Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

The Big Themes: Netflix's disruptive start: Tony had an "inside baseball view" of the early disruptions Netflix made to the entertainment industry in the early 2000s, and he reminds us of just how innovative the company was A myopic focus on customers matters more than ever: when companies start to "over manage the equity markets" and fail to put the customer at the center of everything they do, t...

Episode 20 The Big Themes: Change management and change agility are often overlooked: Raven Intelligence research shows that customers' most frequent regret after completing digital transformation projects is that they didn't dedicate enough time and resources to change management processes. The Six Es of Operationalizing Change: From a presentation by Josh Bersin, these six steps are absolutely...

The Big Themes: How silos impede product innovation: Ray describes "a chasm" that has traditionally existed between product teams and their counterparts working in sales and marketing. Given that every person in those departments has a hand in bringing a product to market, closing that gap is necessary to make better products, and make them faster. Industry-specific solutions are the future: Custo...

The Big Themes: How Ulta grew 40% amid Covid-19 disruptions: Omar talks about the company's innovation department and the remarkable 4-week turnaround it achieved for introducing curbside pickup at all physical locations. Merging the physical and digital: Ulta aims to dazzle customers with a seamless experience, no matter where they're shopping. Omar describes what that would look like from the cu...

The Big Themes: An update on the sale of Thomas to Xometry: Tony describes how the two companies are fitting together and creating a new kind of on-demand manufacturing marketplace. What's the true ROI of technology these days? Following the acquisition, Tony's been on a bit of a listening tour, having lots of conversations with other business leaders, and a theme that's emerged is uncertainty aro...

The Big Themes: Data-first modernization: the return of the Chief Data Officer in many organizations goes hand-in-hand with an increasing effort to streamline data landscapes and eliminate technical debt. Opportunity at the edge: compute power at the edge has strengthened, allowing companies to push real-time analytics out of the edge with a relatively small footprint and transforming how business...

The Big Themes: Modernizing without compromise: every customer is going to have vastly different needs and different use cases, but HPE is adamant about meeting the specific requirements of each one. Putting the platform next to the data: giving customers the ability to access their data in its native form helps them avoid running through hoops in terms of compliance, governance, operations, and m...

The Big Themes: • President Zelensky of Ukraine's heroic example: Leaders are force multipliers for the people that they lead, and to do that, they have to communicate, compel, and inspire. Zelensky is doing all of those things, while refusing to flee his country in the midst of war. It's inspiring. • The sacrifices of leadership: Being a leader is an exhausting occupation. Because you are constan...

Watch "Sadin on Digital," a monthly series that explores the fast-changing and high-stakes world of digital business and what approaches CEOs and boards must take to lead their companies successfully into the Digital Age. A series by Cloud Wars Live. The Big Themes: • The new Future CXO and Board channel from Acceleration Economy: Wayne is helping to lead a new content stream, and his tagline is "...

The Big Themes: Embracing opportunities created through change: The pandemic obviously disrupted how Sarah and her team collaborated with each other and with other parts of the business. Sarah says that it gave the finance team opportunities to think differently and learn new skills. The new role of a modern finance leader: rather than always responding to events, end-of-quarter requests, emails,...

The Big Themes: Acceleration as key to digital transformation: Ajay says acceleration is about getting rid of constraints, hurdles, and manual processes within the business. Data democratization is nuanced: before pursuing "democratization," companies must make sure they're generating the proper transactional data, that it's readily available for people to consume, and that there's a shared langua...

The Big Themes: • Oracle runs its end-to-end business on Oracle Cloud, which Doug says enables them to deliver improved experiences to customers and its own employees. • The key outcome of the shift to a services-based business: As a cloud provider, Oracle’s culture has become one where everyone is expected to ask, ‘how can I help?’ • Doug is focused on removing friction points between the custome...

The Big Themes: The lessons of the pandemic response - Stacy says she and her colleagues discovered that WSU as an institution could be much more nimble and fast-moving than they might have thought before Change management when moving to the cloud - Workday's systems revolutionized the employee experience at WSU, which involved some challenges but mostly major benefits Evolution in the CFO role an...

The Big Themes: • The Web3 breakthrough: basically anything that is built on the blockchain is considered Web3, and Chris believes that it represents a bit of a return to idealism in tech. • Data is under hyped: it might sound crazy, but Chris says that the vast potential of data is still expanding and being discovered. • Native Digitals vs. Native Analogs: the fact that people under 35 grew up wi...

The Big Themes: • What is talent intelligence? The application of data relating to people, skills, jobs, functions, competitors, geographies, to drive business decisions. • What are the core data sets used for TI? The bread and butter data sets are demand, supply, and cost. • Beyond the job title: TI can be used to source candidates based on skillsets that a company is looking for, not just specif...

The Big Themes: CFOs looking beyond financial data - interconnected parts of the business like HR are equally important to understanding performance Data access is a game-changer for quick decision-making - the disruptions caused by Covid-19 forced WestMed to make huge calls about the business without delay Taking your time when setting up cloud-based systems - Anthony explains why he was so hands...

The Big Themes: • Three tenets of data: (1) data volumes keep growing in size and complexity, (2) business leaders are always looking for new ways to extract value from data, and (3) it's all about data security and governance. • John's predictions fall into two buckets: (1) the competitive landscape, and (2) the technology innovation and architecture • Overall, customers are becoming a top priori...

The Big Themes: • The power of relationships: The deal between Thomas and Xometry probably wouldn’t have happened without a trusting relationship. • Helping small and medium-sized companies grow: Xometry developed a way for smaller manufacturers to be able to take on bigger projects and grow their businesses. • Digital transformation inevitably leads to business model transformation: For business...

The Big Themes: • Vendors did a great job: But played to type. • Work From Home/Work From Anywhere culture: Omicron delaying return to the office again. Employment market and stock market point at even more. • Workplace culture evolves: The ‘Screen-ish generation’ (Millennials) doesn’t see f2f as the ideal. The ‘Screen Generation’ (GenZ) lives on screens/games/async comm. • Reminiscent of RPA mark...

The Big Themes: • Good scope = good outcome. And the opposite is almost always true! • Massive personnel turnover. Services firms and their clients need to find new ways to minimize disruptions caused by job changes. • A very clear timeline: Those simple sort of project hygiene type of things really make a big difference in the success of the project. • Software vendors have their own issues: Part...

The Big Themes: • Well-represented by this flag: We hope other countries have organizations that feel that way about their flags. • Someone's putting on space helmet: They're talking about the paradigm shift from big conventional wars and theaters. • A winning mindset: There is a standard of behavior that says we are going to act this way, and we are going to behave within structure within this mi...

The Big Themes: • The ability to tailor applications: A top CFO concern is tax management, and must be addressed on an end-to-end basis. • The right foundation: It's been a big change from when we relied on it to give us reports and manage the data model. • Transforming and enriching data: How a single, unified data model can turn operational data into accounting entries posted into the general le...

The Big Themes: • It’s important to pick the right horse: In terms of transformation, in terms of collaboration, communication culture, in terms of DevOps and engineering culture, in the spirit of becoming a digital company. • Can do a lift and shift: Choosing a path now with our entire executive team and over 500 people and 3,000 – 4,000 customers. • The model would guide us eventually: To land i...

The Big Themes: • Every industry has gone through some profound changes: But when you shift online, there are significant challenges in understanding where do you position inventory? • There are breaches all the time: Because almost every cyber breach is like a black swan event. Before the breach, the organization thought it was secure. • Building large scale consumer services: We now want all our...

The Big Themes: • Now you can put your own paint on it: That's going to be a terrific thing for the clients, the buyers into next year and the year after. • It's a mindset change: Message for the board and for the CEO is to think about whether you're really changing the nature of the business. • The secret sauce for the vertical: We have to work in the wider ecosystem of that industry, whether it'...