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4 Key Developer Responsibilities Where Machine Learning Can Help

Note: A version of this post was published to Tom’s Tech Take II

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?

Here are some examples:
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Amalgam Insights Analyzes Sage Intacct and Pacioli AI

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.

Sage Intacct Pursues AI with Pacioli

In addition, Sage Intacct also announced its pursuit of Artificial Intelligence in Pacioli, named after the inventor of double-entry accounting. (Amalgam believes this is the second most inspired name for an AI behind only Infor’s Coleman named after Katherine Coleman Johnson.)

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.

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28 Hours as an Industry Analyst at Strata Data 2017

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grid-725269_640

Companies Mentioned: Aberdeen Group, Actian, Alation, Arcadia Data, Attunity, BMC, Cambridge Semantics, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataKitchen, Datameer, Datarobot, Domino Data Lab, EMA, HPE, Hurwitz and Associates, IBM, Informatica, Kogentix, LogTrust, Looker, <MesoSphere, Micro Focus, Microstrategy, Ovum, Paxata, Podium Data, Qubole, SAP, Snowflake, Strata Data, Tableau, Tamr, Tellius, Trifacta.

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:
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Microsoft: The New Player in Quantum Computing

Doppelspalt
Doppelspalt

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

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Riverside Partners Acquires Calero: TEM in Transition

Calero Logo
Calero

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:

  1. Why Clearlake sold Calero?
  2. Who is Riverside Partners, a relatively new player in the TEM space?
  3. What to expect from Calero going forward?

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Sumeru Equity Partners Acquires MDSL and Combines with Telesoft

Title Page: SEP Acquires MDSL
SEP Acquires MDSL

Note: Updated August 2nd with coverage links from Sumeru, MDSL, Telesoft, AltAssets, AOTMP, Crunchbase, PEHub, and Pitchbook.

In case you missed the announcement, as of July 31st, Sumeru Equity Partners has acquired MDSL and is joining Telesoft with MDSL to form a single Technology Expense Management company. I had a few opinions about the new MDSL that didn’t fit into my more formal analysis because they’re observations rather than directional guidance. If you haven’t read the formal Market Milestone yet, please check it out.

First, Sumeru Equity Partners has an interesting portfolio of companies that could be accretive to the new MDSL company. Take a look at their current portfolio:
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Microsoft “Early Adopts” New ASC 606 Revenue Recognition Standard

The ASC 606 Apocalypse is at hand!
Apocalypse by Michael Lehenbauer on Flickr

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

But the part that got my attention was a relatively minor 2 paragraph note near the bottom of the earnings announcement on ASC 606 revenue recognition:
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Infor and the 80% Solution: Coleman, Birst, GT Nexus, and CloudSuites

Coleman is Infor's Artificial Intelligence Effort
Coleman is Infor’s Artificial Intelligence Effort

When I represented Amalgam Insights at Inforum, I was wondering if I would be a fish out of water. After all, I am not an ERP analyst. I am not a retail analyst. I am not an HR technology analyst. And those are the first three things I think of when Infor comes to mind. As an analyst who focuses on technology consumption and bridging gaps between the CIO and CFO, I was wondering what would grab my attention other than Infor’s acquisition of Birst.

I was pleasantly surprised by the clarity of Infor’s vision of supporting industry-specific technology consumption. Infor ended up bringing up three key ideas that are core to the future of technology consumption and will end up being strategic considerations for the future of IT.
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How does the 2017 version of HPE support enterprise IT departments?

Meg Whitman at HPE Discover 2017
Meg Whitman at HPE Discover 2017

Recently, Amalgam Insights attended HPE Discover, HPE’s semi-annual show devoted to its enterprise offerings. Our firm was especially interested in seeing how HPE would position itself after having divested much of its software portfolio to Micro Focus and then spin-merging its Enterprise Services division with CSC to form DXC Technology on April 1st of this year.

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.

How HPE found its focus

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The Evolution of IBM’s Cloud, Watson, and Analytic Consulting at IBM Vision

In mid-May, Amalgam Insights (AI) attended IBM Vision, an event focused on business performance, both as an attendee and a presenter. This has been my favorite IBM tradeshow for several years, as it focuses directly on key concerns that I have looked at throughout my career: financial management, enterprise governance, and compliance. Because everyone at this show is focused on some form of BI, performance management, or risk, it is easy to speak with a business user, consultant, or IBM professional at this show and to quickly find common professional ground.

This year, I took three key findings away from IBM Vision that should be of ongoing value for financial departments within the enterprise.

• The Maturity of IBM’s Cloud Analytics Capabilities
• Promontory Digital’s Role for IBM and IBM Watson
• IBM’s DataFirst Method for Analytic Consulting
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