreadsheets. Current transaction matching solutions are either limited in transaction scope or extremely challenging for mid-market organizations to implement in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner.

Key Takeaway: With FloQast Matching, mid-sized enterprises and organizations have access to a scalable and usable transaction matching solution that will significantly reduce time-to-close by eliminating painful manual reviews for the vast majority of transactions and reducing matching error rates.
Continue reading Accounting Tech Market Alert: FloQast Provides AI-Powered Transaction Matching to Accelerate the Financial Close

Mid-February (Feb. 17 – 23) was a hot week for data and cloud migration companies with two big acquisitions.

Google announced on Tuesday, Feb. 19 the acquisition of Alooma to assist with cloud data migration issues. This acquisition aligns well with the 2018 acquisition of Velostrata to support cloud workload migration. This acquisition reflects Google’s continued interest in the Israeli cloud tech ecosystem to acquire technology solutions. It also shows that Google is pushing for enterprise cloud data and workloads and will be better positioned to migrate storage and compute from other clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. As Google Cloud Platform continues to grow, this allows Google to be better positioned to

• become a primary enterprise solution for more enterprises as Google is better positioned to acquire structured data en masse from public and private competitors
• be a credible backup or business continuity solution for enterprises that may want a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solution
• be a competitive provider to help enterprises with cost reduction either through being a foil in contract negotiations or to simply optimize cost in areas where Google resources and services end up being either more cost-effective or easier to manage than similar services from other cloud vendors

This acquisition will allow enterprises looking at cloud as a primary or significant compute and storage tool to consider Google Cloud Platform to replace, replicate, and/or backup existing cloud environments and provides a step forward for Google Cloud Platform to continue growing in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market that Amalgam Insights estimates is currently growing at over 50% year-over-year driven by AWS growing 45%, Microsoft growing 76%, Google Cloud Platform’s assumed growth of 30-40%, and Alibaba Cloud growth of 84% based on the last quarter, the last of which shows Alibaba’s potential to leapfrog Google Cloud Platform in the next even as it has not significantly expanded past the Chinese market.

And there’s more!

On Thursday, February 21, Qlik announced its intention to acquire Attunity for $560 million. Attunity is based in the Boston area and has been a market leader in change data capture and data duplication with a considerable enterprise and cloud provider customer list. The scale of Attunity’s data transfer needs has made Attunity a proven solution for managing, transfer, backup, and recovery of data for on-prem, private cloud, and public cloud.

When I first covering Attunity in 2012, the stock was trading at around $5 per share after having survived both the dot-com and 2008 recessions. At the time, the company was repositioning itself as a cloud enabler and I had the opportunity to speak at their 2013 Analyst Day. At that time, I told the investing crowd that Attunity was aligned to a massive cloud opportunity because of its unique role in data replication and in supporting Cloud-based Big Data.

In 2018, Attunity’s stock finally reaped the benefits of this approach as the stock tripled based on rapidly growing customer counts and revenue driven by the need to manage data across multi-region cloud environments, multiple cloud vendors, and hybrid cloud environments. In light of this rapid growth, it is no surprise that Attunity was a strong acquisition target in early 2019’s cash-rich, data-rich, and cloud-dependent world. Looking at Attunity’s income statements, it is easy to see why Qlik made this acquisition from a pure financial perspective as Attunity has crossed the line into profitability and developed a scalable and projectable business that now needs additional sales and marketing resources to fully execute.

Amalgam Insights believes that Attunity provides Qlik with a strong data partner to go with last year’s acquisition of Podium Data (also a Boston-area startup) as a data catalog. With this acquisition, Qlik continues to build itself out as a broad enterprise data solution post-Thoma Bravo acquisition.

With this acquisition, Qlik users are in a comfortable position of being provided with a next-generation data ecosystem to support their move to the cloud and to support a broad range of data sources, formats, and use cases. Qlik is taking a step forward to support mature enterprise needs at a time when a number of its Business Intelligence competitors are focusing on incremental changes in usability, data preparation, or performance.

Amalgam Insights sees the acquisition of Attunity as a competitive advantage for Qlik in net-new deals and believes that this acquisition provides companies considering investments in cloud data or broad cloud migrations to immediately add Qlik to the list of vendors that need to be added to the enterprise toolkit to fully manage these projects.

The big picture for enterprises is that cloud data migration is a core capability to support BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery), hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. Google Cloud Platform is now more enterprise-ready and competitive with its larger competitors, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, at a time when Thomas Kurian is taking the reins. Qlik is establishing itself as a powerful Big Data and Cloud Data vendor at a time when Big Data continues to triple year after year. The enterprise data world is changing quickly and both Google and Qlik made moves to respond to burgeoning market demand.

On December 22, 2018, the longest government shutdown in American history began. Approximately 800,000 employees have been affected with roughly 380,000 workers being furloughed and another 420,000 working without pay. Many of the 420,000 employees being required to work without pay make important, and often split-second, life or death decisions.

This includes the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and air traffic control, to name a few. While these employees are attempting to focus on their job (without pay), they are also pondering how to pay their rent or mortgage and whether to buy food, medicine, or gas.

With each passing day and missed paycheck, the shutdown is causing increased stress and anxiety. It creeps into the workers’ consciousness whether they like it or not.

From a brain science perspective, the likelihood of a major accident increases significantly every day mission-critical government workers are required to perform their jobs without pay, and with no clear indication of when their next paycheck will arrive.

Brain Science for Routine Behavior

From a brain science perspective, the effects of stress on decision making are well understood.  Well-established, routine behaviors such as swabbing luggage for bomb-making material or maintaining buoys and lighthouses is only moderately affected. Behaviors such as these are learned and initiated by the behavioral skills system in the brain that encompasses the basal ganglia, and is best learned and performed without “overthinking it.”

Situational Awareness Is Weakened By Shutdown-Driven Stress

However, cognitive processes and to a higher degree situational awareness are seriously hampered by shutdown-driven stress. Cognitive processing such as routing planes in flight and maintaining defense readiness in ports and on the oceans is strongly affected. Cognitive processing involves the cognitive skills system in the brain that recruits the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes and relies heavily on working memory and attention. Stress and anxiety engage emotion centers in the brain that appropriate cognitive resources (working memory and attention) from the task at hand.

Situational awareness is especially affected by shutdown-driven stress. Situational awareness involves effectively processing and comprehending the situation around you, and projecting the future state. Situational awareness relies on cognitive, emotional and behavioral skills systems in the brain and involves knowing “what to do, when.”  Situational awareness is critical to Coast Guard, TSA and air traffic control operations because these operations require constant diligence to effectively evaluate the current and future situations that often require split-second decisions and projections into the future. It is this ability to “think on one’s feet” and to make the right split-second decision that is at serious risk when these employees are attempting work and simultaneously deal with the stress and anxiety of going unpaid.

Conclusion

With each passing day the likelihood of a major accident increases. Critical decision-making centers in the brain that are central to the mission of the Coast Guard, TSA, and air traffic control are operating at sub-optimal levels because shutdown-driven stress and anxiety are holding important cognitive and situational awareness processes hostage. This is only going to get worse. Putting politics aside, and focusing exclusively on the psychological and brain science of decision-making, the only solution is to end the shutdown and allow these workers to do their job with pay, and with their full brain processing capacity focused on the job.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Todd Maddox, Ph.D. has more than 200 published articles, 10,000 citings, and $10 million in external research funding in his 25+ years researching the brain basis of behavior.  Maddox is available for comment on this topic and can be contacted via media@amalgaminsights.com

Note: This blog is a followup to Amalgam Insights’ visit to the “Change the Game” event held by IBM in New York City.

On September 19th, IBM announced its launch of a portfolio of AI trust and transparency capabilities. This announcement got Amalgam Insight’s attention because of IBM’s relevance and focus in the enterprise AI market throughout this decade.  To understand why IBM’s specific launch matters, take a step back in considering IBM’s considerable role in building out the current state of the enterprise AI market.

IBM AI in Context

Since IBM’s public launch of IBM Watson on Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM has been a market leader in enterprise artificial intelligence and spent billions of dollars in establishing both IBM Watson and AI. This has been a challenging path to travel as IBM has had to balance this market-leading innovation with the financial demands of supporting a company that brought in $107 billion in revenue in 2011 and has since seen this number shrink by almost 30%.

In addition, IBM had to balance its role as an enterprise technology company focused on the world’s largest workloads and IT challenges with launching an emerging product better suited for highly innovative startups and experimental enterprises. And IBM also faced the “cloudification” of enterprise IT in general, where the traditional top-down purchase of multi-million dollar IT portfolios is being replaced by piecemeal and business-driven purchases and consumption of best-in-breed technologies.

Seven years later, the jury is still out on how AI will ultimately end up transforming enterprises. What we do know is that a variety of branches of AI are emerging, including Continue reading Why It Matters that IBM Announced Trust and Transparency Capabilities for AI

Kubernetes has, in the span of a few short years, become the de facto orchestration software for containers. As few as two years ago there were more than a half-dozen orchestration tools vying for the top spot and now there is only Kubernetes. Even the Linux Foundation’s other orchestrator project, CloudFoundry Diego, is starting to give way to Kubernetes. Part of the success of Kubernetes can be attributed to the support of Google. Kubernetes emerged out of Google and they have continued to bolster the project even as it fell under the auspices of the Linux Foundation’s CNCF.

On August 29, 2018, Google announced that it is giving $9M in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credit to the CNCF Kubernetes project. This is being hailed by both Google and the CNCF as an announcement of major support. $9M is a lot of money, even if it is credits. However, let’s unpack this announcement a bit more and see what it really means.
Continue reading Google Grants $9 Million in Google Cloud Platform Credits to Kubernetes Project