Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes: Apex's culture of curiosity: While the CFO's domain is traditionally finance, JJ explains that at Apex, he is focused on business forecasting, not just financial. Workday Adaptive Planning was the perfect tool for the inclusive and cooperative culture at Apex. Effective planning keeps Apex ahead of disruption: The ability to create scenarios that incorporate many shareholders' voic...

The Big Themes: Don't ignore the threat of ChatGPT: Even as a company with incredibly advanced AI capabilities, Google is doing the right thing by treating this kind of new interactive AI chatbot as a challenger to its massive search business. Be open to the possibilities of ChatGPT: On the other hand, Microsoft is very wisely looking to bring ChatGPT into the fold and enhance its existing product...

The Big Themes: The WFH challenge for young talent: creating a personal network and building personal credibility are incredibly important early in a career, and Pat worries that young people are not getting the networking and mentorship opportunities that working shoulder-to-shoulder offers. Work ethic in today's world: Pat defines work ethic not as being the first-in, last-out team member, but r...

The Big Themes: Similarities between Madoff and SBF: Both men "wrapped themselves" in celebrity, fancy parties, and politics. They were able to pull off the deception they created by being good "talkers" and schmoozers. Differences between Madoff and SBF: Where Madoff admitted his wrongdoing virtually immediately, SBF has been spinning a story of incompetence rather than crime. Christopher makes c...

The Big Themes: What inspired Alloy? Less than a decade ago, Clay says, companies were trying and failing to build their own private clouds, because the technology just wasn't there yet. But Oracle believes it now has the tech to meet this desire among customers. What kinds of customers are interested? Clay points to organizations that deal with a lot of regulation as the prime audience for Alloy—...

The Big Themes: Consistency: Companies that ask employees to give up the benefits of remote work and come back to the office must also require executives to do the same. Otherwise, trust disappears and team members disengage. Clarity, candor, transparency: Explaining the specific benefits of returning to in-person work is essential. Saying that productivity will go up is not enough—leaders must pr...

The Big Themes: What's really going on with layoffs? Among the six companies Wayne pulled numbers for, five of them actually have had net-positive employee growth over the last several years. But they are letting people go, and Wayne explains why. Should non-tech companies hire big-tech engineers? There is a big opportunity here, Wayne says, but execs at non-tech companies have to be very, very ca...

The Big Themes: Customer stories at Cloud World 2022: Bonnie praises Oracle for including the voice of the customer in many of the keynote talks at the conference, including Oracle Me HCM customers McDonald's, Marriott, and the Church of Latter Day Saints. Six key takeaways: These three customers talked about their implementation experiences with Oracle HCM technology, and Bonnie wrote up six impo...

The Big Themes:  This is about adaptation, not ageism: Native digitals are not better or worse than native analogs, but they are actually a new category of human being. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not. Businesses at risk of obsolescence: Leaders who do not account for the differences of native digitals are going to face (1) the failure to hire and retain anybody under 35 and (2)...

The Big Themes: Advice for early talent: Pat says that high schoolers and their parents should at least consider options other than college, like trade schools and apprenticeships. He recommends reading "The Millionaire Next Door" to get inspired. Advice for college graduates: First, differentiate yourself during the interview process by doing research. Second, once you're hired, find "your assets...

The Big Themes: An issue of legacy: Related to the concept of "legacy" tech companies, huge companies are often held back by what Christian calls "the mindset legacy," that narrowly defines what the business does and how it does it, with no room for evolution. The importance of culture: Christian says that a company's culture can't just be part of its overall strategy, an intellectual and emotiona...

The Big Themes: Data modernization: Wayne says that a "modern data strategy" completely changes a company's ability to compete, by helping C-suite executives make better decisions and avoid very expensive mistakes. Wayne's 5 rules of data modernization: Collect more data and do it earlier, clean and validate the data, store it securely but accessibly, make it widely available, and provide employee...

The Big Themes: The Task Force Tribute journey: In September, the group arrived in Washington, D.C., having traveled 8,500 miles in 23 days, with dozens of stops to connect with veterans and family members, including many Gold Star families. TFT is collecting stories for a virtual memorial: Next up for the group is to help create an unprecedented, high-tech virtual memorial composed of the hundred...

The Big Themes: Employee experience and Skills Academies: The concept of employee experience has been buzzy for many years, but the focus is shifting from perks to career advancement, reskilling, and equitable pay. Tech as an enabler for change, not a leader of change: Transforming businesses, business models, and employee experiences should be driven by process and change management, with tech pl...

The Big Themes: The need for speed: scaling a business is more difficult than ever, because the rapid pace of change across industries requires leaders to make big decisions more quickly than ever before—and still get the decisions right. The primacy of customers: Tony channels Walter White of Breaking Bad, and says that today, customers are "the ones who knock," meaning they're dictating the term...

The Big Themes: Balancing partnerships and full-service: Mike says that Oracle is thrilled to work with partners to fill "last-mile solutions" and regulatory-specific needs, but also that Oracle is looking to fill vertical edge cases with its own solutions. HCM in healthcare shows Oracle's differentiation: The gig economy is impacting hospitals and other care settings, so Oracle is stepping up wit...

The Big Themes: Customer demand for multi-cloud: Oracle has been focused recently on partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon that allow mutual customers to pick and choose the cloud services they get from each vendor, and Jae says that big-name brands are very hot on this idea. Cloud @ Customer offers even more flexibility: For customers in highly regulated industries or that prefer more control an...

The Big Themes: Tech's "cancel first" policy: From Amazon to Twitter and beyond, tech platforms seem to be far too quick to remove accounts, content, and products without asking any questions about the rule that's allegedly been broken. Brands are abandoning customer service: Trying to reach a human to discuss a customer question is nearly impossible these days. Christopher points to Southwest as...

The Big Themes: The "fourth phase" of Match Group's business: Following the launch of Match.com in the 90's and the breakaway of Tinder in the 2010's, a new phase is coming that's heavily focused on video, AI, augmented reality, language translation, and more. Eliminating manual work and "cycles of death": Trey shares some of the struggles his team had before installing Workday Financials, and the...

The Big Themes: Enhancing the developer experience: This is a major focus for Oracle, and many CloudWorld sessions will focus on work that's been done to help developers use Oracle DBs, including Autonomous Database. Oracle Exadata: Along with database and cloud, Juan says that Exadata is one of three core initiatives for the event. Oracle Database 23c release: CloudWorld will feature the very fir...

Road to Oracle CloudWorld 2022 Oracle Cloud Analytics EVP T.K. Anand The Big Themes: Fusion Analytics showcases what makes Oracle Cloud unique: T.K. argues that Oracle stands out among the competition as the only full-stack enterprise cloud vendor, since Oracle is both a cloud platform and application provider. The next wave of analytics transformation: Following the self-service and the SaaS revo...

The Big Themes: Looking beyond the walls of IT: As the CIO and VP of IT, Samantha obviously fills a specialized role at Smith, but she says that her "team" is everyone at the college, and that achieving the IT department's goals requires input from many other departments. Continuous iteration as a North Star: Samantha shares a favorite quote of hers, which comes from the center for teaching and le...

The Big Themes: The biggest enterprise tech M&A in history: The planned $61-billion acquisition of VMWare by Broadcom has implications for Goya Foods, says CIO Suvajit Basu, and many other large global firms, because of VMWare's omnipresence in data centers. The cybersecurity side of the deal: When a company that powers data centers is taken over, questions must be raised about access to the data...

The Big Themes: Investing in vertical solutions: Oracle's deep engagement in healthcare through the acquisition of Cerner has provided a strategic framework for how the company will invest and expand into other industries, including with new HCM solutions. New platforms and tools: Chris previews the award-winning employee-experience platform Oracle ME, the evolved Oracle Recruiting Cloud, and new...

The Big Themes: Cloud technology supercharges startups: New companies must focus on scalability, by bringing on new customers, building new features, hitting new markets, and more. The cloud is a game-changing tool in how it helps CXOs scale up and scale down as needed for certain things. The "aha" moment: Each panelist shared stories about how and when they realized that the idea behind their com...