According to BDS Analytics, the Covid-19 pandemic drove retail sales up 35% above industry forecasts, accelerated by cannabis businesses being declared “essential” for medical purposes in virtually every U.S. legal market.
Fueled by strong consumer demand, annual legal (medical and adult-use) sales are projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21%, to reach more than $41 billion by 2025 (from $13.2 billion in 2019), according to New Frontier Data.
BDS Analytics predicts that the U.S. Cannabis Industry will generate $20.8 billion in direct spending in 2021 and $39.6 billion in total economic contribution after factoring its indirect economic effects.
Bottom Line: With an average yield per acre of $1.1 million, legal cannabis agriculture dwarfs all other crops in revenue potential while also providing the resources needed to fund AI-based monitoring to improve yields and security.
Cannabis’ value per acre dwarfs all other crops being produced in North America today, prompting every commercial grower to consider how they can improve yields further while securing their crops on a 24/7, virtual basis. Recent studies by the USDA, The Rand Corporation, and the Marijuana Cultivators of Oregon find that at an average price of $1,948 per pound at Colorado prices, an acre of marijuana can yield more than $1.1 million per acre. The studies compared the most widely grown crops in the U.S., including corn, soybeans, oats, and wheat, which all yield less than $1,000 per harvested acre. The following graphic from New Frontier Data illustrates how profitable an acre of marijuana is to cultivate than other crops.
Using AI to Protect & Grow a Cash Crop
AI and machine learning-based techniques based on real-time monitoring data are an integral part of today’s innovation in cannabis farm management. Supervised machine learning algorithms capable of identifying patterns and sequences in imagery from thermal, infrared, and night vision cameras in real-time can help identify diseases affecting plants early. Identifying and alerting farm staff of a breach or break-in by an animal or person is possible using AI-based smart monitoring systems.
The more advanced a smart monitoring system is in its use of machine learning and real-time monitoring integration, the more effective it is in spotting anomalous activity. Over time, the best AI-based remote monitoring and surveillance systems “learn” or begin to identify recurring patterns in data. Cannabis farms rely on AI and machine learning to identify which techniques for improving yield rates by specific fertilizer treatment produce the most flowers and overall yield per acre.
The following are ten ways AI is being used for improving cannabis yields and security:
Monitoring real-time video feeds of remote cannabis fields using machine learning-based surveillance systems can identify a breach by an animal or human then send an alert immediately. Given how valuable a single acre of cannabis is to a farm, knowing in real-time if there’s been an attempted breach or break-in can save thousands of dollars in potential crop damage and theft. Federated cannabis farms with multiple remote locations are starting to use AI and machine learning-based remote monitoring to secure their operations. Machine-learning based video surveillance systems can be programmed or trained over time to identify employees versus unknown people and easily spot animals attempting to break into a field. The following image from Twenty20 Solutions illustrates how machine learning is used for identifying activity at a remote location:
Reducing the dependence on onsite security guards alone and gaining a 24/7, 365-day monitoring view of each grow and farm site. Instead of relying only on onsite security teams to monitor video feeds in real-time, cannabis growers turn to AI and machine learning-based surveillance to isolate the most anomalous or unexpected events given the pattern of previous activity on a site. Reducing the cost and insurance liability of having security teams on site is one of the most significant benefits of relying on a cloud-based remote monitoring system that can interpret and provide alerts based on real-time data.
AI-based surveillance monitoring systems can prepare activity reports in minutes for state and federal auditors, saving farmers and administrative staff thousands of hours a year getting the data together for audit teams. Using machine learning and advanced video analytics, growers and their staff can prepare for state and federal audit reports in minutes instead of the many hours needed in the past.
Helping to keep licensed cannabis growers in compliance by providing a 24/7, 90 day or longer video history of all activities at their farms keeps them in compliance with state regulatory requirements. Included in several states’ requirements are the specific requirements for video footage access, video archiving, access requirements, how cameras are placed, and how quickly video footage can be accessed. State regulatory agencies are initiating audits of licensed cannabis growing facilities in 2021. All states require video footage to be archived, yet 72% of cannabis operators fail to comply with security and surveillance requirements, according to a recent study by the Brightfield Group:
California regulations require that all video recordings from surveillance be saved 90 days or longer.
Washington requires all video recordings to be archived for a minimum of 45 days.
Oregon requires licensed cannabis growers to retain 24/7 video for 90 days with a minimum of 1.3mp per camera at 10fps. The exterior is 5fps.
Cannabis farms often experiment with new fertilizers and plant treatments on a pilot acre to see if they achieve the expected results, and machine learning-based analysis of video stream data helps track results. Agricultural improvements in cannabis farming continue to accelerate as medical and leisure demand continues to grow exponentially. For example, a cannabis grower will often begin planting in the May/June timeframe to achieve a density of up to 4,000 plants per acre. Taking the real-time data stream infrared and thermal cameras of the acre will quickly tell growers how effective their new fertilizer and plan treatments are. Using the data from their monitoring system, the growers will expand the treatment to their entire farm, often over 40 to 50 acres in size.
Monitoring every access point to a facility with video surveillance 24/7 combined with sound recording can prove invaluable in stopping a break-in before it happens. Every entrance to a cannabis farm needs to be considered a primary threat vector if the farm will stay safe. Advanced remote monitoring and surveillance systems can provide video analytics that correlates sound, video, and status of infrared and thermal cameras, which together can help identify potential break-ins. And with real-time alerts, farm staff can take action immediately even if they aren’t onsite.
A few of the largest cannabis growing companies are experimenting with advanced video analytics combining infrared and thermal camera technologies to monitor insects and rodents’ impact on yield rates. Real-time video feeds are being digitally analyzed using advanced video analytics techniques by the largest cannabis farms today to find out how effective pesticides, insect, and rodent deterrents are at protecting their cannabis crops.
When a surveillance system is cloud-based, it is possible to access any farm or cannabis sites’ real-time video feeds, history of alerts, and advanced video analytics from any browser-based device at any time. Remote monitoring systems that are cloud-based often provide much greater flexibility in viewing, analyzing, and sharing monitoring data than their on-premise system counterparts. Any device with a browser can access the platform’s reporting features and know what is going on at a remote farm or cannabis production facility.
AI-based remote monitoring systems can also identify potential safety hazards to workers and reduce workplace injuries and potential liability litigation. Using advanced pattern matching supported by supervised machine learning algorithms, cannabis growers can identify when workers in high-risk roles are at risk of getting hurt while on the job. All cannabis facilities in the U.S. continue to have the requirement of everyone wearing a face shield and masks for the site to stay in compliance with CDC guidelines. Remote monitoring systems can tell immediately which work teams need coaching to remain in compliance.
Define access privileges across a farm facility by the level of access every employee needs to do their job, which is especially useful for new hires. New hires often start in the field and don’t need access to the front offices or the accounting department, for example. One of the most challenging aspects of running a cannabis business is cash management. Using an AI-based surveillance and monitoring system integrated into the local security system and intelligent locks, employees are provided the level of access they need on the first day to be productive.
The IT services market has arrived at its most critical infection point in 20 years, where the role of service providers that survive the Covid era will be those that have made the shift from support firm (Phase 1) to a business partner (Phase 2). We’ve talked about this services shift ever since Tom Reuner and I were young analysts. And we’re not very young anymore. Especially Dr. Reuner.
So why on earth is Atos bidding to make some wild takeover of DXC? Let’s understand the burning platform driving this
When the first major tranche of IT support deals evolved to a heavy dependence on India as a delivery location to exploit lower-cost labor at scale, made possible by the original Internet revolution. In the early days of the offshore era, the more ambitious traditional IT services firms, at the time, developed their own global delivery models with the goal of staying relevant, in the face of emerging competition from the “Indian Pure Plays” (as they were known in those days). This included the likes of Accenture, Capgemini, HP, and IBM – all of whom invested in India to attempt their own flavor of global service delivery with “added value” that the IPPs – at the time – could not (yet) deliver. The traditional IT service firms which failed to invest effectively in the global delivery model, once-great brands such as ACS, CSC and EDS, all got acquired by traditional western outfits. And the IPPs which failed to break into the Indian Top Tier eventually got rolled up into the second tier of traditional IT services shops, desperate to keep competitive, such as Patni, IGATE, and Syntel.
Covid has forced the services industry to make the rapid pivot from bread-and-butter to business-transformation services
Getting to the point of this little history lesson, we need to understand the motivations behind these acquisitive moves. Phase 1 was all about cost, scale, growth, and profitability as IT services firms could save the Global 2000 billions of dollars by exploiting cheaper talent at scale. If you weren’t in the game of pulling the cost lever – and adding above-average value somewhere to justify yourself to your clients – you either made a graceful exit to a willing suitor adding you to their own scale game – or chose to tread water and watch yourself get progressively smaller and desperate, until you got to a point where nones wanted to buy you anymore. I’ll share these firms’ identities over a drink if you can’t guess who there are already.
This new era of services (Phase 2) is seeing a clear bifurcation between the bread-and-butter services of the years pre-Covid – namely standard IT infra, app development and support, and BPO – and the present-day transformative services that run your borderless, work-from-anywhere business operations in the cloud, dependent on deep skills in data science, process design, automation, and most importantly, business logic and training people to become digitally-fluent. You can read our HFS 2025 Services Vision here.
The drawn-out Pandemic Era has forced the route into the cloud; it has forced processes to be re-designed and automated (or re-automated); it has forced enterprises to embrace rapid change, and it has forced the leading service providers to put their money where their mouths are or face a painful drain-circling experience as the bottom falls out of the traditional services model.
The new leaders in Phase 2 of IT services are rapidly emerging – and these do not include Atos and DXC.
IBM is spinning out its legacy infrastructure business while Hyperscalers like Google are starting to win comprehensive cloud deals as in the case of Deutsche Bank. Furthermore, accelerated by the pandemic service providers are reorganizing their business around the cloud. In addition, we are seeing a spate of mega-outsourcing deals in the billions as the word’s fourth-largest economy, Germany, finally warms up to outsourcing by doing “big-bang” deals to the likes of Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, keen to exploit this market and strengthen for the expected recovery later this year, where we forecast growth of 5%+ across services markets. Atos also got its piece of the action successfully extending its partnership with Siemens for another five years (see below), so this does beg the question why it needs DXC, as it clearly need to focus on making that shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2, and its very difficult to understand how a gargantuan merger is what it needs right now. Simply put, this is probably the most complex services merger ever contemplated by two firms which do not have a great track record of large, complex mergers:
Against this background, the announcements that Atos and DXC are publicly reporting a potential takeover of DXC by Atos – in the region of $10 billion – are very surprising, as both firms have been struggling to keep pace with the market leaders for years, and Covid has not provided any respite for either, although DXC has shown some signs of arresting its decline under the leadership of Mike Salvino now in his second year at the helm. Having providers officially confirming takeover discussions is highly unusual, which indicates a merger could well be inevitable if the numbers add up to the stakeholders that matter. Yet, the central strategic question is whether there is an opportunity to consolidate and scale lower margin legacy businesses rather than focusing on investing in innovation.
Rather than getting bigger, these services firms need to spin off their legacy businesses. This proposed merger is illogical.
Currently, HFS sees little value in merging these two firms together, as the only potential value is more in scale and geography, as opposed to deep areas of innovation where both firms are struggling in this tough market. The muted reactions from Wall St tell enough of a story already – this whole merger proposal smells like a consolidation exercise that could be even less effective than the carnage caused when HP and CSC merged to form DXC in 2016. What’s more, Atos has struggled to derive much value from its major offshore-centric investment Syntel, so the chances of an Atos-led juggernaut of mainly legacy services business-lines being effective are highly questionable.
While we laud the value of OneOffice at HFS, this could be the antithesis version, with a hundred-plus ‘offices’ all grimly clinging to survival. We believe the IBM model of spinning out legacy business lines from growth business lines is the smart way forward. That is not to say a merged DXC and Atos could not pursue a smart strategy, but the simple fact that neither has done this to date gives us little confidence that they will.
So let’s take a look under the covers…
Atos and DXC are caught between a rock and a hard place: Losing out on recent large deals while having limited levers for margin improvement
The recent major contract wins of TCS at Walgreens, Infosys’ double swoop at Vanguard and Daimler, and Wipro at Metro paints a bleak picture. It is too simplistic to point out that some of these were asset-heavy deals as an explanation for the lack of success. In particular, in the context of Daimler, there is a strong cloud element and the synergies across the automotive ecosystem are immense in areas like supply chain, cloud agility and creating of data value. While in the Walgreens extension contract, a strong emphasis was placed on digital innovation. The key question for both providers is where revenue growth should come from as the anemic growth as Exhibit 1 highlights:
If topline growth is not the priority then margins have to be improved by either extreme efficiency of operations and/or deep investments in innovation. As our Triple Trifecta Services Top 10 has demonstrated, neither organization made it to the overall Top 10. Atos has strong investments in innovation and a solid vision but struggles around execution. DXC has not even made the Top 10 in any of the various categories. As such deeper investments in innovation but more importantly, the execution of it should be top of mind to Atos.
The deal logic appears to hinge on three pillars:
Finally, Giving Atos scale in the US market
Cross-selling between accounts
Aggressive cost take-out
Atos has a solid track record in M&A. While Syntel might have been fluffed, it managed to extract value out of stagnated businesses like Siemens, Xerox, and Bull. But we see the deal at best as a defensive move that would be buying Atos management time for other strategic moves. While Mike Salvino has stabilized DXC, he has taken over an organization that was demoralized and exhausted after continuous excessive cost-cutting and management change. . His task ahead is perhaps best illustrated by a comparison of operating margins. IN Q3 2020 DXC was at 6.2% while Infosys achieved top in class with 25.4% and bellwether Accenture came in at 14.3%. Thus, the reported price of $10billion would represent a significant premium on a market capitalization of ca. $7.4bn that is likely to tempt shareholders to accept the offer.
Atos needs to reinvigorate around innovation – not legacy
M&A is in Atos’ DNA. The company is built on perpetual acquisition activity. The extension of the Siemens outsourcing contract in September 2020 is testimony that it can extract value even from highly challenging acquisition targets. Yet, DXC both in terms of scale as well as the culture would be its biggest challenge to date. The acquisition would also come at a time where the company is going through an organizational restructuring dubbed SPRING. With that Atos is moving from a largely horizontal go-to-market to one that is focused on verticals. OneCloud will be the first practice for this new organizational setup. Atos is late with a move toward verticalization and DXC is more advanced. But the key strategic issue goes beyond culture and integration. With the deal, Atos would become a consolidator of legacy businesses. Yet as Accenture and the Indian heritage provider demonstrate, value stems from moving aggressively toward innovation.
DXC is still suffering from its own ill-timed M&A
With a certain irony, DXC is still suffering from its ill-timed acquisition of EDS in 2008 at a time when the outsourcing market was shifting toward more discrete deals with a strong digital flavor. The margin erosion in ITO and infrastructure projects is still haunting DXC. However, in sharp contrast for instance to IBM, there is no RedHat in sight which could act as a catalyst for change. Rather Mike Salvino has evaluated “Strategic Alternatives” for three business units: the U.S., state, and local health and human services business; its horizontal BPS business; and its workplace and mobility business. The public sector business has meanwhile being sold while the other two units will be retained. But this process makes clear that the whole business model is under constant review. Despite more targeted moves like for Luxoft, it appears unlikely that DXC could turn into a consolidator. Therefore, its strategic options are limited.
Bottom-line: The consolidation of legacy businesses will make bankers and executive management happy, but it won’t transform Atos
While Atos might finally get to get to scale in the US, the proposed deal lacks imagination as neither firm adds much of the new world to the traditional world. The offshore component of both firms is not compelling when compared to any of the leaders, the emerging market areas in the OneOffice platform, such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, Pega, SAP S4 Hana and Workday are not leading edge, and business process services investments across both firms have long been neglected. Yes, Atos management might be buying time for a more incisive transformation, but the strategic headwinds are already immense. Clients are looking for trusted partners to accelerate the Phase 2 services journey toward the OneOffice. Doubling down on legacy is hardly a compelling pitch to move up the value chain.
Virtual CES Kicks Off The Conference Season For 2021
Source: R Wang
This year’s CES will be all virtual as with all pandemic events. Last year they brought in more than 171,000 guests, 6500 press and media, and had almost 3 million net square feet of exhibits with 4419 exhibiting companies. As one of the largest industry networking events and conferences, it will be massively different as a virtual. While we can expect more attendees, past virtual events have shown how burn out and the lack of networking leads to less screen time and minimal impact.
Source: R Wang
Given Microsoft’s outsized presence as a technology partner for CES, the logins, the virtual event studio, and other technologies are taking advantage of the partnership. In fact, the Microsoft Studios houses four sound stages in Redmond that include the massive 60 foot by 40 foot sound stage to smaller 22 foot by 22 foot insert stages. There’s some serious equipment there and two identical video control rooms with post production facilities and state of the art off-line editing. The production team is top notch so the broadcast quality and show flow will be pretty smooth.
CES 2021 Builds Off Of Key Technology Trends
The technology themes for this year seem to fall into a few buckets with AI, 5G, Internet of Things, Extended reality, and IOT technologies weaved into the narratives. With digital transformation accelerated five years in five months of the pandemic, major consumer trends and themes that cross into the enterprise for 2021 include healthcare, autonomous and electric vehicles, display technology advancements, smart buildings and connected devices, and eSports and virtual worlds.
Source: R Wang
A quick scan of the major announcements and sessions for this year’s CES shows the seven major trends for the enterprise:
1. Machine learning and AI advancements
2.Healthcare via personal health, devices, and remote care
3. Environmental themes emerging around sustainability, circular economy, and climate
4. Electric and autonomous vehicle innovations
5. Improvement in display technologies from material science, power consumption, and form factors
6. More consumer and enterprise adoption of extended reality (MR, AR, VR)
7. Advancements and ease of use with connected devices and digitization supporting smart homes, smart buildings, and connected devices.
Expect These Following Themes To Dominate The Conversation
Healthcare Everywhere And Digitized For A Pandemic And Beyond
The pandemic has accelerated a lot of telehealt innovations, home monitoring, virtual health, connected areas. Omron, Philips, and Verizon are putting a lot of announcements from new products to new service offerings.
Verizon -, 5G’s impact on healthcare
Omron – health monitoring, remote health heart
Philips – connected health, telehealth, virtual health
We see virtual surgeries, telemedicine, and improved phlebotomy with AR.
Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Capabilities Roll Forward
As many states and countries start the draconian shift to eliminate ICE internal combustion engines and gas cars, a lot of work is out there on electric and autonomous vehicles.
Intel has some big announcements on MobileEye AV
GM’s talking about electrification with Mary Barra
Mercedes and Panasonic have new user experiences and infotainment systems
but here’s the most interesting one
Magma and LG Chem are partnering up
Caterpillar will be showcasing how they are delivering on autonomous mining.
Faster, Better, Cheaper, And More Flexible Displays Continue To Advance
It can’t be a CES without innovations in Display technologies. The big manufacturers are all pushing towards 8K and that future, we still need broadcast for that, but it’s getting good along with the flexible displays we saw last year.
Hisense will be talking more about their Laser TV’s
Skyworth is still pushing out the AIOT story
TCL has made improvements in MiniLed
and LG and Samsung have their latest displays
Smart Buildings, IOT, and Connected Devices Get Easier To Connect And Use
Constellation’s seeing a rash of new smart devices that bring the home, commercial buildings, and IOT closer and easier together.
Bosch is announcing a series of smart mobility, IOT, and devices
Schneider Electric has a smart home DX and XD light switches
LG’s line of smart appliances
Kohler is sharing what their vision of kitchens and baths will look like in the smart home.
Advancements In Gaming, eSports, And Extended Reality Have Enterprise Applications
Mixed reality and extended reality continue to take place. These applications are powering remote work, training, field service applications, and even new types of experiential sales environments.
Rendever has a very interesting solution for senior communities and VR
Lenovo will launch their new Think Reality AR glasses
The Bottom Line: Compressed Digital Transformation Dominates 2020 and 2021
At the dawn of 2021, all across the world, compressed digital transformation is accelerating cloud adoption, digital commerce, cyber security, automation and AI. These are key technologies for 2021 and the team will be keeping a close eye on the leaders in these spaces. CES showcases the innovations for 2021 in the consumer space. So far, nothing break through, however, the rapid adoption in the consumer world always paves the way for enterprise adoption. Add massive security requirements, enterprise class scale, and an understanding of adoption paths, and these trends will pervasively emerge in the enterprise leader’s priority list.
Your POV
How has 2020 treated you? Did we miss a top vendor for this year’s awards? Anything you’d suggest for 2021?
Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup. In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process, and infrastructure in place – and end up with a pattern that looks like:
Hire 1 salesrep, which seems to be working so we …
Hire 2 more salesreps, which seems to be mostly working so we think “Eureka!” and we …
Hire 10 more salesreps overnight
With the result that 8 of the 10 salesreps hired in phase three flame out within a year. You end up missing numbers and hiring a new VP of Sales who inherits a smoldering rubble of a salesforce which they must rebuild, nearly from scratch. The cost: $3-5M of wasted capital [1] and, more importantly, 12-18 months of lost time.
But let’s say you heed Leslie’s lessons and get through this phase. Once you’re up to 20-30 reps, you don’t just need sales to be working, you need to prove that you have attained the Holy Grail of startup sales: a repeatable sales process.
Everyone likes has their own definition of what “repeatable sales process” means and how to measure if you’ve attained it. Here are mine.
A repeatable sales process means:
You hire salesreps with a standardhiring profile
You give them a standardonboarding program
You have standard support ratios (e.g., each rep gets 1/2 of a sales consultant, 1/3 of a sales development rep (SDR), and 1/6 of a sales manager)
You have a standardpatch (and a method for creating one) where the rep can be successful
You have standard kit including tools such as collateral, presentations, demos, templates
You have a standard sales methodology that includes how you define and execute the sales process
And, of course, it’s demonstrating some repeatable result. While many folks instinctively drift to “80% of salesreps at 100% (or more) of their quota” they forget a few things:
The percentage should vary as function of business model: with a velocity model, monthly quotas, and a $25K ARR average sales price (ASP), it’s a lot more applicable than with an enterprise model, annual quotas, and a $300K ASP
80% at 100% means you beat plan even if no one overperforms [2] – and that hopefully rarely happens
There is a difference between annual and quarterly performance, so while 80% at 100% might be reasonable in some cases on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis it might be more like 50%
The reality of enterprise software is that performance is way more volatile than you might like it to be when you’re sitting in the board room
When we’re looking at overall productivity we might look at the entire salesforce, but when we’re looking at repeatability we should look at recently hired cohorts. Does 80% of your third-year reps at quota tell you as much about repeatability – and the presumed performance of new hires – as 80% of your first-year reps cohort?
Long story short, in enterprise software, I’d say 80% of salesreps at 80% of quota is healthy, providing the company is making plan. I’d look at the most recent one-year and two-year cohorts more than the overall salesforce. Most importantly, to limit survivor bias, I’d look at the attrition rate on each cohort and hope for nothing more than 20%/year. What good is 80% at 80% of quota if 50% of the salesreps flamed out in the first year? Tools like my salesrep ramp chart help with this analysis.
But all that was just the warm-up for the big idea in this post: is repeatability enough? Turns out, the other day I was re-reading my favorite book on data governance, Non-Invasive Data Governance by Bob Seiner, and it reminded me of the Capability Maturity Model, from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute.
Here’s the picture that triggered my thinking:
Did you see it? Repeatable is level two in a five-level model. Here we are in sales and marketing striving to achieve what our engineering counterparts would call 40% of the way there. Doesn’t that explain a lot?
To think about what we should strive for, I’m going to switch models, to CMMI, which later replaced CMM. While it lacks a level called “repeatable” – which is what got me thinking about the whole topic – I think it’s a better model for thinking about sales [3].
Here’s a picture of CMMI:
I’d say that most of what I defined above as a repeatable sales process fits into the CMMI model as level 3, defined. What’s above that?
Level 4, quantitively managed. While most salesforces are great about quantitative measurement of the result – tracking and potentially segmenting metrics like quota performance, average sales price, expansion rates, win rates – fewer actually track and measure the sales process [2]. For example, time spent at each stage, activity monitoring by stage, conversion by stage, and leakage reason by stage. Better yet, why just track these variables when you can act on them? For example, put rules in place to take squatted opportunities from reps and give them to someone else [3], or create excess stage-aging reports that will be reviewed in management meetings.
Level 5, optimizing. The idea here is that once the process is defined and managed (not just tracked) quantitatively, then we should be in a mode where we are constantly improving the process. To me, this means both analytics on the existing process as well as qualitative feedback and debate about how to make it better. That is, we are not only in continual improvement mode when it comes to sales execution, but also when it comes to sale process. We want to constantly strive to execute the process as best we can and also strive to improve the process. This, in my estimation, is both a matter of culture and focus. You need a culture that process- and process-improvement-oriented. You need to take the time – as it’s often very hard to do in sales – to focus not just on results, but on the process and how to constantly improve it.
To answer my own question: is repeatability enough? No, it’s not. It’s a great first step in the industrialization of your sales process, but it quickly then becomes the platform on which you start quantitative management and optimization.
So the new question should be not “is your sales process repeatable?” but “is it optimizing?” And never “optimized,” because you’re never done.
# # #
Notes
[1] Back when that used to be a lot of money
[2] You typically model a 20% cushion between quota and expected productivity.
[3] The nuance is that in CMM you could have a process that was repeatable without being (formally) defined. CMMI gets rid of this notion which, for whatever it’s worth, I think is pretty real in sales. That is, without any formal definition, certain motions get repeated informally and through word of mouth.
[4] With the notable exception of average sales cycle length, which just about everyone tracks – but this just looks at the whole process, end to end. (And some folks start it late, e.g., from-demo as opposed to from-acceptance.)
[5] Where squatting means accepting an opportunity but not working on it, either at all or sufficiently to keep it moving.
Bottom Line: Cyberattacks enter a new era of lethal impact when threat actors are sophisticated enough to compromise SolarWind’s software supply chain with infected binary code while mimicking legitimate protocol traffic to avoid detection.
To gain greater insights into the SolarWinds breach, its implications on cybersecurity strategy in the future and what steps enterprises need to take today, I contacted Andy Smith, Cybersecurity Evangelist and an industry expert with Centrify. He explained the attack’s specifics, referencing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Alert AA20-352A, which details how sophisticated the attack is, citing the sobering fact that it is unknown if all attack vectors are identified. Active since at least March 2020, the advanced persistent threat (APT) has been identified by FireEye, SolarWinds, Microsoft and several other cybersecurity firms.
SolarWinds’ Security Advisory lists 18 known products that have been affected by the attack, including their Application Centric Monitor (ACM), Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) and Network Performance Monitor (NPM). Earlier this month, SolarWinds says the malicious code may have been delivered to nearly 18,000 customers.
Insights Into The SolarWinds Hack
Interested in dissecting the hack from a cybersecurity standpoint, I spent some time investigating the SolarWinds hack with Andy, a leading authority on Identity and Access Management (IAM), particularly around securing and managing privileged access credentials. The following is my interview with Andy:
Louis: There have been large-scale breaches before; why is this particular cybersecurity attack getting so much attention? Why is it so enormous?
Andy: What’s interesting about this particular attack is a couple of things. It follows a very traditional cyber-attack kill chain as many attacks, but the start of this one is impressive. Usually, there’s a vulnerability that allows threat actors to get into the network. What’s unique about this is the initial vulnerability is in vendor software, so it’s often now being referred to as a supply chain hack because the vulnerability was embedded as code.
The exposure to federal agencies and the attackers’ focus going after emails is especially troubling. It appears like it’s a nation/state-related incident that always heightens the exposure and is another reason it’s so large in scale. Some tools that FireEye uses for Red Team evaluation of people’s networks got exposed, so now those tools are in the hands of threat actors to do nefarious activities with them.
That’s one aspect of this hack that makes it remarkable, as sophisticated tools from FireEye are in nefarious actors’ hands. That’s one reason it’s enormous: you just gave something that was being used for good to threat actors intent on gathering as much intelligence across a supply chain of customers as they can.
Louis: How are the cyber-attack methods used in the SolarWinds hack particularly unique?
Andy: It follows a very common cyber-attack kill chain we’ve seen at Centrify for years. We ran the Anatomy of a Hack webinar earlier this year and it always starts with that initial vulnerability and getting in. What’s unique was this case is that the initial vulnerability wasn’t just, “Hey, I phished somebody’s password and logged in.” It was a vulnerability in the software build process for SolarWinds. So that’s a bit unique about how that initial vulnerability was there.
Still, once the attackers are in, the breach starts to look very traditional in the sense that they settle in, sit there for a while, scan the network, move laterally in that environment and hunt for privileged access.
All those things happened precisely by the people who investigated and then you find the data you’re going after. In some cases, it’s been software, as is the case with FireEye, or email servers, as is the case with government agencies. Attackers are patient and they wait to extract the data and then cover their tracks.
Louis: You and many others are an advocate of a layered approach to security. What is that and how would it have helped in the SolarWinds case?
Andy: For me, the biggest takeaway of this hack is that a layered approach to security is the way to go in the future in light of this hack’s sophistication. There’s no silver bullet to stop a hack this sophisticated, though. No one strategy or approach could have prevented it.
When you investigate this attack, it is pretty sophisticated and has multiple vectors to it and one has to assume there will be certain threat vectors compromised. That initial vulnerability will be there and you need those layers of security to prevent it, so you need to look at preventive controls, predictive controls and detective controls. All those need to be combined into a single, unified strategy.
For every organization looking at this hack and considering how future attacks of this sophistication will impact them, it’s a good idea to use this event as a way to get your board and executives thinking about a more resilient, hardened multilayer approach and not relying on a single solution to protect you. I see organizations using this opportunity to evaluate how a layered approach will work for their projects when it might not have been feasible to fund in the past.
It’s an extreme attack that shows how vulnerable the exposures are out there. It’s a good time to shore up your defenses. The Federal Information Processing Standard 200, or FIPS 200, the standard offers excellent guidance, including discussing the different types of layers and controls available today. Minimum Security Requirements for Federal Information and Information Systems defines the minimum security controls for federal information systems and the processes by which risk-based selection of security controls occurs.
If you dig into the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53, that gets a little deeper into the particular cyber controls you have in place. There is guidance available. You’re not out there on your own about what the layers should be and you can evaluate yourself against these standards.
Louis: What are some layers specific to privileged access management? Are there any particular PAM best practices that enterprises should be thinking about right now?
Andy: Absolutely and I’ll start with Privileged Access Management (PAM), which is one of the core layers. Investigations into this hack found specific evidence where they got in and created new accounts with elevated privileges to access data. It’s all over this.
We typically state the Forrester stat that 80% of hacks involve compromised privileged access. This SolarWinds example is no exception: that’s what happened.
Additional points to keep in mind include the following:
Before our interview, we talked about how vulnerable passwords are and how using the company’s name, followed by 123, is not a good idea – that ties into going pro with preventive controls rather than just relying on a password. That’s a perfect example of what not to do. Organizations can design preventive privileged access controls and detective controls and both are typically provided in Privileged Access Management solutions. Best practices call for multiple preventive controls – strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, password rotation, maybe use a federated credential and have privileged users log in as themselves for better auditing and accountability.
Rethink enterprise cybersecurity from a preventive control perspective that includes least privileged access. Simplistic preventive controls aren’t enough, as the sophistication of this hack shows. Preventive controls need to be strengthened with least privilege. The account creation process needs to provide as little privilege as possible to the server level. Workflows to request additional access need to be used to provide resources for a predefined period. If these types of controls had been in place, malicious code disguised in executable files and dynamic linked libraries would not have traveled as far down the supply chain.
Lastly, even if threat actors get through or you don’t have enough of those layers in place, you want detective controls. PAM solutions should have audit capabilities that watch what privileged users do. In the financial markets, there are things like the “four-eye principle,” where people are watching what other people are doing and so you can watch a privileged session in real-time and verify what users are doing. Of course, all that’s audited in the recording. You can send that information off to a SIEM to be correlated with other data to look for compromise indicators. Recent articles I’ve read pointed out the attackers were in the FireEye network for months before being detected. FireEye detected that they had been attacked thanks to detective controls.
Louis: The SolarWinds attack seems to have rejuvenated the case for Zero Trust. How can companies adopt a Zero Trust mindset and take stock of their security layers today?
Andy: Definitely and I see organizations accelerate their Zero Trust initiatives today. Organizations can get started on their Zero Trust frameworks by reviewing the FIPS and NIST publications. Review the layers of your security stack with a Zero Trust mindset. Don’t configure your network to trust someone just because they gained access. That’s how these attackers got in, laying in the network for plenty of time. Zero Trust says, “Don’t trust that authenticated network access. That could still be a compromised credential or a threat actor,” and this is a perfect example of that. This is why Zero Trust is critical: just because they’re on your network doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy.
The concept of least privilege, of authenticating at each step, introduces segmentation. When I give access, it’s just to that machine or that service that I need access to and not broad access across the network a network segment. That’s how you prevent that lateral movement. A Zero Trust mindset that Zero Trust philosophy of security is critical in this case.
Louis: What do you think will happen from the perspective of micro-segmentation and how does this hack change the balance of security relative to ongoing operations of a business?
Andy: I think it’s another evidence of our current breach culture and brings forth more awareness. More and more, events like this will make cybersecurity a higher priority in an organization – one essential to excel at to keep a business operating. So from that perspective, it is a business enabler.
If you do it right, you can start to do things like moving to the cloud and start to do things that make you more agile. The more we can think of security as a business enabler instead of a business blocker, the better we are. Taking the lessons learned from this hack and using them to create a more resilient, hardened organization is a start.
Conclusion
80% of hacks involve the use of compromised privileged credentials and this one is no exception. An important layer of control is Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions such as Centrify, which typically involve predictive, preventive and detective controls.
In the end, it is security layers and vigilance that make the difference in minimizing the impact of a breach. NIST’s guidance can be constructive in cybersecurity planning, which can also be informed by Zero Trust’s principles. Remember, it’s not a question of if you will be hacked. It’s a matter of when and what you can do to limit the impact through layers.
Glassdoor shows 3,937 companies in the middle of a hiring surge during Covid-19, 960 of which are in information technology.
Leading software companies going through a hiring surge right now include Aha! Software, Appen, Clevertech, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Dataiku, Fastly, Hashicorp, Leidos, Liveops, Netskope, Proofpoint, Rackspace, Zapier and Zendesk.
Modern Tribe, Dataiku, Zapier, PartnerCentric, Slack, Fuse, Freshworks. ScienceLogic and SAP are the highest rated companies by their employees on Glassdoor who offer remote jobs today.
Between Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn and Monster, over 16,500 open remote-based software technical professional jobs are available today. Companies with open, remote-based solutions include Aha!, Box, Cloudera, DemandBase, Jobot, Red Hat, NTT Data, Salesforce and many others.
GitLab alone has 79 remote full-time positions open today and is widely considered a leader in creating a productive, positive remote working culture, with 88% of employees saying they would recommend the company to a friend.
These and many other useful insights are based on comparing the leading tech companies who offer remote, work-from-home job positions by their Glassdoor scores. Leading tech companies are ranked on the percentage of employees who would recommend their company to a friend and the percent of employees who approve of the CEO. The total number of open job positions by company is in the third column of the table. Hiring companies of note include the following:
Freshworks’ excellent Glassdoor ratings make them a must-consider in any remote job research, and with 161 open positions, there are many opportunities available. Their Glassdoor ratings are impressive: 95% of their employees approve of their CEO and 90% would recommend the company to a friend. Among the many great remote positions they have open today is a Senior Manager, Analyst Relations, and a Senior Corporate PR Manager. Check out their 161 open positions here on Glassdoor.
PowerToFly has had an impressive growth year and is the go-to remote job search engine for women professionals. The company was launched in 2014 by Milena Berry and Katharine Zaleski to connect Fortune 500 companies, startups and growing companies with women looking to work for businesses that value gender diversity and inclusion. PowerToFly’s number of available remote jobs has soared from 994 earlier this year to over 2,500 open remote positions today. 94% of employees would recommend working at PowerToFly to a friend and 93% approve of their CEOs.
Angelist has 2,700 enterprise software-related remote positions on their website today with companies including Auth0, Arctic Wolf Networks, Confluent, Couchbase, HackerOne, Slack, MindTickle, MongoDB, Sendoso, Tanium and many others.
FlexJobs has 5,566 remote-based software jobs that include full-time, part-time and freelance positions. Open positions include Senior Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Product Managers, Project Managers, Full Stack Developers and more.
StackOverflow has 815 open remote-based job positions available today, including Canonical (39 open jobs), Octane AI, Shield AI and many others.
Torch Capital’s Talent Connect Portal has 980 positions open today, including several from DoubleVerify, Electric, Lexis Nexis, Nexon America, Shopify, Tesla and others.
Working Nomads site currently has 11,216 remote, work-from-home development jobs advertised. There are also 2,021 marketing, 1,922 management, 1,873 system administration, 1,592 design and 1,164 sales remote, work-from-home job postings.
The 2020 Awards Demonstrate The Power Of Humanity Amidst A Global Pandemic And Mass Digitization
What started out as an amazing beginning to a new decade ended with one of the worst economies and global health crises in history. Cultural, technological, and business model changes that would have taken a decade to play out became reality in less than 6 months. Almost every brand and enterprise had to rethink their business model AND their monetization model. Every senior executive could see their pre-pandemic business model shift to a rapid pandemic response and slowly emerge into a post pandemic reality.
Instead of attending over 300 physical events, we attended 500 virtual events including our own CCE 2020. In addition, the Constellation Research team accelerated their digital presence with more videos, virtual keynotes, and digital experiences in 2020. In anticipation of the planning needed to emerge from the pandemic, Constellation’s analysts worked hard to bring together a post-pandemic playbook. Along the way,Constellation’s team has been busy with clients addressing the shift to remote work, contactless commerce, digital business models, accelerated cloud adoption, digital CX, beefed up cybersecurity, health and mental health priorities, and digital first mindsets.
These collective experiences and interaction with forward thinking buy-side executives and responses from innovative vendors, guided the team’s view of this year’s 2020 winners. The research team watched technology vendors shift their go to market strategies, provide some leniency to clients unable to make ends meet, and craft new strategies to help clients with the rapidly changing landscape. Fear and a burning platform accelerated a generational adoption of key technologies in one full swoop. New solutions were rolled out in days, not weeks or months to customers by vendors. Solutions were adopted in hours not weeks by customers. There had never been a greater sense of urgency for change.
While this year has been tragic for many, the improvements and acceleration of technology adoption will play a huge role in paving the way for the autonomous and AI driven decade ahead. Many of the technology vendors and providers who made this possible have been named to this year’s Constellation Enterprise Awards. Thanks to the hard work of our research team who put in double duty to get this out in time!
Catch the run down on Constellation TV Episode 002
This video is about 20201209 ConstellationTV Episode 002
And now, the winners for 2020…
R “Ray” Wang
Founder and Principal Analyst
BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE STARTUP
This category recognizes when an enterprise software startup achieved escape velocity in mind share and relevance.
WINNER: Celonis
Why did they win?
After years of beating the drum on process mining powering the future of enterprise software and why process mining is more advanced than their robotic process automation (RPA) bretheren, Celonis has finally gained critical mind share beyond the business and technology early adopters of Airbus, GM, and Vodafone. After raising a whopping $290M in Series C funding in November of 2019, the mainstream messaging shift to address execution capacity inside enterprises finally makes sense amidst a pandemic as every enterprise seeks to find automation opportunities. Celonis has shown the Global 2000their ability to improve execution capacity by creating more capacity with existing infrastructure with its Execution Management System and almost every industry’s top customers have become a client or are in the process of implementing Celonis.
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Yellowbrick
Despite the push to the cloud, there’s still a place for a high-performance/low-cost data warehouse/mart option that can be deployed and managed on-premises or private-cloud style. There’s a sweet spot for customers who have high-scale but stable (non-elastic) workloads, data-location restrictions and a need for high performance and predictable costs. It’s a market niche that was opened up 15 years ago by the likes of Greenplum and Netezza and Yellowbrick has a focused strategy and modern platform to pursue a market that hasn’t gone away. In keeping with today’s cloud expectations, Yellowbrick is subscription based and a managed query service can be tapped within a customer’s VPC running on a public cloud.
Gong.io
Serial startup rock star Amit Bendov of Sisense (CEO) and Panaya (CMO) fame created a category known as revenue intelligence with Gong.io. The company just closed a Series D round of funding this year (who knew that was a thing?!), prompting us to wonder at what point a startup stops being a startup and goes mainstream. By facilitating customer interactions, understanding deals, and shifting go to market approaches, Gong helps revenue teams improve growth. Data-driven recommendations, up-to-the-minute deal/sales pipeline visibility, team collaboration and personalized coaching are changing how sellers work.This cloud–based sales performance platform is gaining ground among the tech companies and also high growth companies.
BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE VENDOR
This category recognizes the enterprise software vendor who improved their customer relevance, market share, customer satisfaction, and brand standing.
WINNER: Smartsheet
Why did they win?
Though many tech companies scrambled to get out ahead of the pandemic, few did so with as much verve and aplomb as work coordination vendor, Smartsheet. Not only is their COVID-19 resource center one of the best in the business, their product category is arguably one of the most useful there is for organizing a mass response to a global pandemic. But it didn’t end there, Smartsheet’s standout achievement in 2020 was helping the Department of Commerce survive the onslaught of millions of U.S. firms suddenly trying to clarify their status as essential businesses, where they helped replace the DoC’s home page with a Smartsheet quick response form after the agency’s email servers went down and stayed down. This helped countless U.S. organizations to obtain critically needed information and helped many of them to stay in business
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Microsoft
Microsoft has made some pretty big shifts and investments in 2020, but what stood out most were the intentional investments across the key systems that quickly and safely turned work into customer engagements. Take Microsoft’s security portfolio that offers customers a unified and impressively comprehensive end-to-end security posture from network to end points and even future forward headless points at the edge. With streamlined and simplified solutions, Microsoft is intentionally bringing together a portfolio that doesn’t add to the chaos and complexity taking over security operations. They are very focused on how security and IT teams are working…and Microsoft is striving to deliver tools to make all that work more transparent, collaborative and easy.
In addition, Microsoft is making very similar moves across the Dynamics 365 Marketing portfolio where they have been smart to walk away from some suites (social media as an example) to really focus on the job of marketing and allowing an open marketplace to plug in specialized tools into their engagement platform. This isn’t the Microsoft of old where users needed to adapt to succeed. Today, citizen developers are embraced while open source code is celebrated…but more than ever tools are aligning to how people work and how teams want to drive growth and success.
BEST ENTERPRISE SERVICES VENDOR
This category recognizes the enterprise services vendor that transforms delivery models and crafts new client–centric market approaches.
WINNER: Infosys
Why did they win?
Despite the critics who have predicted Infosys’ downfall in recent years, 2020 has emerged as a year of rebirth for the venerable bellwether IT services company. With two years into his CEO tenure as of January 2020, Salil Parekh has brought his sales skills to the table and rekindled relationships, partnerships, and attracted an enviable pool of talent while Nandan (one of the legendary co-founders) has been in the background guiding technology innovation. The offering launch of Live Enterprise and Wingspan have been game changers in the market for bringing productized IP that address a wide range of business needs from the remote workforce to artificial intelligence.
A strategic focus on winning large deals, precisely cutting costs, acquiring new practices, and refreshing talent have led to big wins and renewals include a $1.3B Daimler deal, Rolls Royce partnership, the acquisition of GuideVision for ServiceNow skills, and pay increases for January 2021. As with other leading IT services firms, Infosys has also succeeded in addressing compressed digital transformation by staffing up for accelerated cloud adoption, digital commerce, cyber security, automation and AI. The result – faster profit growth, higher quality revenue, improving position among IT services vendor, and a stock price that’s come back with a roar!
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Accenture
Last year’s winner for best Enterprise Services Vendor remains the benchmark competitor to beat across the IT Services landscape. Impressive large account wins, quarterly earnings beats throughout the pandemic, and a flurry of acquisitions and partnerships had competitors in reactive mode. The global reorganization to a regional model has some competitors playing “me too”, while others are doubling down on industries instead.
Despite many high profile managing director departures, thought leadership remains high and clients have not left. Accenture is a formidable competitor and may have gotten stronger during the pandemic. Accenture is also at the forefront at establishing best practices on how to implement enterprise software during a pandemic, establishing them internally first, as show with the recent go live with Workday HCM on a global level and 800k+ FTE.
BEST TECH ACQUISITION
This category recognizes the enterprise tech acquisition that has the most impact for customers, market landscape, and the overall industry direction.
WINNER: ServiceNow + AI Targets
Why did they win?
ServiceNow buys into an AI-first future. ServiceNow wants to simplify work for everyone, and it knows that AI will be the key to automating workflows touching customers, employees and IT. To build out world-class AI capabilities, ServiceNow has pushed through four AI acquisitions in 2020: Element AI, Loom Systems, Passage AI, and Sweagle. In the process it has not only picked up cutting-edge AI tech, it’s tapping the minds of world-class AI talent, including Element AI Co‑founder and Lead Fellow, Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a winner of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, who will serve as a technical advisor. ServiceNow is also establishing an AI Innovation Hub in Canada to tap that country’s rich trove of AI expertise. In short, ServiceNow is preparing to serve up the next generation of enterprise work tech powered by AI.
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Nvidia acquires ARM for $40B
The transformation from the graphic card to AI to multiple CPU architecture player is bold and in progress. Rarely high tech vendor manage to add additional revenue streams and get the proverbial additional legs – Nvidia has managed to do that – not only taking advantage of the graphic card to vector based ML implicit innovation move, but is now making a bold move to all other CPU architectures beyond the GPU with the ARM acquisition. 2020 has also shown how the strength of the Nvidia AI platform and brand, coupled with the desire of enterprises not to get locked in for their AI projects, leading to all major public cloud vendors (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) offering Nvidia chip architectures in their respective clouds.
Adobe acquires Workfront for $1.5B
As acquisitions go, this might not be big and splashy, but Adobe’s acquisition of Workfront is an important pickup as Adobe continues down the path of connecting the workflows that connect creativity with customers. No longer happy to just be the creative or marketing cloud, Adobe’s recent sites have been on developing an engagement system that applies data and intelligence to enhance every segment of the value chain. This move starts to address the internal silo walls that disrupt marketing operations and helps bridge the gap in planning, understanding and optimizing the entire lifecycle of digital experience from inception to optimization. There is no question that marketing and creative need to move fast to stay ahead of their customer’s expectations of engagement…and the right tools can help tackle the stagnation of decision making and banish the lag between ideation and iteration. With this acquisition, Adobe is betting that this brings them closer to being that right tool that quickly drives growth. (Liz)
Microsoft acquires CyberX for Security
Microsoft’s acquisition of CyberX wasn’t just a pick up of a pretty solid IoT security solution. It filled a noted gap in Microsoft’s Azure IoT security offering by adding discoverability across new and existing headless device deployments. While the Azure Defender IoT solution had some good monitoring and updating capacity, it failed to provide a more comprehensive visibility across deployments and often failed in discovery of devices. Updates still required recall, which for most Industrial IoT settings is a non-starter in solutions. More than anything, this pick up falls in line with what has been a year of plugging holes and filling in gaps across Microsoft’s security portfolio. From infrastructure to headless endpoints and all of the hybrid combinations and expanding human vulnerabilities in between, Microsoft is building a platform to be reckoned with.
Twilio acquires Segment for $3.2B
It’s not all that big, it’s not all that splashy, but the really big implications of this acquisition are that we’ll see a significant alternative to “traditional” CRM systems to manage customer data and customer interactions. Between Twilio and Segment, the joint company has both the ability to dynamically resolve customer identities AND use that information to feed a wide range of customer interactions across channels and contexts. In terms of the core tech stack required to deliver on the customer-centric vision, this has the potential for huge ripple effects throughout the industry. As companies ask some fundamental questions about what operation capabilities they really need, and what level investment they need in tools to support them, this alternative approach is likely to gain a big following.
Koch buying Infor
When was the last time a non software company invested in a Top 5 category player? In an unprecedented move, Koch took complete ownership of Infor. What looked like an investment protection move, to own a piece of the ERP vendor that Koch was implementing, has now come a full-on investment by the conglomerate vendor. And there is nothing from with this, give that the returns of enterprise software are attractive to most industries. In the past lateral investments have not produced the expected results (close to now Infor owned Baan went through this experiment with manufacturing power house Invensys). But Koch is staying out of the software business and limiting itself to financial supervision. Will 2021 see more enterprises looking for better returns of investment with acquisition of enterprise software players?
Accenture went on a security buying spree in 2020
Accenture didn’t just acquire one security solution in 2020…they picked up three in a buying spree that brought new managed security services, critical infrastructure consulting, testing and simulation services, and specialized consulting services for the financial services market. Perhaps most notable of the acquisitions was the January pickup of Symantec Cyber Security Services from Broadcom, which brought Symantec’s global threat monitoring and analysis, real-time adversary and industry-specific threat intelligence and incident response services along with six global security operations centers. When combined with the $1.2 billion across 33 acquisitions made in 2019, Accenture is positioned to be one of the most formidable managed security service providers around.
Kronos and Ultimate Software merge
Owned by the same PE firm, two long standing HCM vendors were told to merge into what is now UKG, a larger and more competitive vendor in the US and with deeper pockets to grow abroad. Kronos’ given leadership within workforce management coupled with Ultimate’s HR and payroll expertise are a powerful combination that needs to get amalgamated carefully, but can deliver a challenge to the larger established vendors in the next year.
WORST TECH ACQUISITION
This category recognizes the enterprise tech acquisition that had the least impact for customers, market landscape, and the overall industry direction.
WINNER: TikTok still not acquired
TikTok
Also known as (A.K.A.) “The Acquisition that Wasn’t. These folks managed to drum up a lot of noise for quite a few companies but ultimately faded into the background. No doubt Oracle and Walmart will make whatever hay they can, but we’re not expecting this one to amount to much.
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Verizon acquires BlueJeans for $500M
So, when Verizon said they were buying BlueJeans for half a billion to solve a hole in short term video conferencing for Covid-19, many tech watchers groaned. When they tried to spin the 5G story around how Verizon Business could cross sell the solution for telemedicine and online learning almost all the technology watchers barfed. Despite BlueJeans bringing in 15,000 enterprise customers and raising $175M since 2009, the solution has been antiquated, technologically inferior, and easily replaced by a highly subsidized Microsoft Teams and a worth-paying-for Zoom. Are teleco’s this badly managed that they don’t know how to rebadge a leading video conferencing solution or build on an open source solution like 8×8 Jitsi or Twillio? This acquisition fails the sniff test on a technical, commercial, or acqui-hire level.
Salesforce acquires Slack for $27.7B
Another acquisition with no likely chance to ever get a payback. Timing was also not at the best as with Slack having lost a of potential and market share vs Microsoft Team – the prices for Slack could reasonably be expected to be lower in 2021 and 2022 than in 2020. And while there is a chance to redefine CRM processes and employee processes with IM, the possibility of Salesforce competitors to imitate that with the more popular Microsoft Teams has a very low barrier of realization. So – cui bono? Salesforce certainly will be able to add platform revenue in 2021 from Slack, and platform has become the #1 revenue segment for Salesforce. There is also ample cross-sell for Salesforce to sell Slack into the install base. 2021 will tell how not so bad acquisition this will have been.
However, when the acquisition is evaluated in terms of building a business graph, Slack makes a lot of sense, despite the high price tag. The future of enterprise software is AI driven and AI driven software needs a business graph. Slack gives Salesforce the ability to create digital feedback loops and context among business processes, objects, users, and data. Why is this important? The next battle in enterprise software will be the creation of business graphs. Like social graphs which use social networks to provide signal intelligence and digital feedback loops to accumulate massive amounts of data that is mined by AI, business graphs will accomplish the same for enterprises. In the case of the enterprise, the relationships among users, documents, business processes, and contextual data will power the signal intelligence and digital feedback loops. As the majority of data is collected by digital feedback loops via automated and ambient collection, these systems can improve their precision decision capabilities. Automation and AI are the tools that bring scale to creating decision velocity.
Pitching this acquisition to the street as a work from home, remote work winner makes no financial sense. As a key part of the future of Salesforce’s platform, this acquisition makes a ton of sense. Constellation just doesn’t see a near-term financial payback despite the high price of Salesforce stock and thus, one of the worst tech acquisitions of 2020.
BEST PARTNERSHIP
This category recognizes the enterprise partnership that delivered the most impact for customers and the market.
As AWS and Azure threatened to take the lion’s share of the cloud business in a growing winner-takes-all sweep in 2020, the MCA has brought together top cloud platforms and solution vendors in a Google-led industry-leading alliance that will allow them to be stronger together than any individual vendor could be against the current leaders. The goal: to better connect with today’s IT audience, to listen and be more responsive to their needs, to address top concerns about performance, security, identity, remote work, and interestingly, the healthcare vertical, in order to build a cloud buyer community long-term that will enable the alliance to keep IT stakeholders closer to them. The MCA can help them sustain themselves against the top two cloud behemoths to create a richer and more appealing set of offerings than any single cloud vendor ever could.
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Salesforce and Okta Partner for Work.com
We are never “really” surprised when former Salesforce execs partner with current Salesforce execs, but in this case, it was a partnership worth forging. Still in early days (the partnership was announced in October), the combined effort is intended to add to the Work.com portfolio of tools, template and solutions to get businesses of any size or industry back to work safely and securely. The partnership with Okta adds Identity access and the capacity for employees to sign-in to Work.com with a single click by leveraging their existing identity providers or corporate directories such as Active Directory. The move also helps organizations with contact tracing in a post-pandemic workplace securely and responsibly connecting key employee data with contact tracing that help organizations navigate COVID-19 realities and requirements. The partnership has clear wins for Okta with easy integrations into work.com and Salesforce in a time when more firms are looking to easily onboard multi-factor authentication and identity management solutions. For Salesforce, it adds to the messaging around trust…while also leveling up their game against rival ServiceNow.
It’s been a bad year for innovative partnerships in general.
As vendor continue to battle for market share, implementation resources, and customer success, most of the partnerships announced this year were transactional and lacked a strategic vision. With Covid-19 hampering in-person business development at events, few new partnership announcements showed a vision as with the IBM-Maersk – TradeLens blockchain partnerships last year. For that reason, the team decided not to name any additional runner ups. Sorry, BD teams, you need to do better!
BEST CEO
This category recognizes the best enterprise CEO. Enough said.
WINNER: Sridhar Vembu – Zoho
Why did he win?
There has been an awful lot of talk among many technology companies about how they’re helping customers and employees through the pandemic, but Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has shown genuine leadership and a well-considered approach. He’s stuck to his values in several key areas including privacy, people over profits and rural/under-served talent empowerment. All of this was kitschy and “admirable” in a pre-pandemic conversation, but now seems down-right visionary.
When the pandemic hit, Zoho was really early out the gate with resources for remote work, programs for subscription relief and forgiveness focused on hard-hit small businesses and investments to help small businesses get thru the worst of the economic hit of the pandemic. His commitment to rural work forces decoupled from a large “wealth-centered HQ” was ahead of the curve, shifting their corporate HQ to Austin before it was the cool thing to do in response to a “Bay Area exodus”. That’s in addition to the corporate mandate that a college degree is not required to work at Zoho since talent should not be tethered to privilege.
All of the things people are so quick to celebrate from the likes of Benioff, Cook, Musk, et al., Vembu has been doing for a while…and then he doubled down in a pandemic.
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Frank Slootman – Snowflake
Frank Slootman spearheaded the biggest and most buzz-generating enterprise tech IPO of 2020 by sharing a much bigger vision than delivering yet another database service. As articulated by Slootman, the Snowflake Data Cloud is about about mobilizing data, sharing it within a broader network to drive new business opportunities, and “driving operations instead of just informing people.” Well done!
Eric Yuan – Zoom
When a company’s name has gone from noun to verb, they have arrived. Eric Yuan had spend years building a low cost, high quality, easy to use video platform. Corporate giants Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Apple all had existing solutions, yet Zoom prevailed going from 10 million monthly active users to 300 million active users with barely a hiccup in three months.
As his success rose, he faced security flaws, a social phenomenon of Zoom burnout, and an accusation of widening the digital divide. Yuan persevered by addressing the security concerns with transparency and the creation of a rock star security team starting with help from Alex Stamos and the addition of Jason Lee as CISO. What makes Eric a top CEO in 2020? He was flexible, intuitive, passionate, and humble in the midst of rapid growth and a pandemic. He showed grit and perseverance in building Zoom and going public as a profitable and debt free company. And to top it off, the stock is up more than 510% year over year
BEST NEW ENTERPRISE CATEGORY
This category recognizes the best new enterprise category that made an impact to the market.
WINNER: Enterprise Low Code
Why did they win?
This became a real and vital category in 2020 as CIOs needed to suddenly field new solutions to urgent disruptions to their business. While low code is an increasingly large and generic grab bag marketing term for almost any solution that can be used to create a working solution through some sort of configuration, a number of vendors at the top end are focusing specifically at the enterprise space.
These solutions include off-the-shelf integrations for popular enterprise application suites, manageability features for the large number of resulting apps, as well as security, version, and lifecycle controls. These solutions provide an entire stack that provides features to enable IT to provide their stakeholders greater choice, enable more self-service, tap more widely into corporate innovation, and unleash decentralized development, all without shooting themselves in the foot with skyrocketing maintenance baggage and security headaches.
RUNNERS UP
Intelligent Orchestration
Vendors in multiple categories – Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS), ML/AI, robotic process automation (RPA), workflow and more – recognize that a convergence is ahead among categories that will help organizations integrate, optimize and automate processes for efficiency and breakthrough customer experience. Constellation Research is championing “Intelligent Orchestration” as a future tech category that span old silos of integration, automation and data-driven action.
“Customer Service Gig Platforms”: There’s one leader in this game so far, Simplr, a subsidiary of insurance company Asurion. They’ve pioneered a text-based, pay-per-resolution approach to customer service that allows businesses to flex resources as needed and highly educated “experts” to act as agents for multiple companies even in the same work session. It’s early days, but we expect to see much more of this approach in the near future.
The Post Pandemic World Best Practice Package
As enterprises struggle with the post pandemic world., vendors have moved fast to help enterprises with managing the ‘new normal’. It is no surprise that low code / no code vendors where the first out of the gate, showing the developer velocity of their platforms – no only for customers but also for themselves.
The ‘Covid19’ package is also a chance of the segment to establish itself beyond the PaaS category with some SaaS Forays. Needless to say, HCM vendors were most active next, providing payroll and workforce management capabilities for safe operation and re-openings. Tracking applications saw also high demand, with lateral vendors like Salesforce offering this through its new work.com offering or even SAP being asked to provide the Covid tracking app in Germany.
BEST NEW IPO
WINNER: Snowflake
Why did they win?
The most noteworthy enterprise tech IPO of 2020, hands down, was Snowflake. Who knew the valuation of this data warehousing service would surpass that of IBM and AMD? Snowflake achieved this milestone when its market value reached $120 billion in December, less than three months after its IPO. That’s a heady valuation given that Snowflake is forecasting $538 to $543 million in revenue for its fiscal year ending January 31, 2021.
Snowflake execs would counter that the company is not just a database-as-a-service provider. They stress the ability to “mobilize your data” using the Snowflake Data Cloud to share and deliver data and insights using services-oriented approaches. That helps customers “drive operations instead of just informing people,“ according to Snowflake. That’s an evolution in the use of data and analytics that Constellation has long espoused, going from data to decisions rather than stopping and insights. Snowflake is also a good reminder, that taken proven concepts (here the data warehouse) to the public cloud has enormous growth and success potential.
RUNNERS UP
C3.AI
The odyssey of C3.AI came to a public offerings, after starting out in utility billing, transforming to IoT and then to PaaS / AI. Its the 2nd IPO for legendary CRM figure Tom Siebel, how shows that he can grow and take a company public in the PaaS space. C3.AI has a unique pattern based architecture that starts from the analytics and builds back to the transactional applications. This allows for unique opportunities with customers pursuing digital transformation.
BEST NEW ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE MARKETING OF THE YEAR
This category showcases the best marketing campaign, ad, or perception transformation in the enterprise.
Without question, ServiceNow has been knocking it out of the advertising park, most recently with the Christmas themed “Let’s Workflow It” campaign featuring the “Chief Holiday Officer” of the North Pole leveraging workflows to exceed performance expectations..and even get in a little swipe at 2020.Check out the inspired ad campaign here: “Chief Holiday Officer, Let’s Workflow It”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqQRokPX654This isn’t the first brand salvo ServiceNow has launched in the year, kicking off 2020 with a brand campaign around hard-working Derek and a confetti cannon. Derek and the team have been thru a lot this year and ServiceNow’s advertising has kept us up to speed from working from home to gearing up to go back to the office safely.
But ServiceNow didn’t win this category for their advertising…the“Better Way to Workflow” campaign and the most recent “Let’s Workflow It” campaign represents a far more layered and comprehensive marketing approach. They have picked up their content game…a recent Forbes piece on work–flowing your way to a stress free Thanksgiving is a nice example. They are ramping up their social buzz and content marketing. Their content syndication and demand generation is also on point, teasing back to the big brand plays, but backing that up with business use cases and technical specifications the IT set knows and demands. While their work with BBDO has been creative, engaging and hysterical, thankfully, ServiceNow isn’t just relying on the big brand advertising route. They are leaning into their new brand voice and vision and turning new heads, which can likely be seen in their 2020 performance numbers.
Part of the allure to the public cloud wars is the message battles among Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. While these ads don’t often influence direct buying decisions in the B2B world, they do help raise brand awareness to some extent, especially when third in a three-horse public cloud race. To celebrate Google Cloud’s win with Major League Baseball (MLB) over a rival, Google Cloud and the MLB put out an ad that not only highlighted summer and America’s past time, but also reminded buyers that MLB chose Google Cloud over their competitors for Anthos, innovation, and personalized experiences.
To make the point of the hybrid loud, the IBM team took to the airwaves and broke down the enterprise trend into simple consumer examples from a labradoodle and cronut to a skort. Somehow they figured out how to tie this to hybrid cloud infrastructure and Watson A.I. to talk about getting to cloud modernization having to rebuild from scratch. How they delivered was pretty deft.
BEST LIVE-EVENT TO VIRTUAL-EVENT PIVOT
This category showcases the team that adapted and succeeded in their high-touch in-person event to a full on virtual event experience
WINNER: Domo’s Domapalooza 2020
Why did they win?
With little more than three week’s notice, as lock downs emerged in March 2020, Domo switched from an in-person event to the virtual Domopalooza. What emerged retained a live-event feel, with a mix of real-time hosting and panel interaction and prerecorded content. This hybrid approach set the pattern for the most engaging virtual tech events of 2020. They knocked it out of the park before all the bigger spenders on virtual events even knew where the park was. What was more interesting, they had an earthquake 20 minutes before the event began and one slightly after and the presenters didn’t even bat an eye. Domo and their team set the bar for live virtual events for the entire year and Josh James is really rad on skis!
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Constellation’s Connected Enterprise 2020
Bringing together a high touch, senior executive networking event is not easy in the physical events business, let alone the virtual event paradigm. So, we nominated ourselves here. The Constellation team attempted to bring back immersive experiences and networking to virtual events without the boredom of one-way push video keynotes and panels. From morning coffee and tea tastings to evening chocolate and wine tastings, the event included a variety of shared physical experiences and active networking via the Cosmic Experience platform. Attendees received the Cosmic Experience Kit, which included executive chotzkis from 22 vendors and the USB powered Constellation travel coffee grinder, brewer, and cup kit along with fuzzy hotel slippers.
BIGGEST TECH FLOP OF THE YEAR
This category simultaneously recognizes the highest potential and largest failure in enterprise tech
WINNER: Stagnant, Pre-Recorded Virtual Events
Why did they win?
Do you want fresh fruits and vegetables or the canned alternative? Of course you want fresh, and the same preferences apply to tech events, even if they have to be virtual. We know it’s hard to reproduce the buzz and spontaneity that can be catalyzed when gathering thousands of people in a single place, but too many 2020 events had all the appeal of canned peaches in a syrupy sauce of “unprecedented times” excuses. Virtual will continue into 2021, so find a way to mix in live interaction, serendipity and a touch of the unexpected
RUNNERS UP
Why were they recognized?
Community Misfires
Launching a “community” only to realize you launched a LinkedIn Group was an all too frequent flop. There was a real misunderstanding as organizations navigated thru the pandemic on how to leverage social, often misunderstanding the difference between social as a communications tool and social as a community platform. The bigger flops included starting a “community” only to have all engagement and conversation be based around push announcements (product offerings, virtual event notifications, customer success stories) and no opportunity for like minded people to share, have conversations and work out loud with peers. So now, we’ve got a lot of branded message boards that include the word community and few actual communities working on tough problems together.
The Bottom Line: Compressed Digital Transformation Dominates 2020 and 2021
At the dawn of 2021, all across the world, compressed digital transformation is accelerating cloud adoption, digital commerce, cyber security, automation and AI. These are key technologies for 2021 and the team will be keeping a close eye on the leaders in these spaces. See you in 12 months, when the Constellation Research Team will be back recapping who the winners and some losers will be for 2021!
Your POV
How has 2020 treated you? Did we miss a top vendor for this year’s awards? Anything you’d suggest for 2021?
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing
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Disclosures
Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy,stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website. * Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.
Constellation Research recommends that readers consult a stock professional for their investment guidance. Investors should understand the potential conflicts of interest analysts might face. Constellation does not underwrite or own the securities of the companies the analysts cover. Analysts themselves sometimes own stocks in the companies they cover—either directly or indirectly, such as through employee stock-purchase pools in which they and their colleagues participate. As a general matter, investors should not rely solely on an analyst’s recommendation when deciding whether to buy, hold, or sell a stock. Instead, they should also do their own research—such as reading the prospectus for new companies or for public companies, the quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC—to confirm whether a particular investment is appropriate for them in light of their individual financial circumstances.
Bottom Line: Cybersecurity CEOs’ lessons learned from navigating the pandemic provide a valuable framework for leading and growing a business through anxious, uncertain times.
How each cybersecurity CEO responds to the challenges of keeping employees safe, customers secure, and product release cycles on schedule while still achieving customer success – all virtually – provide valuable insights into leading a company during difficult times. Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti), exemplifies the empathy all CEOs interviewed have for their employees’ welfare. “My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always-on business” for our customers,” Simon mentioned during a recent interview.
What made leading during the pandemic even more difficult was the exponentially increasing number of breaches and cyberattacks their customers are experiencing. McAfee Labs Covid-19 Threats Report found a 630% increase in cloud services cyberattacks between January and April of this year alone. The FBI estimates cyberattacks are up 400% due to the pandemic. As DevOps teams fast-track new features and releases, CEOs keep their virtual organizations cohesive and focused on the same goals.
The following cybersecurity CEOs provide their most valuable lessons learned leading through the pandemic:
Christy Wyatt, CEO of Absolute Software
About Absolute
Absolute is a leader in Endpoint Resilience solutions and the industry’s only undeletable defense platform embedded in over a half-billion devices. Enabling a permanent digital tether between the endpoint and the enterprise who distributed it, Absolute provides IT and Security organizations with always-connected visibility and Self-Healing Endpoint security.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
There was a clear moment for us where we said, “What is our objective? What is the best response to this?” And the phrase that came out was, “How can we help?” We knew our primary focus needed to be helping our customers solve a massive problem, instead of monetizing this opportunity. Making this decision to come together as a mission-driven organization… that was so incredibly powerful.
Even as life was changing drastically between breakfast and dinner every single day and employees were navigating their own work-from-home journeys and trying to care for their families, what we heard was that this ability to contribute was the thing that they were hanging onto. They were able to say, “Listen, I’m getting up every morning and I’m helping organizations with something that’s really scary and unfamiliar.” And, they did remarkable things… these teams put themselves through so much to help our customers stand up remote work and learning environments essentially overnight.
I always say you don’t win the race when you’re in the race. It’s the training and the practice, and the talking,and the drills and the teamwork… which we had been working on long before the pandemic hit. So I think my biggest takeaway is that if you put in the training upfront and you focus on doing the right things, the right things will happen. And you really can achieve more than you thought you could.
Flint Brenton – President and CEO of Centrify
About Centrify
Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management by delivering multi-cloud-architected Identity-Centric PAM to enable digital transformation at scale. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes trust and then grants least privilege access just-in-time based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request and the risk of the access environment. Centrify centralizes and orchestrates fragmented identities, improves audit and compliance visibility and reduces risk, complexity and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
“Our customers and the people they serve are all going through rapid change. When you look at the concept of digital transformation, a lot of companies were struggling with that before the pandemic. Now we know that we can’t live without it. The role of the developer is more important than ever and they are driving innovation in a very different environment than they’ve ever experienced.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic is that no matter what the obstacles are, people need connection. For a company like Centrify, that means we need to be connected to our customers intellectually, strategically, virtually and – eventually – physically.
An example of this was very clear recently, as we engaged in discussions with one of the world’s largest financial institutions to replace their existing password vaulting solution. They have a vision for where they want to be, how they are going to get there and how they are going to secure that transformation. But they need the right partner who not only has the technology capabilities and architecture for a cloud-focused, DevOps-drive, digitally-enabled enterprise, but also to understand their vision and be invested in their success.
So the CIO asked me to personally track the rollout of our product against their product enablement success and he was very interested in how our vision of Privileged Access Management will converge with cloud security, DevOps and other modern technologies and empower their vision and plan. Ultimately, he wanted connectedness. He wants a personal relationship built on understanding, honesty and accountability, even if that relationship can’t be forged and nurtured over a dinner or meeting in a conference room.
That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned leading this year: that customers, employees, partners and peers want to be connected any way possible, even if they can’t do so in close physical proximity yet.”
Steve Havas, CEO of Evernym
About Evernym
Evernym is a pioneer in the field of verifiable credential technology, which gives individuals control over their digital identity and organizations the ability to trust and verify their data. Evernym builds and deploys self-sovereign identity solutions, with the technology and go-to-market resources powering the largest implementations of digital credentials in production.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
The pandemic has been, to say the least, impactful on society and our business. The market changes have required ruthless listening to customer needs and absolute focus on delivering what’s needed today.
We’ve all anticipated a gradual convergence of the digital and physical worlds, but that timeline has been accelerated by the sudden rise in remote work/education and contactless identity verification. We’re fortunate that this is the future we’ve been building toward, although we would have never imagined many of the COVID-19 credential use cases that are now mission-critical for our customers. It’s certainly been a lesson in adaptability and prioritization.
Benji Markoff, CEO of Founder Shield
About Founder Shield
Founder Shield is a tech-enabled insurance brokerage, focusing on rapidly growing businesses that operate in emerging industries. As a broker, we have a unique perspective of protecting our clients against cyber threats and guiding them to recovery should their fall victim. We work with forward-thinking insurers using proprietary cyber risk management tools, while also offering the most innovative insurance coverage possible.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
People say that fortunes are won and lost in times like these and it certainly appears that hackers & social engineering fraudsters have gotten that memo. Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen an increase in both hacking and social engineering attacks on clients of all shape and size $5M Revenue to $500M revenue. The reports suggest that working from home has only increased vulnerabilities of company networks (or lack thereof as employees use home networks) and the ability to induce fraudulent payments from employees who might not be able to lean over to a coworker to fact check a fishy invoice. The valuable lesson? Do a cyber audit and make sure you’re training your team on spotting social engineering and phishing scams.
Anand S – CEO at Gramener: Insights as Data Stories
About Gramener: Insights as Data Stories
Gramener is a data science company that helps solve complex business problems with compelling data stories using insights and a low-code analytics platform. We help enterprises large and small with data insights and storytelling by leveraging Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Automated Analysis and Visual Intelligence using modern charts and narratives (NLG). Our Gramex platform is a low-code framework to rapidly build engaging data solutions across multiple business verticals and use cases. Our products have empowered CXOs, Chief Data Officers, Scientists, Business Analysts and others save millions of dollars by making an impact on revenue and decision making. Gramener was founded in 2010 and has over 325+ clients worldwide, 200+ employees and 5 offices globally including the United States and Singapore.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As an SMB we leaned more towards cost optimization over premium cybersecurity tools and services, resulting in ring-fencing our office infrastructure more. Due to COVID-19, when we moved 100% remote, our cybersecurity controls fell short to defend us against external threats. We had to extend the security protocols like moving all work to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), strengthen VPN tunnel security, implement 2FA for all logins, opt for more security services from our Cloud service provider.
We accelerated digitization across operations and increased spending in Cloud security and production application security. We are revisiting our current approach and playbooks for cybersecurity.
– We are evaluating the current 3rd party service providers offering and reevaluating if they still have same level security controls in place at their end
We are conducting an accelerated implementation of Data Security protocols across the organization and not just on client specific projects. This includes updates to Information Security Policy around Data classification, Data tracking and protection.
With 100% remote operations, we are moving to VDI for all production and critical services. This means access to all data is through dedicated VPN Tunnels only. This is to mitigate any exposure to data from folks working at home.
– Our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure allows our IT teams to protect client sensitive data to a restricted cloud environment. All the tools and 3rd party cloud services required by our team members to perform their tasks are provided in the VDI. No data can be extracted or moved from VDI instances.
– All internal company data around operations, team members, Intellectual Property are a prime target for cyberattacks and ransomware. We have moved to a secure VPN tunnel architecture for all our team members to access company internal systems. Earlier this was restricted to a small group of functions. By mandating access via secure VPN tunnel our IT team has centralized visibility of all traffic across the network and can intervene quickly against any potential threats.
We are mandating 2FA. Earlier employee convenience led to not mandating 2FA for all our services. Now 2FA has been made mandatory across all services.
In order to optimize costs, we are consolidating tools used in the organization to identify overlapping functionalities and getting rid of those which are no longer required.
Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode
About Hexnode
Hexnode MDM is the award-winning Unified Endpoint Management platform from Mitsogo Inc. The company has been helping organizations in over 100 countries to stay agile and competitive in an increasingly mobile world. Mitsogo Inc. is a leading provider of Endpoint Management and security solutions. From SMBs to Fortune 500s, enterprises of all sizes have leveraged Mitsogo’s prowess in device management to drive business productivity and compliance. Mitsogo’s solutions adapt to the most complex of business environments.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Navigate the path, trust your crew
Being a CEO, as lucrative as it may seem has its own little big challenges, for example, they don’t tell you that there are no off days. There are always thousands of choices to be made and tons of pathways to be chosen, but the absolute worst thing comes when we face an uncertainty that was never on the radar.
And when the pandemic hit, the team needed support more than ever, I had to switch through the roles of commander in chief, therapist, cheerleader and even at times a babysitter. After all, you have to be the rock for your employees, or else it shows. But fortunately, I was so lucky to be surrounded by like-minded people who are as passionate as the founder about our business and customers.
We had to establish a fully remote work landscape and it was not what we would have expected, it was at a time when everyone was very insecure about COVID-19. People were worried about their safety, the safety of their families and work started to slip into second gear, some of us were even having mental breakdowns. It was time to be the person that the team could look up to.
“Customer is king”, is a tired old saying but that is what Hexnode live by, we had a commitment towards our clients, so we had to provide uninterrupted service for them rain or shine. So, we made a decision that would be deemed “mad “from a financial standpoint.
We rented out hotel rooms and made guesthouses for each of our employees around the globe and ran security and screening protocols equivalent to that of hospitals. Soon the stress levels were back to normal and the team started to enjoy the atmosphere. Productivity became better than pre-COVID levels.
As a leader, your team should be able to trust that you’re going to do everything in your power to navigate them through this tough time. The greatest asset for every business is said to be “finding the right staff”, but I would say it is “how you create the right staff”. The most valuable lesson l learned during this pandemic is “When the crew is great you just have to navigate, they will pull through all the tides and storms coming your way. They always do”.
Brad Wiskirchen, CEO, Kount
About Kount
Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network delivers real-time fraud prevention and account protection and enables personalized customer experiences for more than 9,000 leading brands and payment providers. Linked by Kount’s award-winning AI, the Identity Trust Global Network analyzes signals from 32 billion annual interactions to personalize user experiences across the spectrum of trust—from frictionless experiences to blocking fraud. Quick and accurate identity trust decisions deliver safe payment, account creation and login events while reducing digital fraud, chargebacks, false positives and manual reviews.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Open, honest, fearless communication. The Kount team has lived by this motto for more than a decade and never before has it been more tested and more relevant than in navigating the events of 2020. From moving our entire team to remote work to quickly pivoting to help our eCommerce businesses handle dramatic changes in transaction volume, it’s essential that our team communicate at the highest levels. As the impacts of the pandemic are often deeply personal, open, honest, fearless communication has empowered us to balance individual needs, customer needs and company needs while uniting us in our mission to do whatever it takes to stop digital fraud for our customers.
Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti)
About MobileIron
MobileIron is redefining enterprise security with the industry’s first mobile-centric security platform for the Everywhere Enterprise. MobileIron’s platform combines award-winning and industry-leading unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities with passwordless MFA (Zero Sign-On) and mobile threat defense (MTD) to validate the device, establish user context, verify the network and detect and remediate threats to ensure that only authorized users, devices, apps and services can access business resources in a “work from everywhere” world.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As a leader during a pandemic, you must go above and beyond to provide your employees and customers with world-class service and support. My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always on business” for our customers. At MobileIron, we quickly enabled our employees around the world to work remotely. We also made it as easy as possible for our customers to issue more corporate-owned devices or enable a BYOD program to keep their employees secure and connected – whether they were working on the frontlines or at home. And we continued to innovate to meet the changing security needs of our customers and communities.
Overall, the pandemic has crammed years’ worth of change into a few short months and it will have long-lasting effects on how, when and where we work in the future. Work in the future will be very different to work in the past, which will present leaders with some challenges. However, it will also offer some significant opportunities to overhaul working practices and support employees who work from home with better collaboration and more intuitive access. The “Everywhere Enterprise” is not a passing phase, it’s the current reality and will continue to grow and expand as workers find new ways to be productive from anywhere.
Ward Osborne, CEO of Osborne Global Security
About Osborne Global Security
Osborne Global Security is a new player in the security space. They are challenging the stereotypes that come to mind when you originally think of security and replacing them with the ideas of trust, care and a shift in general security culture. This is a fascinating company to watch in the future.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As CISO’s for multiple companies through this pandemic, we have seen so much shift and change. There’s been borderline chaos in many companies – and chaos ALWAYS brings opportunity. For our clients, the ones we’ve worked with and developed mature, risk and capabilities based models for just this situation, they are thriving.
It’s interesting to see the world adapt to a virtual delivery model which we’ve been creating, living, evangelizing for 25 years. Our clients who may not have had the time or prioritization to develop those models and capabilities have taken a hit, but we continue to do what we do, which is develop and provide resilience and growth to our customers.
In a virtual and distributed world, Trust becomes a major factor in every conversation. If a customer can’t Trust that we are there to solve problems when things get tough, then they aren’t able to operate effectively knowing that someone has their back.
Our world has become physically disconnected, but the people and companies that deal with that challenge in a proactive and positive way will always thrive. We are here. Growing our tribe. Doing the next right thing and leading customers to success in the midst of all of this chaos and challenge.
Rodrigo Tumaián, CEO and Co-Founder of Prometeo
About Prometeo
Prometeo provides a single point of access to banking information, transactions and payments across multiple financial institutions in Latam. Inspired by PSD2 and with high security standards, Prometeo brings easy plug & play access to open banking, the future of financial services. Currently, Prometeo is connected with more than 30 financial institutions across 9 countries of Latam (including México & Brazil) and provides access to more than 45 APIs.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Prometeo was born with a very strong focus on cyber-security, so the pandemic had no effect on our operation. Our company grew up with the foundation of mobility and work flexibility, this forced us from the beginning to think about the best way to transmit data and protect mobile assets. So when the pandemic arrived, we were already providing remote access (VPN) to all our employees, limiting access by profile. We were already using two-factor authentication to access our services. We already had user nomination and record of the operations generated by our employees on our assets. I think if I had to mention what was the most valuable thing we learned from the pandemic, it’s that the direction we took from the beginning was worth it. We didn’t have to deal with operational issues to handle the high demand for digital products from customers, we just did it. So the pandemic for us strengthened another of our fundamental values, not to make security to be compliance, but to make integral security, both within our company and for our customers.
Jean Le Bouthillier, CEO of Qohash
About Qohash:
Qohash delivers advanced data classification and monitoring capabilities to protect your personal, health, corporate and financial data using transformational technologies such as machine learning and analytics.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
2020 has accelerated digital transformation efforts and highlighted the need for advanced, lightweight data security capabilities. With enterprise employees working increasingly remote, data is flowing faster and in previously unimagined ways. Businesses realize that to keep up with the demands of clients and a digital workforce, data risk models need an update or risk jeopardizing the enterprise.
Qohash clients recognize that the employee Risk Score, a quantifiable measure of trust, mitigates the impact both of bad actors as well as busy, distracted employees.
Remote, digital work will be a part of enterprise operations for the foreseeable future. Organizations need to enable governance risk and compliance teams to better support this transition to Work From Anywhere [WFA] models where talent and business thrive.
Jean-Paul Smets, Founder and CEO RapidSpace
About RapidSpace
Rapid.Space is a cloud provider whose “approach is based exclusively on the use of free, fully auditable and reversible software, hardware and management procedures under open licenses. Thanks to a network of 228 points of presence, Rapid.Space has global presence including in mainland China. It covers similar features as the most sophisticated public cloud provider and introduces exclusive innovations such as industrial edge computing and private 4G/5G vRAN.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
“Rapid.Space learned during the pandemic how to formalize its management procedures and remotely setup points of presence. Thanks to Augmented Reality and smart glasses, Rapid.Space team in Europe and Americas could setup remotely its points of presence in mainland China and Taiwan without having to travel by air plane”.
Software companies continue to deliver the highest growth rates for the 25th straight year, representing 71% of the entire list, the highest-ever percentage in the history of the rankings.
353 of the 500 fastest-growing companies in North America are in the software industry according to Deloitte’s 2020 Tech Fast 500, the most ever in the history of their rankings and a 3% increase over last year.
Two of the ten fastest-growing companies over the last three years specialize in cybersecurity, OneTrust and Transmit Security.
Notable software companies ranked in Deloitte’s 2020 Tech Fast 500 include Bolt, Illumio, LogicMonitor and Seeq.
Biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies are the second most prevalent sector, comprising 14% of all companies, followed by digital content/media/entertainment (5%) and medical devices (4%).
It’s fascinating to look at the emerging trends in Deloitte’s 2020 North America Technology Fast 500 Rankings as leading predictors of innovation. This year’s report is a quick read and provides a glimpse into the fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019. Deloitte chooses Technology Fast 500 awardees based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2016 to 2019. Overall, the 2020 Technology Fast 500 companies achieved revenue growth ranging from 175% to 106,508% over the three-year time frame, with a median growth rate of 450%.
Key insights from the rankings include the following:
Five of the top ten winners are software companies, includingBranch Metrics, OneTrust, Transmit Security, Drift and CharterUP. It’s noteworthy that cybersecurity is well-represented in the top ten fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019. OneTrust and Transmit Security is in the top five fastest-growing companies between 2016 and 2019, accentuating how critical cybersecurity is becoming in all businesses. The following graphic lists the top ten Deloitte 2020 North America Technology Fast 500 winners.
Digital platform and enterprise infrastructure & productivity dominate software companies are dominating software sub-sectors with 56% of all companies. Deloitte’s ranking reflects the increasing urgency all organizations have to launch, scale and excel at new digital selling channels. The pandemic accelerated the urgency faster than the most compelling business case ever could. Having over 50% of all software companies in these categories quantifies the cloud as the platform of choice across enterprises.
Electronic devices/hardware, energy tech and software & SaaS are the three sectors generating the fastest growing businesses over the last three years. Edge computing and the quick pace of innovation in intelligent sensor development and adoption for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use cases are catalysts driving the 683% growth rate. Sustainability’s bottom-line benefits, including its positive impact on lean manufacturing, help drive to 525% growth rate in energy tech. Software and SaaS median growth rate of 465% shows enterprise software’s evolution is nascent and just getting started.
62% of the fastest-growing companies of the last three years say the Covid-19 pandemic has a low- to moderate impact on their business. It’s understandable how most high-growth companies are seeing a moderate impact of the pandemic as entire industries rely on their software, services and products to survive. Take software, for example. Manufacturers producing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) need ERP and MES systems to get healthcare workers much-needed supplies. Retailers need e-commerce software to drive sales online. Bolt’s success with its Checkout Experience Platform and it now being the platform of choice for Authentic Brands Group’s Forever 21 e-commerce relaunch are a case in point.
Eliminating System Complexity Is Celonis’ Number One Priority
On October 14th, 2020, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Alexander Rinke, kicked off its Ecosystem Summit and showcased its new Execution Management System (EMS). The goal is to improve an enterprise’s execution capacity by simplifying complex processes. Celonis defines execution capacity as the ability to get things done over the time + cost + effort (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Celonis Defines Execution Capacity
Source: Celonis
Celonis uses its process mining core to deliver the Celonis EMS Platform. The Bavarian software startup is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with 15 offices worldwide.
The Celonis Execution Management System
The Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) brings together a number of applications, instruments, development studios, tools and platform approaches to unlock execution capacity. Sitting on top of business processes and systems, the heart of the solution is the process mining core that identifies and measures capacity barriers. Capacity is unlocked by a methodic approach to applying best practices, actions, and automation. The new additions and updates from the fall launch of EMS include:
Celonis Execution Applications. These operational applications include popular apps such as Celonis Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Opportunity Management.
Celonis Execution Instruments. What was formerly known as process mining analytics applications, can be used to measure current execution capacity and identify execution gaps. Over 170 instruments have been developed to date.
Celonis Studio. Ecosystem partners and customers use the studio to build new instruments and applications.
Celonis EMS Store. New solutions can be ecosystem partners can be found in the store
Figure 2. Inside The Celonis EMS Platform
Source: Celonis
Proof Is In The Pudding
At the Ecosystem Summit, Celonis showcased a number of use cases where EMS improved operations. For example, AVNET reduced throughput times order management by 50% from order to ship. Dell was able to move to a leaner supply chain with 8 days of inventory versus an industry average of 40 days. Ascend improved on time delivery by 27% while simultaneously increasing automation by 43% in just four months. L’Oreal was able to grow on-time touchless orders by 800%, resulting in greater revenue and capacity to ship more products using existing infrastructure. Comcast improved asset utilization and captured $85 million in improvements.
Overall, this ability to improve execution capacity has created more capacity with existing infrastructure. In supply chains, the average on-time delivery rate is 43%, yet Celonis customers using EMS can hit a 95% target. Celonis clams that the average touchless invoice rate is only 27% inside companies while Celonis EMS customers are exceeding 90% adoption for finance and administration use cases. In customer experience, most companies average a 32 net promoter score (NPS), yet Celonis EMS customers appear to double scores at an average of 70 NPS.
Companies using the Celonis Execution Management System are constantly identifying and unlocking more capacity in their business. In finance and administration, the average touchless invoice rate is only 27%, where Celonis EMS customers often achieve 90%. In the supply chain, the average on-time delivery rate is only at 43% while Celonis EMS customers can achieve more than 95%. In customer service, the average Net Promoter Score is 32, compared to a score that is more than double for Celonis EMS customers who regularly achieved scores of more than 70.
Celonis customers include venerable brands such as ABB, AstraZeneca, Bosch, Coca Cola, Citibank, Dell, GSK, John Deere, L’Oreal, Siemens, Uber, Vodafone and Whirlpool (see Figure 3)
Figure 3. Celonis EMS Customers Include Global Leaders In Every Industry
Source: Celonis
Bottom Line: The Race To Business Graphs Is Here, Automation and AI are The Facilitators To Decision Velocity.
The convergence of workflow, process mining, robotic process automation, integration services, microservices, and low-code/no-code platforms drive the future of software. This next battle in enterprise software will be the creation of business graphs. Like social graphs which use social networks to provide signal intelligence and digital feedback loops to accumulate massive amounts of data that is mined by AI, business graphs will accomplish the same for enterprises.
In the case of the enterprise, the relationships among users, documents, business processes, and contextual data will power the signal intelligence and digital feedback loops. As the majority of data is collected by digital feedback loops via automated and ambient collection, these systems can improve their precision decision capabilities. Automation and AI are the tools that bring scale to creating decision velocity.
Your POV
How has your experience with Celonis been? Do you feel they have the chops to take process mining to the next level? How are you using Celonis and will you adopt their execution management system?
