Don't miss ConstellationTV episode 88 đź“ş This week, co-hosts Liz Miller and Holger Mueller unpack the latest enterprise #tech news (Oracle's #CloudWorld announcements and database integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure AND how recent leadership changes at SAP will impact it's future direction).
Then, Holger introduces his 2024 Workforce Management ShortList, describing what qualifies vendors for the list, and highlighting ADP specifically for its strong scheduling capabilities, #UX, labor forecasting, and #payroll integration.
Finally, Liz highlights her 2024 Digital Asset Management (#DAM) in High-Volume Commerce Shortlist, emphasizing the importance of scale, usability, integrations, and speed, and naming OpenText for its integration capabilities, simplicity, and all-inclusive subscription pricing.
00:00 - Meet the Hosts
00:59 - #Enterprise Tech News updates (Oracle & SAP announcements)
17:41 - Workforce Management ShortList feat. ADP
23:16 - DAM for High-Volume Commerce ShortList feat. OpenText
34:55 - Bloopers!
ConstellationTV is a bi-weekly Web series hosted by Constellation analysts, tune in live at 9:00 a.m. PT/ 12:00 p.m. ET every other Wednesday!
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News Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)
Hello everybody. It's Holger Miller here from Constellation Research. Welcoming my fabulous course. Liz Miller to episode number 88 welcome Liz 88 Thank you, Holger. It's great to be here, although you and I now have officially kicked off event silly season. So here is a randomly moving pin on a map to be determined later. But it started. It has begun. We've kicked off three months of absolute madness, but we couldn't be happy to be here with you folks. Let's get right into it with the news. Thank
Yeah, I'm in Las Vegas, so it's cloud world going on once a year, Oracle User Conference. And I didn't expect it would happen now. I would expect it would happen at some point. As you know, Oracle's been putting its database into Azure, where it started. All got renewed last year with being available to provision Oracle for the Azure console, they added Google Cloud and spring and now, believe it or not, Matt Garman was on stage with Oracle founder Larry Ellison, talking about the benefits of running the Oracle database inside of AWS. Now great news for customers, of course, because it means you can use your trusted, transactional, mission critical database in conjunction with the whole AWS stack. I think it's a win win for customers behind the scenes. On the database side, it means that the last people who were kind of like saying, we have a better database for transactional applications was AWS, and that has got similar like Microsoft or SQL Server, Google was never in that field, but basically, Oracle has won the competition for performance critical transaction databases.
And interesting enough, also big here, the heatwave database, which also runs on AWS since a long time, and running on Azure as well, has also low code, low offering, MySQL, open source based so to like database answer, great, great progress, or great situation from Oracle perspective, good situation for customers, because there's really only one database. Let's hope that Oracle doesn't abuse that position. Otherwise compares to who would never do this? Oracle, right? No, no. Oracle would never do this. So good news on the OCI side as well, more latency, smaller instances, basically, or it can put their cloud into any on premise solution, so satellites, public cloud, and last but not least, SaaS, I mean, massive investment the SaaS side, it's all going agent based over 50 agents announced always going to be more last year, they said 50. AI solutions channel to be 100. The industry stuff is super deep and vertical. It's a really good time to be an Oracle customer. If you're a prospect, you definitely have to look at Oracle across the stack. And I mean, last comment on this right, Larry Allison's vision was always build the better IBM, or the next IBM, or the 20th century. Well, now then 21st century. And he basically, I think, has achieved that, but he has something across compute, hardware, compute, networking missed that already pass database and software application, and it runs in the multi cloud.
So, I mean, what else would be the IBM of the 21st century, the all the one place where every company has to stop by for it as the SMB offering. On the NetSuite side, there's a small case database side, so fitting all boxes, it's good time on the Oracle side for Oracle customers. I think it's why, when I, when I see everything they're doing, that it is, it is really smart. It is really methodical, very strategic on both the infrastructure and on the data, on just, you know, the availability and the usability of everything that you know you've got something that is financially sound and secure, which you can't necessarily say for a lot of their competitors. It is one of the reasons why I think I have a heightened expectation that their reworked CX solutions and their strategies around CX sales, marketing, service and commerce. If we look at all four of those, I need to see more, right? If I'm being super honest, I need to see, you know, I'm expecting a whole lot, maybe not out of this cloud world. But what happens three months from now? Four months from now, what are we going to continue to see coming out of them? They reworked that fusion platform.
We know that they took the best of the best out of all of their acquisitions over the past, you know, 567, years, they got rid of a lot of the advertising nonsense that was really mucking up. Here's right, if we're really being honest about what happens when you try to merge ad tech in with your CX platform, it is never going to be a pretty picture. I think everyone has learned that at. This point, but with Oracle, I really have high expectations, because because of a lot of the work that they've done there, my expectation is that we start to hear a heck of a lot more around what CX leaders who are on OCI, where your IT infrastructure has made this decision. They've moved their databases. They've moved their infrastructure into the cloud. They are now working in this environment where the data is truly available for these business applications. I want to hear more about the whims and the use cases, right? I want to hear more about the connectivity. I want to hear more about the interoperability of all of these suites of not just fusion sales, fusion service, fusion commerce and these buckets. I want to hear how these customers are bringing it all together. And so I'm hoping that we hear that through a lot of these industry conversations. I think that the way that they have brought these tools together is really smart. Now it's going to be, at least for CX buyers. This is where the rubber has to meet the road. It can't just be about, well, we have OCI, like, we've got this great infrastructure. It's like, okay, great. Now I want to see more.
So I think it's going to be a really interesting time, as much as I wish I could be at Cloud world. I am off doing other nefarious things here in New York with the team at Sprinklr, and then I'll be heading up and seeing the folks at emphasis and you know, both are really trying to make strides into that CX space, offering different solutions and offering very different suite and platform offerings with a new AI driven marketing automation that's coming out of emphasis, we've got, you know, certainly, more connected solutions here at Sprinklr. So it's, it's a very interesting space right now. All of it comes with that magical sparkle pixie dust that's going to solve everything. It's going to cure everything. I don't know if you know about this folder. It's called AI, yeah, exactly. It's interesting. It's interesting that we see a lot of activity, again, from the formerly beaten CRM players at the ERP vendor trying to get back in the game. We saw that SAP at Sapphire as well. Also interesting, like just minor side, right? So Oracle doesn't talk about HCM, finance, supply chain, purchasing, but sales, service and marketing. I live in the same level like HCM finance and so on. So at least they can get some airtime. I hope that the execution works on the HCM side. And the important thing there is that workforce management necessary for Cerner, you can't have a ehm solution or workforce management had to be built. So that means and the partnership with Kronos, aka UKG, and it turns out that healthcare scheduling is so complex that it also works really well for retail, which also one of the most scheduled, exactly so. But that's where workforce is getting really interesting. And I think that is where, I mean, we talk about it a lot here at Constellation, right the breakdown of that wall between the technologies and solutions that are required for customer experience and employee experience. And it's not that fluffy middle ground, right? Of like, everyone's happy. So everyone's happy, it's like, no. This is really hard stuff to manage, managing customer journeys and managing scheduling. Isn't as easy as dropping three blips into a workflow and having the arrow go in the right direction, right? These are really hard things to do with a lot of different systems have to connect into these tools to make this flow, especially if you want to look at autonomous actions. So when you start to look at something like contact center scheduling, it's not an Excel spreadsheet anymore. Kids, right? Like we have to start looking at some of these automated fashions, but we also then have to look at, how does that impact everything downstream? So I think we're going to start to see those blend together. We're certainly, we're certainly gonna be talking about it more at our ambient experience Summit.
That's gonna come up in 2025 so holders gonna get dragged in kicking and screaming on that one. So then, how's that for news everyone? That's a good news flash. Yeah, one takeaway from the Oracle side, right? I mean, Oracle was pronounced this more than a few times, right? And I think the lesson learned, really there is, as long as a software vendor keeps the customers and the customers don't go away, even if they don't like you, which is exactly case of war, you may eventually get it right. And then, if you have, if you're profitable enough, which oracle was, and you know when to invest. I mean, if you look Oracle, put like 30 billion or so into OCI and Nvidia GPUs, right? I mean, always jokingly say Larry and Safra spent money like drunken sailors on this, but when they saw an opportunity, they had the financial resource to invest. Which the big difference to all the vendors which were relevant in the 90s as well. If you look at IBM, if you look at Cisco, if you look at Dell, all these people, all these vendors didn't have the resources to build their own cloud infrastructure. So that makes Oracle unique. Now that's a SaaS vendor which has their own cloud and coming into the eye area. What could be good about this? Right? We can think of lots of things which for another video.
So that's absolutely and I think this is and I think that this theme, and everything that you're talking about here that we're going to start seeing cloud start seeing cloud world. I mean, talk about what happens in the next week when we start to head into things like Dreamforce, and you start looking at all the heavy lifting that the folks at Salesforce has had to do over the past couple of years to get their own cloud and get their own platform in order and create that foundation so they could build these solid business applications. And on top of it. So you now have a scenario where, okay, you know what? What are we going to start to see at Dreamforce? Are we going to start to see what happens when all of this connectivity can happen and all of these agents in this kind of big agentic life that we can now start experiencing within corporations? How does that have to happen? It has to happen because you've got, you've collectivized all of the data and all of the infrastructure in that public cloud space, and with all that data available, so customers have not moved to the public cloud as they could have. So that will be the interesting thing that for me next week at Dreamforce to see what is holding them up right at the same time rising right the bromance between workday and Salesforce, again, another partnership, same problem there, build on their own, and haven't gone to the public cloud yet. So the partnership with Salesforce and AWS, they, you know, they are now, are also available in Azure. So I think that, I do think that we're going to start to see, you know, we've seen, we've seen some pre briefings.
We can't talk about them right now, of course, just because they're under NDA until Dreamforce. But I think we are going to see a couple things that are going to start showing why the last several years of building this foundation had to happen, and now there's a reason why, I think for a lot of customers, there wasn't a reason why, because there were just certain clouds that weren't available over there, right? If you can't get everything in one spot. Why do you want to tip over the apple cart? So I think we're going to start to see some of those reasons and those reasons to believe. So stay tuned, because I know in our next episode, episode number 89 with Larry and with Martin, they're going to be doing some stuff from Dreamforce. And of course, you're going to probably see a whole lot of us posting from there. You're going to see Holger talking. You'll see me talking. But listen, lots of news is happening. We didn't even get to touch on the fact that Google has officially started their trial, or the DOJ actually has officially started its trial against Google with its antitrust in creating unfair advertising practices and creating unfair imbalance in the online advertising business. That's going to have a whole lot of fireworks. We're going to have to get big buckets of popcorn. This is not going to be a quick and easy trial. A lot of stuff is going to come out. There's going to be a lot of stuff that comes out about what happens when Google and Facebook try to go do a couple things that they might not, might not be great. So lots of stuff is going to be coming out there. We've also had a big shake up at SAP, um, you know, and we're kind of entering into a new era. We've gotten rid of threes and boxes and seen, you know, other board members, but you know Holger, we're going a little bit over here. We're going to get yelled at by our wonderful producer, Hannah, but let's take a minute.
When you look at SAP, of course, it's sad to see folks that we had great relationships with go, but they're all going to move on to other things. You know, we've already seen one board member. We've already seen Scott Russell be announced as the new CEO over at, nice, the big C Cass and, you know, contact center leader. So that's a great role for him. It's a great pickup for nice opens up a Rolodex of CIOs that have trusted Scott for decades. So it really brings them into a very, very different posture. So great pickup for them, you know, but, you know, it's sad to see folks go. But what does this mean for SAP? If you were to kind of crystal ball this, and you look at this and say, Okay, what this means for the next six months, 12 months? What do you see happening with SAP? Yeah, so we're definitely in the post hustle platinum era in SAP, right? Some of the board members, which are no longer there, were very close to him. Were pushed by him to be in their position, got their back strengthened by him in multiple occasions. So we'll see how that's going to pan out. To all these roles will be filled. What we know for sure it's the least experienced board SAP ever since SAP went public, and no board member had public company experience, obviously, right? So there's only two board, three board members, and barely one that CFO Dominic Assam is is barely over one year, and Thomas our IC and Christine Klein irons basically on their shoulders to move sap to as Farhana convince SAP customers to move there, which is a really, really difficult challenge, specifically on the platform side. Wilk Muller gum, Christine Klein always spoke very highly of the platform in his early days, before he was even CEO, much of this was to Bill McDermott, who had bets with he would say platform in the keynote, and he wouldn't say it.
But fine, that doesn't matter. So history, what's interesting from that? And report the platform reports directly to Christian. So we'll see how that changes the dynamics. We're moving more to an SAP board, like at the original founding, where every board member had a development functionality and go to market functionality, right? So we have Thomas Allen, all they do go to market part, all the maintenance of the old things, all the customer transformation, because the client, basically, apart from Moritz alarm, who has the application side, has a platform and so on. So we'll see so for a moment. And you know the history of SAP say, Hey, can I be in charge of your sales, or Japan sales, or whatever? Just as to go back to the old traditional, yeah. I think it's a big opportunity though. Like, I don't you know, like, it's always sad to see those, those phases happen, and you never want to see people go but I will say, after the momentum that I saw of what they're doing with primarily grow right, primarily some of that motion with that mid market, I think there are a lot of positive signs that people are kind of understanding where SAP wants their organizations and wants their enterprises to go. They've got the heavy the heavy industrial, you know, position. But I will say the interesting thing of this for me are the changes that happen on the supervisory board, kind of before all of this happened. Because I think that's where a lot of the guidance, and that's where a lot of the push for innovation can really come from. You have a lot of folks that are kind of very new to the SAP ecosystem that are potentially going to ask leaders like Christian, leaders like Thomas to say, Okay, where are we going next? Where are we pushing next? So I actually think this could be a real opportunity for Christian to really become his own CEO. So I'm kind of excited to see it like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna lie. I think it's I think it's gonna be a challenge for him, but I think it's one that he's a little battle tested already for. So I think it could be a good thing you and I, of course, have had a chance to get some of the inside scoop on some of the tools and solutions that are going to be coming out over the next several months. SAP. It's going to be super interesting to see what generation, age wise, cmo and CRO SAP is going to hire. Right is that, might they be younger, or might they get somebody experienced older in there? But it could set up a management team for SAP for the next 20 years. Right between consistency being a cloud world would be the same like at Oracle 20 plus experience on every side, on database, leadership side, on the application leadership side, right? Only the Cloud Guy claiming Gore is a newbie with six, seven years or something being there, which is completely new. It's more tenure than all the new SAP board members have together, right?
So and consistency is very important in this business, right? People build relationships. Software's the business of trust. They have to trust your bits and bytes to what you say. So it's high stakes, certain amount of risk, I think Christian has ability to get it right, and we'll see. First thing will be nominate, seeing who they get for CMO of zero.
So yeah, okay, well, we're gonna have the hook pulled on us by stop from she's just gonna pop on here and just tell us to be quiet. So hey, thanks for joining us. We got a couple interviews that are gonna be coming up. We got we're gonna talk about some short lists. We're gonna talk about what's happening out there in the world of digital. So stay tuned. We do have a little bit more content for you, but, you know, Holger and I could rant all day, but we'll see That's right.
