To be widely effective, AI needs clean data and cloud scale

Informatica World 2019’s focus was on customers of all backgrounds and sizes leveraging AI to accelerate digital transformation. While AI is not a new or novel discipline, cloud computing has supported its growing accessibility by enabling scalable, cost-effective data processing. In that spirit, Informatica has forged partnerships with the three most prominent public cloud brands, Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google Cloud (Nasdaq: GOOGL), and put these three Platinum partners on stage throughout the event’s keynotes and breakout sessions.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud was represented on the keynote stage by new CEO Thomas Kurian, who harped on both data processing at scale and the idea of ensuring you’re informing AI and analytics with clean and comprehensive data sets. Informatica and Google jointly announced that as of the conference, Informatica’s Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) and Master Data Management (MDM) solution were available on Google Cloud, better enabling customers to move their data warehouses to Google Cloud Platform, leverage Informatica’s products in the environment, and run analytics through BigQuery and Google’s AI capabilities.

AWS

Ariel Kelman, VP of Worldwide Marketing at AWS, joined Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy on stage to describe how AWS is innovating and enabling customers with AI, but more importantly to explain the relationship between Informatica and AWS in supporting their joint customers. Kelman admitted that “a lot of [AWS’] services need data and a lot of that data is still on premises.” Though AWS is bringing its services into customers’ environments through AWS Outposts, customers also want help bringing their data to the cloud. In addition to supporting integration between Informatica products such as Power Center and IICS with Amazon Redshift, the partners announced a joint offering with Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) that enables customers to complete a free, self-service data migration assessment. The assessment service leverages Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog on AWS and Cognizant’s data-to-cloud migration assessment and strategy services to help customers begin planning and mapping their data migrations to cloud. The service is intended to accelerate customers’ data migrations to AWS infrastructure while ensuring enlistment of Informatica data management products and Cognizant consulting and systems integration services in the process.

Microsoft

While Microsoft and Informatica did not make a formal announcement on stage, Microsoft had a large presence in the final keynote of Informatica World and in breakout sessions, highlighting how Microsoft approaches AI innovation and use cases across various industries and customer roles. At the outset of the event, Informatica announced its support of the Microsoft Common Data Model (CDM), data frameworks meant to ultimately reduce data silos across workloads and applications through data model standardization on Microsoft Azure. Informatica’s support of the Microsoft CDM, which is a key aspect of the widely discussed Open Data Initiative between Microsoft, Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) and SAP (NYSE: SAP), enables customers to utilize Informatica’s portfolio of products and solutions to manage data across applications and enable analytics and business intelligence efforts across the data landscape. TBR believes there’s a clear opportunity for Informatica to similarly extend its Customer 360 and Customer 360 Intelligence solutions into the Open Data Initiative alliance, particularly to bring greater light to the capabilities brought with Informatica’s recent acquisition of AllSight, a storyline that was overshadowed at the event despite its deliberate inclusion in the narrative.

Dell Technologies’ strategies

Deliver ‘essential infrastructure’

Dell Technologies’ key strategy is to deliver on what it promises: comprehensive and competitive essential infrastructure, specifically, hardware and systems software for PCs, data centers and cloud vendors. Dell Technologies fills in this spectrum with a mantra of “from edge to the core to the cloud,” where edge includes PCs, gateways and near-the-edge data center hardware. By “core,” Dell refers to on-premises data centers. Dell has been investing in R&D and in breaking down internal silos to compete in its core business, with a successful recent track record. For the last two years, part of this strategy included consumption-based pricing to compete with cloud offerings. Dell Technologies’ main competitors, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo, have similar strategies, including flexible pricing.

‘Better together’ with VMware

The company differs from its competitors in its ownership of VMware, a provider of popular software products that provide an abstraction layer between workloads and hardware, allowing flexibility and efficiency. VMware products run on all vendors’ hardware — a necessity for VMware’s continued presence in the market. Dell Technologies seeks to leverage its relationship with VMware to make it easier for customers to benefit from VMware solutions when they buy them on Dell hardware. This “better together” approach is delicate; “better together” implies “worse apart.” One company spokesperson described Dell Technologies’ approach as offering a combined solution to those who prefer Dell hardware or are indifferent and continuing to offer separate solutions for customers who prefer competitors’ hardware.

With or without Dell hardware, VMware’s solutions are very profitable, and contribute approximately one-third of Dell Technologies’ operating profit. Maintaining VMware’s strong position in both core and cloud markets is critical to Dell’s continued success. For this reason, Dell and VMware must ensure that Dell hardware and VMware cannot be too much better together. VMware also plays a role in Dell’s cloud strategy by playing key roles in the company’s multicloud offering, Dell Technologies Cloud, providing a way to work with multiple clouds, both public and on premises. By providing the ability to move workloads between public and on-premises clouds, Dell makes it easier to bring workloads back on premises, where Dell’s margins are stronger and where, the company claims, customer operating costs are often lower.

Dell Technologies World 2019 was, to a large extent, a celebration of the success of a long-term plan. Dell has emerged from a sequence of going private, shedding many businesses, acquiring a huge federation of related business, and then going public as a healthy, growing company. Despite some continuing challenges, Dell Technologies has largely achieved the goals of an ambitious plan to become the dominant provider of “essential infrastructure,” which includes computer hardware, systems software and supporting services “from the edge to the core to the cloud,” including PCs, cloud hardware and data centers.

“Business first” is the resounding message from Oracle regarding IoT. The company leaps over the technical morass and ecosystem complexities, which often bog down any digital transformation discussion, and instead starts with the business discussion: What is your pain point? Oracle has deep relationships with a wide customer base due to its legacy solutions, including ERP and supply chain management. Oracle leverages this vendor standing to start discussions with VPs and line-of-business (LOB) managers on how Oracle can improve the client’s business outcomes. Once a set of KPIs are agreed on, Oracle and its partners work backward with operational technology (OT) and IT teams to reach the business outcome.

TBR believes Oracle has made great strides with its business outcomes focus. The first time we talked to company executives, in September 2017, they seemed to be following the traditional route of going through IT, as IT vendors tend to do. However, the company faced similar roadblocks to its peers. Tribalism inside the organization — OT versus IT versus C-Suite — made collaboration inside a customer organization difficult. Oracle found itself selling to customer IT, with customer IT having to sell to management, and Oracle admits this approach was not working. And the issue was not just with the audience; what Oracle was selling — IoT capabilities and solutions — was also an issue. Now, the company is upselling features attached to existing products.

Oracle retooled its IoT go-to-market strategy to focus heavily on selling business outcomes and making its platform accessible to the business user. Below, we outline a few important steps Oracle has taken.

Portfolio simplification

Figuring out IoT is difficult for customers. It is not always clear which direction to go in, which use case to chase or how technologies will benefit the business. Ultimately, the number of paths to follow can lead to choice paralysis. Oracle addressed this with a narrower (but not less impactful) portfolio with five primary applications, or packaged solutions, aimed at specific business goals:

• Asset monitoring: Focuses on asset health, utilization, availability and predictive maintenance
• Production monitoring: Manufacturing equipment and production line monitoring and prognostics
• Fleet monitoring: Monitors shipments, fleet vehicles, driver behavior and costs
• Connected worker: Focuses on worker safety by monitoring workers and their environments
• Service monitoring for connected assets: Allows customers to engage in value-added services to their end customers through incorporating asset monitoring and manipulation capabilities into products

EY lays out its digital blueprint as ‘now, next and beyond’ with blockchain use cases easily fitting into the construct

This fundamental playbook repeated in many of the use cases discussed in breakout sessions at EY Global Blockchain Summit:

• Early efforts focus on cross-collaborative business entities establishing business rules.
• The rules become the digital contracts.
• The first use case is either low-dollar-value or intracompany; the sponsoring enterprise working with EY becomes “customer zero.”
• Once fully operationalized, EY and the client partner look for ways to enroll additional participants to:
  • Broaden the use case into an industry utility
  • Extend the underpinning business logic into adjacent industries for the repeatable capability to build out industry utilities

Gaming: The editors for the EY-Microsoft playbook

Much of the content shared at the 2018 event revolved around EY’s ongoing collaboration with Microsoft to deliver a blockchain royalty payment system to track developer community activities in the gaming space. This year, EY and Microsoft touted the collaboration on many different levels that easily fit into the “now, next and beyond” construct.

EY Tesseract: A clear view not to be confused with a short distance

The Tesseract-like aspirational objective is autonomous vehicles; period. To achieve the objective requires prototyping the IoT sensoring and business rules ahead of when specific technologies and revised public policy regulations have been hardened. Interim steps revolve around building out the ecosystem participants required to allow autonomous vehicles to be serviced absent human accompaniment as the vehicles course through the physical world based on their digital instructions.

The third annual EY Global Blockchain Summit gave an indication of the rapid acceleration in adoption that had EY describing this as “Year 0.” With hockey stick charts for the number of proof of concepts (POCs) and live applications, blockchain appears poised to deliver on its anticipated promises to transform business interactions and greatly reduce operating expenses while creating new business services networks. The event was held at 32 Old Slip in the heart of New York’s financial district with several hundred attendees and 28 breakout sessions organized in four tracks consisting of blockchain business applications (where TBR spent most of its time); blockchain assurance, tax & compliance implications; financial services and the token economy (where TBR attended a session on decentralized finance); and blockchain technology.

TBR perspective

Norman Lonergan, EY global vice chair, Advisory, opened the EY 2019 Global Analyst Summit with an outline for a new strategy called Now. Next. Beyond. Having executed extremely well against its earlier strategy, EY needed to raise its own bar. In a way, it is adhering to a strategy that it likewise seeks to use to assist its key clients in adopting and leveraging technology to enter the digital economy as a stronger and more vibrant operating business.

Achieving these objectives does not happen overnight, nor will it occur without false starts and shelved proof of concept trials. From TBR’s perspective, Now. Next. Beyond. broadly translates into the following:

• Now: The point in time where the heavy advisory lifting takes place to establish the foundational business rules required for further automation on the way to becoming a truly digital business.
• Next: Obtainment of the low-hanging fruit in quick operational enhancements to cut costs (and prove value) and to enhance the overall customer experience. This phase likewise lays the foundation with anchor ecosystem participants to harden the automated or smart contract pieces necessary for the network effect at scale.
• Beyond: The aspirational objective that in some ways could be entirely different business models made possible through atypical partnerships with business entrants from radically different business domains.
  
  

The EY construct is not necessarily groundbreaking or unique, but it is the strategic framework and corporate language the firm intends to deploy as it moves forward in the industry evangelizing its best practices and promoting the tight working relationships it has built over the past decade with enterprise technology stalwarts such as Microsoft and SAP.

Appropriately, EY hosted its annual Global Analyst Summit at a working cruise terminal at the water’s edge of Boston’s Seaport District, in a facility that served as an EY innovation hub before turning back into the assembly area for an oceangoing cruise ship. The venture-forth vibe in the physical facility amplified the sentiments expressed by EY’s leaders, particularly around making the firm more global, including global engineering across service lines and developing IP in a more industrialized way. As one EY professional explained, “When we solve a problem through applying tech, and thus creating an asset or tool, we want to productize and commercialize and globalize.” Like a ship making course corrections while still navigating toward a desired destination, EY has adjusted its business model, folded asset-based consulting and managed services into traditional consulting, and committed to emerging technology.