Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

S/4HANA is a force multiplier: S/4HANA is part of the "next generation of ERP," meaning its intelligent, sustainable, and collaborative. The product is truly a "model A suite of applications," leveraging the best ERP systems have to offer. The company ensures the time-to-market for the product is quick, offers great value to users, and is an overall end-to-end product for customers. Industry-speci...

How Oracle Brings Horizontal, Vertical Solutions to Bear for Financial Services Industry The Big Themes: Shifting needs for financial services companies: Generational shifts are taking place, explains Sicilia. Traditionally, banks have "built a lot of it themselves on top of bespoke systems." As such, it can become expensive and "non-elastic" to maintain these systems. The combination of Oracle's...

Innovation: Upwards of 70% of IT spend is dedicated to compliance, leaving only 30% of the budget for innovation. This is a tremendous drag on productivity, as organizations and business leaders want to be innovating. IBM partners with over 70 financial institutions to "put the industry muscle together." Global Financial Services Councils: In an effort to help mitigate the complexities associated...

VCU Health and Workday | A Unified Platform The Big Themes: Process improvements: In order to enable healthcare workers to perform to the highest degree of their license, VCU Health recognizes the importance of technologies that enable process improvements. By working with Workday, VCU Health is able to optimize its resources, and people, by leveraging Workday systems and technologies to the great...

Episode 45 | Infrastructure, Software, Applications The Big Themes: CIO "Lego blocks": CIOs in tech are looking for vendors to provide the "building blocks" that are necessary to develop applications. When CIOs approach the board, they are not looking to describe servers and storage, but rather, systems, or applications. Vendors compete on the strength of their products: Wayne praises Oracle for c...

Episode 20 | Combatting Declining Productivity The Big Themes: Declining rates of productivity: For five consecutive quarters, productivity rates in the United States have been steadily declining. In the most recent quarter, it was down nearly 3%. "It's very clear worker productivity is in jeopardy, or so we say as corporations." Work from home may be a factor: Employers are facing economic and ma...

Episode 29 | Key Takeaways from Oracle Summits, Customers, Partners The Big Themes: Bonnie's lens: When attending analyst events, Bonnie looks for the impact that products and related announcements have on customer experience, and how the technology or software is, or can be, implemented. Market demands for customers: As of late, customers are focused on hiring faster, more effectively, and contro...

The Big Themes: Delivering solutions that create agility for the business: Aviatrix handles the compiling of security enforcement into the fabric of the network. All a customer needs to do is tell Aviatrix the policy of what they want to do, and Avaiatrix puts it into the CI/CD pipeline. Distributed cloud firewalls are the way: In trying to "fix" network security, distributed cloud firewalls offer...

How Workday Applies AI and ML Technologies to Healthcare Industry The Big Themes: Patient-centered care: Workday applies AI and ML technologies to deliver on its promise of delivering patient-centered care, by looking closely at past patient records. "Already, we have seen that AI and ML apply to help our diagnosis, to help with automation, to help guide our care recommendations, and so much more,...

The Big Themes:  Do more with less: Finance is a highly volatile business environment where things are rapidly evolving. As a result, finance teams are challenged to work within their current processes, yet still need to respond to ongoing change. Arima proposes that a company should be aligned with its data model, data definitions, business drivers, and hierarchy structure. How Workday Adaptive P...

Episode 14 | Lost Your Job? Here's What to Do The Big Themes: Company names and personal networks: Pat suggests that new hires create two lists: one to list companies, and one to list personal networks. This is a simple and effective way to "do your research" and will help guide your job search. "The reality is your network is going to be your biggest avenue" for finding a new job, explains Pat. T...

The Big Themes: Creating room for innovation: Financial services companies spend 60-70% of their IT budgets on compliance, leaving little room for innovation. This is a critical area that the IBM Cloud for Financial Services, a solution that is co-created and co-built with the industry, addresses. Real-time compliance monitoring: IBM offers real-time, constant compliance monitoring to banks and fi...

The Big Themes: Purpose-built solutions centered on people: Managing resources to deliver for customers can be a challenge for companies with large services organizations. Certinia's solutions are purpose-built, focusing on the people and the service economy business, rather than product ID, which was formerly considered to be the "center of the universe." Synchronous process flows: When looking a...

The Big Themes: Be intentional about the use of generative AI: Christian advises that when bringing generative AI into the workforce — or any technology, for that matter — that humans must ensure they remain the "master" and the technology remains the "servant." Consider trust: Christian encourages everyone to "get smarter on these things" but within the context of their companies. Business employ...

Episode 44 | How Partners Ecosystems Drive the Acceleration Economy The Big Themes: The four types of partners: Value-add re-marketer (VAR), independent software vendor (ISV), implementation support consultants, and co-creation partners. Each of these partner types multiples a businesses ability to deliver. How partners are changing the game: Gone are the days where partners roles are limited to j...

Episode 28 | Generative AI and the Impact on Enterprise Software Purcashing, Use, Implementation The Big Themes: Extensive experimentation: Bonnie tested the impacts and effectiveness of generative AI around the area of software selection and implementation, prompting the tool to provide scenarios and advice around purchasing and implementing software, from the perspective of a customer. Generativ...

How Workday Adaptive Helps ENMAX with Forecasting Capabilities The Big Themes: Workday Adaptive Planning helps ENMAX discover a single version of the truth: With this software, everyone in the company is working off the same data set and can be used for whatever purpose is necessary. A single view across three applications: ENMAX utilizes Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday HCM, and Workday Financi...

Episode 27 | Employee Centric-Culture and the Future of the Workforce Note: this episode contains explicit language. The Big Themes: Layoffs at Salesforce: Salesforce recently cut about 10% of its entire workforce which suggests a big shift in performance culture. Business leaders are now looking for a culture that is employee-centric and produces tangible results. A choice for listeners to make:...

The Big Themes: Forget the headlines, what's in this product? Is generative AI and ChatGPT truly the "next big thing," or is this something that has been around for awhile and is just now starting to get popular? When starting college in 1970, Wayne was encouraged to study computing programming because experts were predicting that by 1975, artificial intelligence (AI) would be "writing all the pro...

The Big Themes: Top CEO priorities: To drive digital business, top CEOs are focusing on acquiring and retaining talent, and leveraging and deploying emerging technologies such as AI and ML. Regardless of the company, all businesses must be "tech-enabled" now. New business models: The new (and multiple) business models of today are geared to adapt to meet customers where they are. Companies are shi...

The Big Themes: What it takes to be great: companies must strongly consider incorporating DEI initiatives into their businesses but must be careful not to let the focus on talent and culture fall by the wayside. Go back to the "foundational" piece: The "big initiative" of today's companies should be addressing exactly what the priorities are. Attract talent, but know how to retain it: A strong foc...

Episode 28 |  Supply Chains: The "Orchestrator" of Today's Business The Big Themes: Why AWS entered the supply chain space: The company has the knowledge and expertise to solve critical issues for businesses today. AWS is "putting its competency to work for its customers." Customers want to create their own roadmap: AWS Supply Chain is not a "rip and replace solution." The product leverages the al...

The Big Themes: Fixing human error: The biggest cybersecurity vulnerability companies have is their people, and there's no software tool or system that is more powerful than cultivating an awareness of secure practices among employees. Setting the right example: Business leaders must practice what they preach. No more leaving laptops open to email inboxes on our desks. Demonstrate the company's mi...

The Big Themes: The automation of knowledge work: This has been happening for a while now—just think of the hours of labor eliminated by search engines—but generative AI takes this automation to a different, higher level. ChatGPT is overhyped: The panic over AI tools replacing journalists, teachers, and all human workers is overblown, Tony says. Businesses should be focused on augmenting the work...

Episode 26 | AI and the Rise of the Intellectual Capitalist Note: this episode contains explicit language. The Big Themes: Knowledge workers are no longer at the top of the pyramid: Careers like lawyer, doctor, and engineer have long been highly valuable and widely esteemed, but by making tons of knowledge readily accessible and mostly free, tools like ChatGPT are going to push knowledge workers d...