Posts from the ‘Cloud Computing’ Category

Jan 24

Gartner Predicts AI Software Will Grow To $297 Billion By 2027

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Predicting global spending on AI software will surge from $124 billion in 2022 to $297 billion in 2027, Gartner forecasts the market will grow at a 19.1% compound annual growth rate in the next six years.

Generative AI (GenAI) software spending is expected to skyrocket from 8% in 2023 to 35% by 2027. GenAI’s rapid growth is attributed to enterprise software vendors integrating AI tools into current and future releases, streamlining the widespread adoption of GenAI-based features and new apps, emerging as the fastest-growing category of AI software.

Gartner predicts the integration of AI tools will be most prevalent in marketing, product design, and customer service, reflecting a shift towards more personalized and efficient operations. The research firm provides an extensive analysis of AI software’s growth areas and opportunities in their recently published report, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide (client access required). The forecast is based on over 500 AI use cases sourced from Gartner’s AI use case prisms and related research.

What Driving The AI Market Boom?

Key assumptions that are driving the forecast include the prediction that greater than 70% of independent software vendors (ISVs) will have embedded GenAI capabilities in their enterprise applications by 2026, a major jump from fewer than 1% today.

Thirty-nine percent of worldwide organizations will be in the experimentation phase of Gartner’s AI adoption curve by 2025, with 14% being in the expansion phase. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 36% of organizations in the experimentation phase will also start to adopt use cases with high business value but low time-to-financial impact (TOFI).

Another factor driving long-term market growth is how spending on AI software increases with organizational maturity. Gartner notes that organizational maturity is lower today versus the higher hype levels and market interest in AI technologies. As organizations gain greater maturity with AI experimentation, spending will increase.

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide

“We expect to see ongoing demand for more AI enhancements within software applications and more opportunities for providers to deliver software to build AI. However, do not expect these markets to become saturated (where supply outstrips demand) during the forecast period,” Gartner’s analysts write in the forecast analysis.

Application areas growing the fastest

Gartner predicts AI spending on financial management system (FMS) components will be the largest application market overall. FMS supports the office of finance with capabilities for forecasting, planning, cash application and collections, balance reconciliation, and others.

FMS vendors are doubling down on AI already to provide proven productivity and optimization support, integrating AI-based features in their apps and platforms. AI’s inherent advantages quickly lead to quantified performance and productivity gains with FMS systems, which are table stakes for building a solid business case for potential customers.

Digital commerce applications are the highest-growth AI application market. Digital commerce applications are designed to streamline commerce operations and related areas, including optimization, customer segmentation, image categorization, and others. Gartner defines the AI capabilities in digital commerce to include personalization, automated execution, and content generation.

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide

Predicting Generative AI’s Growth

Gartner is predicting that GenAI will eventually become a cornerstone of all AI software spending, reaching 35% of worldwide revenues by 2027.

The report’s authors point to the proliferation of AI copilots being integrated into a wide variety of enterprise systems as a primary catalyst driving this area of the market’s growth. Copilot systems are in use today within email systems, customer support chatbots, and a wide variety of marketing applications, with content creation and personalization vendors fast-tracking copilots into their apps and platforms.

One of the many data points that support the optimistic growth forecast for GenAI is Microsoft’s success with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, launched in March of last year. Since then, more than 130,000 organizations have experienced copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide

Large Language Models (LLMs) are the growth catalyst natural language platforms need

Gartner is predicting that the data science and AI platform market will see the greatest amount of software spending in the forecast period. They’ve defined the market as including machine learning (ML) platforms and cloud AI developer services. “The data science and AI platforms market is accelerated by the growth of AI and the democratization of technology, where capabilities like ease of use, workflow, collaboration, and deployment provide support for citizen data scientists,” writes Gartner’s analysts in the report.

The leading AI platforms seeing the greatest growth are natural language technologies (which include LLMs), data science and AI platforms, computer vision platforms, and analytics and BI platforms. LLMs will be the fuel that keeps natural language technology-based platforms growing for the next three years. They’re the emerging workhouses of the AI software market.

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide

Apr 19

FinancialForce Unleashes Spring ’23 Release, Strengthening Opportunity-to-Renewal

Finding new ways to improve opportunity-to-renewal is core to any services business’s growth.

FinancialForce has long bet its business on the belief that it could streamline opportunity-to-renewal for people- and software-centered businesses better than any other vendor. In delivering their Spring ’23 release, they’re proving how adept they are at delivering new features on a faster release cadence of three major releases a year. Out of its workforce of 1,000 people, FinancialForce has 400 full-time employees in DevOps, engineering, product management, and quality and nearly 100 outside resources in R&D.

FinancialForce’s overarching goal with the Spring ’23 release is to strengthen the customer’s ability to excel at opportunity-to-renewal. The feature refresh for Spring ’23 includes 18 different areas of their platform, with the most, eight, being in Services CPQ. Dan Brown, Chief Product, and Strategy Officer at FinancialForce, says, “Opportunity-to-renewal is core to companies that deliver services. It’s an area that has been dramatically underserved by classic vendors in this space. Most are fairly product-centric, and that tends to hold companies that are service-oriented back.”

Services-as-a-Business is gaining traction

FinancialForce’s Spring ’23 release shows how Services-as-a-Business is closing gaps and improving the opportunity-to-renewal process. Tight labor markets, spiraling costs and prices due to inflation, and blind spots in opportunity-to-renewal cycles continually jeopardize services revenue. As a result, professional services and software companies relying on service revenue risk losing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and seeing reduced Customer Lifetime Value for every account. The Spring ’23 release provides a more granular, 360-degree view across eight core areas of the opportunity-to-renewal process to help services businesses meet new growth challenges.

“Our new Spring ’23 release is designed to give organizations the kind of certainty they need in these very uncertain economic times,” said Scott Brown, President, and Chief Executive Officer at FinancialForce. “Given the pace at which market and business conditions change, services businesses need confidence in their ability to manage estimates, skills and resources, and solve complex problems. This new release gives organizations a complete, customer-centric view of their business to turn continuous disruption into a competitive edge.”

FinancialForce’s Spring ’23 release doubles down in the areas of Service CPQ and Resource Management, which are the areas where the majority of new features have been added in the Spring ’23 release.

Improving Services CPQ process performance protects margins

FinancialForce is prioritizing Services CPQ, first introduced in the Winter ’22 release, to help customers get more in control of their margins and time management. The number and depth of new features in this area and Dan Brown’s insights into how popular Services CPQ has become with enterprise accounts demonstrate that prioritization. FinancialForce’s enterprise accounts are adopting Services CPQ to save time during sales cycles by providing their prospects with the visibility to identify resources available for quoting work, their billable rate, skills, and previous experience.

Dan Brown said that “in (quote) estimation, you now can reach into your PSA (Professional Services Automation) system and identify the resource that you’re going to quote, what’s their billable rate, what’s their skills, what’s their capabilities. A big issue our customers have is that the As Quoted versus the As Delivered are almost always materially very different.”

He continued, emphasizing, “And that’s where you end up with margin erosion, that’s where you end up with revenue leakage for our customers. Now with Services CPQ, the As Quoted and As Delivered features are tightly linked together. And that has driven enormous improvements.”

Scott Brown added, “When I was a customer, this was a big pain point. For me, the capability to connect your pre-sales activities to your post-sale delivery is a real game changer for us.”

Underscoring how vital Services CPQ is to FinancialForce’s opportunity-to-renewal strategy, the Spring ‘23 Customer Overview notes that “with usability improvements in Services CPQ, support for additional pricing and costing scenarios, and streamlined estimate export for correct Statements of Work, services teams will be able to create accurate and competitive proposals faster, leading to higher win rates on projects, with much lower risk profiles.”

Among the many enhancements to Services CPQ are usability enhancements to the Estimate Builder, helping to reduce errors in As Quoted and As Delivered Results.

New features to optimize resources and projects

Additional goals of the spring ’23 release are to provide customers with improved workflows for optimizing resources and streamlining project management. Given how every professional services firm and software company today is under pressure to continually find new ways to optimize resources and be more done with less, the timing of Resource Optimizer Enhancements and introducing Resource Manager Work Planner is excellent. FinancialForce allows assigning multiple resources to project enhancements, integrating with MS Outlook and Google Calendar, as well as mass deletion of pass utilization results. FinancialForce also delivers task-based scheduling of held resource requests.

The Spring ’23 release is designed to help enterprises optimize resources from small-scale to multi-location projects by adding Resource Work Planner and Enhanced Skills Maintenance that can scale across multiple global locations.

How FinancialForce’s Spring ’23 Release Strengthens Opportunity-to-Renewal

“This new release gives organizations a complete, customer-centric view of their business to turn continuous disruption into a competitive edge,” remarked Scott Brown during a recent briefing. FinancialForce aims to help services businesses more efficiently monetize their time and resources by concentrating their development efforts across opportunity-to-renewal.

The release shows how services companies are looking to real-time financial analytics, including new risk management features, as guardrails to keep their businesses on track to margin and profit goals. The Spring ’23 release shows FinancialForce’s view of the opportunity-to-renewal process and what strengths it can offer customers, from a new Scheduling Risk Dashboard that provides early intervention and project course corrections in real time, to streamlined estimate exports for accurate Statements of Work (SOWs).

The following table uses the opportunity-to-renewal process as a framework to put the new release into context. It compares each phase of the opportunity-to-order process, how FinancialForce defines their role, how the Spring ’23 release strengthens each area, what the people and software-oriented benefits are, along with their leading customer references. You can also download a copy of the Opportunity-to-Renewal Process comparison here.

Sep 7

FinancialForce Services-as-a-Business Is What Their Customers Need To Drive Growth

Service businesses must keep finding new ways to add value to existing clients while removing barriers that slow growth. Overcoming the challenges of outdated HR planning and human resource management (HRM), contract management, and CRM systems are table stakes for staying competitive.

FinancialForce’s Summer 22 release aims to turn those weaknesses into strengths with one of the most comprehensive releases they’ve had lately. “Organizations continue to be buffeted by market disruptions, from spiraling inflation to new COVID variants and unanticipated supply chain issues,” said Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of FinancialForce. “Our new Services-as-a-Business approach delivers the automation, intelligence, and innovation that services organizations need to become more agile so they can expertly turn disruption into opportunity.”

Improving Opportunity-to-Renewal Is Key

FinancialForce’s Summer 2022 release reflects how services businesses need to gain greater visibility and control across to their opportunity-to-renewal process while growing more resilient to spiraling costs, uncertain supply chains, and chronic labor shortages. They need to take on these challenges and keep growing. FinancialForce believes its Business-as-a-Service unified platform can strengthen services’ traditionally weak areas (integrated HR, CRM, & contract management) without giving up on how fast they can react to new opportunities.

CEOs and COOs running several leading professional services firms spoken with recently say that tight labor markets, rising prices, and blind spots in the opportunity-to-renewal cycles are hurting revenue. As a result, they’re seeing a drain in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Customer Lifetime Value at risk. They also see that the blind spots in Contract Management, Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ), Resource Management, and Financial Planning & Analysis (FPA) across opportunity-to-renewal grow wider the more diverse their client bases become. What’s needed is a 360-degree view of the opportunity-to-renewal process that encompasses every aspect of service operations, from sales to delivery to customer success management, financial management, and planning.

FinancialForce’s Summer 22 release introduces Business-as-a-Service to bridge the gaps in the opportunity-to-renewal process, improving customer experiences, and driving faster growth by enabling greater real-time collaboration and visibility organization-wide.

Skills Matching & Scheduling Speed Is A Services Killer App

In the Summer 22 Release, FinancialForce strikes at the heart of what challenges services businesses face the most regarding getting staffing right. Skills matching is new in the release, providing Resource Managers with the insights they need to identify skills related to open roles as either Essential or Desirable. The goal is to bring greater accuracy and speed into the assignment process to control for costs, usage rates, and margin impacts while assigning associates to one project versus another.

Optimizing project schedules and seeing potential scheduling conflicts in real-time helps improve scheduling efficiency by identifying potential project conflicts early and alleviating them by balancing available hours.

A New Streamlined UX Pays Off For Services CPQ

The Summer 22 release marks the first time FinancialForce ERP Cloud and Professional Services (PS) Cloud run entirely on the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX). During the FinancialForce analyst briefing, Heidi Minzner, Vice President, Product Management (ERP Cloud) at FinancialForce, demonstrated how users could create, manage and update line-level data on requisitions and purchase orders in a single view. Additionally, LEX is evident across the entire platform.

Of the many improvements announced in the Summer 22 release, updates to Services CPQ are noteworthy. The updated Services CPQ interface built on LEX has streamlined estimates creation and provides options for defining date-driven rates. Reflecting how services businesses need more role management capabilities, the Summer 22 release can enable role requests from templates and also supports pass-through of needed skills.

Services’ CPQ improvements are based partly on the platform’s flexibility LEX provides.

William Spice, Senior Director of Product Management says that Services CPQ and Customer Success Cloud are born in LEX, providing FinancialForce with the flexibility of using the latest Salesforce visual UI to deliver greater simplicity of workflows. “Services CPQ shows us extending the footprint across the whole services lifecycle, allowing our customers to build up a range of different estimates for professional services work, widen the selling and opportunity phase, and then seamlessly be able to transition these into a delivery model,” William said.

“Customer Success Cloud is really focused on making it simple and automatic to create playbooks, which are means for anyone across the organization to help ensure that we’re treating our customers with all the respect and impact they would expect from us. And finally, performance to scale sees us continuing to invest and make sure that our applications scale faster than any of our customers can, and focusing on enterprise-level integrations like linking out of the box with JIRA and Concur, for example,” William concluded.

Improving Opportunity-to-Renewal With More Intelligence

Services CPQ’s improvements reflect revenue managers’ need for greater visibility into their sales pipelines and more insights into the propensity to close by client. FinancialForce takes that a step further by providing insights into which factors are most and least affecting opportunity-to-renewal performance.

Current FinancialForce customers have access to dashboards that deliver utilization performance and staffing efficiency and can be configured to provide revenue forecasting. Also announced is a project burn-up dashboard that visualizes work completed and enables teams to be more cost-efficient during project delivery.

Improving Services Revenue With Real-time Visibility And Control

Business-as-a-Service is predicated on the design goal of enabling any business to migrate into providing services profitably. As a result, product-centric companies’ transition to services is commonplace. Nearly every major equipment manufacturer is now selling the value delivered by their machinery as a service.

The many improvements FinancialForce has made in their platform’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) areas reflect how this area is core to getting service revenue right. Of the many announcements made in this area of their platform, highlights include providing FP&A teams with the option of performing headcount planning at the resource level to better understand how compensation adjustments will impact future budgets. In addition, flexible budget templates for improving headcount planning alignment with company goals and objectives are now included.

Also announced is a new Planning Workspace where FP&A teams can collaborate and analyze budget information and potential scenarios. The value of having the entire platform on LEX is evident in how FP&A managers can immediately use financial data to accelerate planning cycles which also drives more accurate forecasting within the Planning Workspace. Also introduced is a new machine-learning-based component to the ERP product suite. Its Intelligent bank reconciliation solution provides accounting teams the agility to match a single bank statement transaction to multiple accounting transactions. It’s also supporting a more extensive end-to-end intelligent transaction matching that streamlines reconciliation procedures. That’s welcome news for accounting teams that need the time for more intensive tasks and would like to be free from the repetitive nature of reconciliation work.

Conclusion

FinancialForce’s decision to change its cadence from four to three releases a year shows its product strategy is delving further into where the gaps are in the opportunity-to-renewal process. Concentrating on three significant releases gives their DevOps and engineering teams the time they need to develop new features while revamping the entire platform to the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX). Leading with usability on Services CPQ and Customer Success Cloud makes sense as services businesses need to excel in each area to grow and retain customers. Additionally, a new UX will help accelerate the ramp-up times of new users. FinancialForce enters a new era with the Summer 22 Release, closing gaps in platform strategy while helping customers do the same.

May 3

FinancialForce’s Spring 2022 Release Defines the Future of FP&A In Services

Economic uncertainty sends shock waves throughout businesses, with service organizations seeing its brunt. The recent drastic drop-off in Netflix subscribers is a case in point. Services CFOs say there is an urgent need to track how well their overarching planning strategies linking finance and operations perform. However, getting the data to analyze has been challenging for even the largest services businesses.

As a result, CFOs need Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) integrated with operational planning applications to make it easier to track plan performance across all P&Ls and financials. FinancialForce’s decision to launch a fully-featured FP&A on their ERP Cloud platform shows they read the services market clearly and listen to their customers’ CFOs on what matters most.

CFOs Want To Know The Financial Impact Of Every Planning Decision

Even during economic stability, finance teams struggle to get operations planning teams the data they need to predict the financial outcomes of decisions. Line-of-business leaders look to finance to provide accurate, detailed information on the financial implications of every planning decision. By having FP&A use the same data accounting, reporting and planning have, CFOs, COOs, and their teams get greater visibility and control over every aspect of budgeting and forecasting.

One of FP&A’s greatest shortcomings in the past was relying only on siloed financial data alone with little visibility into operational planning. Financial teams need access to all available data across finance and operations to do their jobs well and create accurate forecasts. Getting FP&A right with any ERP platform needs to start with the goal of delivering integrated business planning. Sales management and their teams also need visibility into FP&A reporting and analysis to manage revenue. FinancialForce’s decades of experience on the Salesforce platform combined with the integration expertise Salesforces’ MuleSoft acquisition brought to the company four years ago will increase the probability of their FP&A solution gaining adoption.

Services companies’ CFOs are grappling with new economic uncertainties every week. As a result, they’re most interested in getting greater visibility and control over the planning process, including version control, more automated multi-planning options, and more real-time enterprise-wide collaboration, all on a single platform. FinancialForce’s DevOps and product management teams deserve credit for identifying these challenges and including them in their FP&A application delivered in the Spring 2022 release.

FinancialForce’s long-awaited FP&A solution enables analysts to create multiple what-if scenarios using calculation rules and mass functions, create dynamic plans and stress-test assumptions, and better anticipate their return by area and investment.

The future of FP&A Is An Integrated Cloud

Service organizations are quicker to migrate to the cloud versus their product-based counterparts. That’s because procurement, order-to-cash, and supply chain management workflows tend to be less complex than product-based businesses. Services organizations also need financial management, procure-to-pay, and Professional Services Automation (PSA), all on the same platform to support operational planning with FP&A.

FinancialForce’s Multi-X functionality is expanded in the Spring 2022 release to simplify the consolidation of financial statements and meet the needs of multi-entity organizations. In the latest release, it’s possible to record taxes due from intercompany tax transactions, accelerating the intercompany process for taxation and reporting. The Spring 2022 release also streamlines the creation of multi-company sales invoices and simplifies consolidated financial statement preparation with consolidation group structure capabilities.

Multi-X enables the recording and sharing across a multi-tier or multi-entity business.

New localization features that are essential to running a global business were added, including support for Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Austria, as well as enhanced business operations in Germany and Australia. In addition, multi-X supports multi-company invoicing support and advanced invoice consolidations for multi-revenue billing. Calculating and recording tax on intercompany transactions and enabling cash matching process across companies are also supported.

FP&A’s future is an integrated cloud, further validated by FinancialForce’s’ launch of ERP Cloud, Professional Services Cloud, and enhancements to its Customer Success solutions. “In today’s business environment, organizations must be able to respond to disruptions quickly while continuing to innovate and deliver tangible outcomes to their customers,” said Dan Brown, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at FinancialForce. “Our Spring 2022 release gives our customers a richer toolset to help pursue their primary goal, delivering exceptional customer outcomes while improving the customer experience across the opportunity-to-renewal journey.”

New Professional Services (PS) Cloud additions in the Spring 2022 release include customer-requested improvements to skills and resource management, services estimating, and project management capabilities. FinancialForce’s customers have also requested improved resource management to scale their efforts to train and retain their workforce. As a result, the Spring 2022 Release adds intelligent automation to the staffing process by enabling auto-assignment of resource requests that meet specific criteria and an expanded capability to model ideal staffing scenarios across a project, opportunity, or region. These enhancements improve PS Cloud’s resource optimization capabilities and enable resource managers to deploy ever larger and more complex teams efficiently and cost-effectively.

Conclusion

Services organizations are looking for cloud-based professional services ERP systems that deliver greater forecast accuracy, faster forecasting and budgeting, and improved accountability, visibility, and control. Integrated clouds are the future of FP&A for all these factors and the need all services organizations have to improve revenue and operations performance. In addition, given the growing economic uncertainty today, CFOs also want to increase better predictability and better risk management strategies while also supporting more collaboration. All these factors combined are defining the future of FP&A in an integrated cloud, which is what FinancialForce has been doing for decades on the Salesforce platform.

Apr 8

Five Ways AI Can Help Create New Smart Manufacturing Startups

AI and machine learning’s potential to drive greater visibility, control, and insight across shop floors while monitoring machines and processes in real-time continue to attract venture capital. $62 billion is now invested in 5,396 startups concentrating on the intersection of AI, machine learning, manufacturing, and Industry 4.0, according to Crunchbase.

PwC’s broader tech sector analysis shows a 30% year-over-year growth in funding rounds that reached $293.2 billion in 2021. Smart manufacturing startups are financed by seed rounds at 52%, followed by early-stage venture funding at 33%. The median last funding amount was $1.6 million, with the average being $9.93 million.

Abundant AI startup opportunities in smart manufacturing and industry 4.0

According to Gartner, “The underlying concept of Industry 4.0 is to connect embedded systems and smart production facilities to generate a digital convergence between industry, business, and internal functions and processes.” As a result, Industry 4.0 is predicted to grow from $84.59 billion in 2020 to $334.18 billion by 2028. AI and machine learning adoption in manufacturing are growing in five core fields: smart production, products and services improvements, business operations and management, supply chain, and business model decision-making. Deloitte’s survey on AI adoption in manufacturing found that 93% of companies believe AI will be a key technology to drive growth and innovation.

Machine intelligence (MI) is one of the primary catalysts driving increased venture capital investment in smart manufacturing. Startup CEOs and their customers want AI and machine learning models based on actual data, and machine intelligence is helping to make that happen. An article by McKinsey & Company provides valuable insights into market gaps for new ventures. McKinsey’s compelling data point is that those leading companies using MI achieve 3X to 4X the impact of their peers. However, 92% of leaders also have a process to track incomplete or inaccurate data – which is another market gap startups need to fill.

McKinsey and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collaborated on a survey to identify machine intelligence leaders’ KPI gains relative to their peers. They found that leaders achieve efficiency, cost, revenue, service, and time-to-market advantages. Source: Toward smart production: Machine intelligence in business operations, McKinsey & Company. February 1, 2022.

Based on the uplift MI creates for new smart manufacturing startup funding and the pervasive need manufacturers have to improve visibility & control across shop floors, startups have many potential opportunities. The following are five that AI and machine learning is helping to create:

AI-enabled Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) systems that can factor in supply chain volatility on product costs are needed. Several startups are already using AI and machine learning in CPQ workflows, and they compete with the largest enterprise software providers in the industry, including Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, and others. However, no one has taken on the challenge of using AI to factor in how supply chain volatility changes standard and actual costs in real-time. For example, knowing the impact of pricing changes based on an allocation, how does that impact standard costs per unit on each order? Right now, an analyst needs to spend time doing that. AI and machine learning could take on that task so analysts could get to the larger, more complex, and costly supply chain problems impacting CPQ close rates and revenue.
Using AI-enabled real-time data capture techniques to identify anomalies in throughput as an indicator of machine health. The aggregated data manufacturing operations produced every day holds clues regarding each machine’s health on the shop floor. Automated data capture can identify scrap rates, yield rates and track actual costs. However, none of them can analyze the slight variations in process flow product outputs to warn of possible machine or supply chain issues. Each process manufacturing machine runs at its cadence or speed, and having an AI-based sensor system track and analyze why speeds are off could save thousands of dollars in maintenance costs and keep the line running. In addition, adding insight and intelligence to the machine’s real-time data feeds frees quality engineers to concentrate on more complex problems.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and edge computing data can be used for fine-tuning finite scheduling in real-time. Finite scheduling is part of the broader manufacturing systems organizations rely on to optimize shop floor schedules, machinery, and staff scheduling. It can be either manually intensive or automated to provide operators with valuable insights. A potential smart manufacturing opportunity is a finite scheduler that relies on AI and machine learning to keep schedules on track and make trade-offs to ensure resources are used efficiently. Finite schedulers also need greater accuracy in factoring in frequent changes to delivery dates. AI and machine learning could drive greater on-time delivery performance when integrated across all the shop floors a manufacturer relies on.
Automated visual inspections and quality analysis to improve yield rates and reduce scrap. Using visual sensors to capture data in real-time and then analyze them for anomalies is in its nascent stages of deployment and growth. However, this is an area where captured data sets can provide machine learning algorithms with enough accuracy to identify potential quality problems on products before they leave the factory. Convolutional neural networks are an effective machine learning technique for identifying patterns and anomalies in images. They’re perfect for the use case of streamlining visual inspection and in-line quality checks in discrete, batch, and process manufacturing.
Coordinated robotics (Cobots) to handle assemble-to-order product assembly. The latest cobots can be programmed to stay in sync with each other and perform pick, pack, ship, and place materials in warehouses. What’s needed are advanced cobots that can handle simple product assembly at a more competitive cost as manufacturers continue to face chronic labor shortages and often run a shift with less than half the teams they need.

Talent remains an area of need

Manufacturers’ CEOs and COOs say that recruiting and retaining enough talent to run all the production shifts they need is the most persistent issue. In addition, those manufacturers located in remote regions of the world are turning to robotics to fulfill orders, which opens up opportunities for integrating AI and machine learning to enable cobots to complete assemble-to-order tasks. The unknown impact of how fast supply chain conditions change needs work from startups, too, especially in tracking actual cost performance. These are just a few opportunities for startups looking to apply AI and machine learnings’ innate strengths to solve complex supply chain, manufacturing, quality management, and compliance challenges.

Apr 6

LinkedIn Best Companies To Work For In 2022 Dominated Again By Tech

Amazon’s Sunnyvale, CA Campus (source: Istockphoto)

Tech leaders are six of LinkedIn’s top ten companies to grow your career in 2022.
Amazon is the again highest rated company, followed by Alphabet (2^nd), IBM (6^th), AT&T (7^th), Apple (9^th), and Comcast (10^th).
19 of the 50 top companies in the U.S. are in the tech industry, including Dell, Intel, Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, and others.
LinkedIn identified four key trends in their analysis, with flexible work is becoming table stakes for recruiting and retaining employees.

These and many other insights are from LinkedIn Top Companies 2022: The 50 best workplaces to grow your career in the U.S., published today. All 50 companies are currently hiring and have over 530,000 jobs open across the U.S, with over 70,000 being remote positions. The LinkedIn analysis of the best companies to grow your career spans 35 global markets, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, the U.K., Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, India, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya.

LinkedIn’s Top Companies 2022 spotlights the organizations investing in employee success and career development. LinkedIn’s methodology and internal analysis ranked companies based on seven pillars that display career progression: ability to advance, skills growth, company stability, external opportunity, company affinity, gender diversity, and educational background.

The 19 Best Tech Companies To Grow Your Career In 2022

The following are profiles of the top 19 tech companies hiring in the U.S. today with links to available positions accessible via LinkedIn:

Amazon

Amazon is the parent company of Whole Foods Market, Zappos, Twitch, PillPack, and others.

Global headcount: 1,600,000 (with 1,100,000 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, New York City | Most notable skills: Warehouse Operations, Data Entry, AWS Lambda | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Fulfillment Associate, Warehouse Associate | Largest job functions: Operations, Engineering, Program and Project Management | What you should know: Even as the country’s second-largest private employer, Amazon continues to compete in recruiting and retaining top talent amid a competitive labor market. The company recently announced that it’s doubling its maximum base salary for corporate and tech workers, and it raised average wages for warehouse workers late last year, increasing pay for more than half a million of its employees. But the e-commerce giant is going beyond compensation, too: investing $1.2 billion over the next three years to expand its education and skills training initiatives. Amazon now pays 100% of college tuition for frontline employees as part of its Career Choice program and covers high school diploma programs, GEDs, and English proficiency certifications.

See jobs at Amazon

Alphabet

Alphabet is the parent company of Google, YouTube, Fitbit, Waymo, Verily, and others.

Global headcount: 156,000 | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Seattle | Most notable skills: Video Editing and Production, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), C++ | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Program Manager, Product Manager | Largest job function: Engineering, Information Technology, Program and Project Management | What you should know: It’s been a big year for Alphabet: The company onboarded nearly 6,500 employees last quarter and saw significant growth across Google’s Cloud service and YouTube (whose revenues are now growing at a faster rate than Netflix). For those interested in flexibility, the tech giant has a robust offering. In addition to adopting a hybrid work model, the company told LinkedIn that Alphabet offers four ‘work from anywhere’ weeks per year, sabbaticals for long-term employees, and ‘no meeting’ days. But Alphabet has also worked to maintain a collaborative culture and support career growth while working remotely. Employees can take advantage of resource groups like Women@Google and its Googler-to-Googler training, which lets its workers get first-hand knowledge across different fields from other employees.

See jobs at Alphabet

IBM

IBM is the parent company of Red Hat, SoftLayer Technologies, Truven Health Analytics, and others.

Global headcount: 250,000 | Top U.S. locations: New York City; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; San Francisco Bay Area | Most special skills: Kubernetes, Openshift, Hybrid Cloud | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Project Manager, Data Scientist | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Sales | What you should know: The perennial IT giant has re-upped its benefits offerings amid the Great Reshuffle, IBM told LinkedIn. The new initiatives are increased paid time off, more promotion and pay reviews, backup dependent care, virtual tutoring, and ‘compassionate leave’ for parents who experience stillbirth or miscarriage. In addition, as the company moves forward with a hybrid working model that allows employees to decide how often they want to be onsite, IBM has also transformed its onboarding process with “a focus on empathy and engagement” to help remote new hires feel more connected.

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AT&T

AT&T is the parent company of DIRECTV, WarnerMedia, Cricket Wireless, and others.

Global full-time headcount: 202,600 | Top U.S. locations: Atlanta, Dallas, New York City | Most notable skills: Design Thinking, Customer Experience, Futurism | Most common job titles: Retail Sales Consultant, Client Solutions Executive, Customer Service Representative | Largest job functions: Sales, Information Technology, Engineering | What you should know: Just three years after the acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T is changing course. The company agreed to a deal last year that will combine WarnerMedia’s assets with Discovery’s to create a new, separate global entertainment giant. Once the spinoff is completed (likely mid-2022), the telecom company will be focused on its core business — expanding access to broadband internet. For its employees, AT&T offers several advancement opportunities. For example, it invests $2 million annually in ‘AT&T University,’ an internal training program to help its workers upskill, and has partnered with groups like Udacity and Coursera to offer advanced online courses.

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Apple

Apple is the parent company of AuthenTec, NeXT Software, Shazam, and others.

Global headcount: 154,000 | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area; Austin, Texas; New York City | Most notable skills: Apple Software and Hardware, Technical Learning, iOS | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Technical Specialist, Mac Genius | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Sales | What you should know: Apple is increasing benefits and pay for retail workers to attract and retain employees at its 270 retail stores across the U.S. — including doubling sick days for both full-time and part-time employees and granting more vacation days. Its retail employees are also eligible for paid parental leave and can access discounted emergency childcare. In addition, after being one of the first companies to tell its corporate employees to work remotely in March 2020, Apple is now asking that they return to the office three days a week.

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Comcast

Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, Sky, DreamWorks Animation, and others.

Global headcount: 189,000 (with 130,000 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles | Most notable skills: Media Production, Cable Modems, Broadcast Television | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Communications Technician, Salesperson | Largest job functions: Engineering, Sales, Information Technology | What you should know: Comcast prioritizes career growth and development among its employees through various benefits — including mentorship programs, department rotations and tuition assistance for continuing education and skills development. As a part of its commitment to wellbeing, it also pays for 78% of its employees’ health care costs. Want an in? Comcast says the #1 skill it looks for in new hires is authenticity. “We believe that by being yourself, you are empowered to do your best work,” the company told LinkedIn.

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Meta

Meta is the parent company of Onavo, WhatsApp, Instagram, and others.

Global headcount: 71,900 | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, New York City | Most notable skills: PHP, Program Management, Social Media Marketing | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Technical Recruiter, Data Scientist | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Human Resources

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Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies is the parent company of Dell EMC, SecureWorks, and others.

Global headcount: 133,000 | Top U.S. locations: Austin, Texas; Boston; San Francisco Bay Area | Most notable skills: Software as a Service (SaaS), Kubernetes, Salesforce | Most common job titles: Account Executive, Software Engineer, Inside Sales Representative | Largest job functions: Sales, Information Technology, Engineering

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Accenture

Accenture is the parent company of Karmarama, The Monkeys, Fjord, and others.

Global headcount: 674,000 | Top U.S. locations: Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago | Most notable skills: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Management Consulting, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) | Most common job titles: Managing Director, Management Consultant, Business Integration Manager | Largest job functions: Information Technology, Business Development, Engineering

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Verizon

Verizon is the parent company of GTE Corporation, MCI Communications Corporation, and others.

Global headcount: 119,400 (with 105,800 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: New York City, Dallas, Washington D.C. | Most notable skills: Quotas, Wireless Technologies, Solution Selling | Most common job titles: Solutions Specialist, Customer Service Representative, Business Account Manager | Largest job functions: Sales, Engineering, Information Technology

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Intel

Intel is the parent company of Mobileye, Data Center Group, and others.

Global headcount: 121,000 (with 55,700 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: Portland, Ore.; Phoenix; San Francisco Bay Area | Most notable skills: JMP, System on a Chip (SoC), Statistical Process Control (SPC) | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Process Engineer, System-on-Chip Design Engineer | Largest job functions: Engineering, Operations, Information Technology

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Oracle

Oracle is the parent company of MICROS Systems, NetSuite, Peoplesoft, BEA Systems, and others.

Global headcount: 133,000 (46,600 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Denver | Most notable skills: Oracle Cloud, NetSuite, OCI | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Business Development Consultant, Application Sales Manager | Largest job functions: Engineering, Sales, Information Technology

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Salesforce

Salesforce is the parent company of Slack, Mulesoft, Buddy Media, Tableau, and others.

Global headcount: 74,300 (41,000 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, New York City | Most notable skills: Salesforce.com Administration, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Slack | Most common job titles: Account Executive, Software Engineer, Solutions Engineer | Largest job functions: Sales, Engineering, Information Technology

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Cisco

Cisco is the parent company of Duo Security and others.

Global headcount: 81,800 (38,800 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Dallas | Most notable skills: Software as a Service (SaaS), Kubernetes, Network Engineering | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Account Manager, Program Manager | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Sales

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Cognizant

Global headcount: 330,600 (34,680 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: New York City, Dallas, Chicago | Most notable skills: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Agile & Waterfall Methodologies | Most common job titles: Project Manager, Software Engineer, Technical Lead | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Program and Project Management

See jobs at Cognizant | See people you may know at Cognizant

Siemens

Siemens is the parent company of Mendix and others.

Global headcount: 303,000 (with 40,000 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta | Most notable skills: Building Automation, HVAC Controls, Electrical Troubleshooting | Most common job titles: Project Manager, Software Engineer, Senior Sales Executive | Largest job functions: Engineering, Sales, Operations

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Juniper Networks

Global headcount: 10,400 (with 4,400 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Washington D.C. | Most notable skills: Junos, Kubernetes, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, System Engineer, Technical Support Engineer | Largest job functions: Engineering, Sales, Information Technology

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Viasat

Viasat is the parent company of RigNet and others.

Global headcount: 5,800 | Top U.S. locations: San Diego, Denver, Atlanta | Most notable skills: RF Test, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Satellite Communications (SATCOM) | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Program Manager, System Engineer | Largest job functions: Engineering, Information Technology, Operations

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MathWorks

Global headcount: 5,000 (with 3,000 in the U.S.) | Top U.S. locations: Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles | Most notable skills: MATLAB, Simulink, Deep Learning | Most common job titles: Software Engineer, Application Support Engineer, Principal Software Engineer | Largest job function: Engineering, Information Technology, Sales

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LinkedIn’s Key Trends Of 2022

Flexible work is becoming table stakes for recruiting and retaining employees. With job seekers and employees in the driver’s seat and able to ask for the work-life balance they need, flexible work has become required to attract and retain top talent. Most companies on this year’s list offer some form of work-from-anywhere flexibility, with more than 70,000 remote jobs open now across the top 50 companies. Many companies also allow employees to set their schedules and work custom “on” hours through asynchronous work. Some, like Amazon (#1), Raytheon Technologies (#21), and General Motors (#44), are encouraging work-life balance with company-wide days off, while others offer unlimited paid vacation and sabbaticals. In addition, many companies are testing out new flexible offerings – employees at Cisco (#30) have adopted a four-day workweek through the company’s Interim Reduced Workweek program, IBM (#6) has set mandatory “off” hours, Cognizant (#33) offers the option to work a compressed week through its WorkFlex program, Realogy (#40) has a no meetings policy on “Focus Fridays,” Publicis Groupe (#41) allows employees the freedom to work from anywhere they like for up to six weeks per year and PwC (#32) allows employees to step away from work for up to six months while paid through its new Leave of Absence program.
Top companies offer stability in an unstable world. While many companies across the U.S. have faced challenges and disruptions over the last year, the Top Companies offer stability and upskilling opportunities that employees can count on – from tuition assistance and PTO for professional development to mentorship programs and job shadowing. Many organizations instituted new programs to retain employees. For example, Deloitte (#11) introduced a new Talent Experience Office focused on employee sentiments and preferences to help inform company choices, EY (#22) offers a Pathway to Purpose virtual program to help employees discover and live their personal purpose and vision, and Kimley-Horn (#31) offers job rotations, so employees learn from different roles and departments. Amazon (#1) is investing $1.2 billion to expand its education and skills training initiatives, Walmart (#5) gives field-based associates access to a no-cost college degree through its Live Better U program, and Verizon (#18) offers an apprenticeship program for those facing employment loss due to automation in technology to prepare them for the jobs of the future. PwC (#32) invested $3 billion in a “New World. New Skills” commitment to equip employees with digital training and awarded a “thank you” bonus of one-week extra pay. Bank of America (#8) provided an additional $1 billion in compensation stock awards to employees globally, and Northrop Grumman (#38) enhanced their annual bonus plan in addition to their ongoing stay interviews.
Mental health care is going mainstream across hiring and talent management. To keep employees healthy and happy at work, almost all of this year’s honorees now provide services that address mental health and well-being. Companies like Intel (#23), Salesforce (#28), and Juniper Networks (#46) provide dedicated mental health days, with many – including FedEx (#47) and Blackstone (#43) – offering company-paid mental health benefits. In addition, EY (#22) has expanded its no-cost counseling and mental health coaching sessions to 25 per year for employees and family. Deloitte (#11) provides a $1,000 well-being subsidy in addition to individualized psychological health resources. Unitedhealth Group (#13) provides complimentary access to wellness apps offering coaching, talk therapy, and more.
Authenticity, compassion, and curiosity are must-have skills. Most of the Top Companies do not require college degrees and instead look for soft skills that can translate across departments and roles. For example, the #1 skill Comcast (#10) seeks in new hires is authenticity, HCA Healthcare (#37) wants new hires to possess compassion, and Dell Technologies (#14) looks for people who thrive in an environment with a diversity of people and ideas. Accenture (#17), Oracle (#27), and Lockheed Martin (#29) value candidates with curiosity and eagerness to learn and grow. Alphabet (#2) looks for problem-solving skills and a growth mindset.

LinkedIn’s Top 50 Companies In The U.S., 2022

Amazon
Alphabet
Wells Fargo
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Walmart
IBM
AT&T
Bank of America
Apple
Comcast
Deloitte
Meta
UnitedHealth Group
Dell Technologies
CVS Health
The Walt Disney Company
Accenture
Verizon
GE
Boeing
Raytheon Technologies
EY
Intel
Keller Williams
Kaiser Permanente
Target
Oracle
Salesforce
Lockheed Martin
Cisco
Kimley-Horn
PwC
Cognizant
Citi
Citadel
Johnson & Johnson
HCA Healthcare
Northrop Grumman
Siemens
Realogy
Publicis Groupe
Whiting-Turner
Blackstone
General Motors
Capital One
Juniper Networks
FedEx
Ford Motor Company
Viasat
MathWorks

Jan 17

Cybersecurity CEOs Share How Businesses Can Protect Themselves In 2022

Bottom Line: Every business needs to resolve in 2022 to treat cybersecurity as a business decision first because the risk to operations and revenue are too great if they don’t.

Any cybersecurity prediction for 2022 will likely be on the low side, given how ingenious ransomware attackers are at mining long-standing common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and how intricate breach attempts are becoming.

Predictions don’t protect businesses, professional guidance does. Intending to provide every business, especially startups, with insights they can use to protect themselves in 2022, I’ve interviewed several cybersecurity CEOs. Their recommendations on what every business can do to improve their cybersecurity and avert a potential breach, ransomware attempt, or worse are provided below:

BOS Framework Founder and CEO Sashank Purighalla

Before BOS, Sashank founded and served as the CEO of 5Y Solutions, Inc., a DevOps company that provides SaaS and enterprise-class technology solutions based in the cloud, AR, VR, IoT, Media Streaming, and Big Data spaces. 5Y has offices in the US, Australia, and India. Much of Sashank’s 20+ years of experience has involved developing enterprise-class technology solutions, strong strategic and long-range planning, setting business and technology strategies in B2B and B2C environments, and leading and motivating diverse teams to build high-impact SaaS and PaaS products. Sashank has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Science.

Advice from Sashank Purighalla Founder and CEO at BOS Framework

“The biggest problem that enterprises are dealing with is with fractured technology architectures. The playbook for how technology systems are designed and maintained has fundamentally changed over the past 5 years with the advent of DevOps as a new disciple geared toward bringing efficiency to the PDLC process. To help meet this growing demand, there has been nearly a 570% increase in the number of known niche tools. Here’s the strange dichotomy: In the same timeframe, there has been an over 630% increase in the number of cyber breaches and over 600% increase in technology management and maintenance costs.

The fact is that you cannot patch disparate systems with non-standardized implementations using niche tools and expect to achieve security. Breach resilience and systemic integration can only result from sound systemic architectures that are based on best practices.

Enterprises must shift their focus from thinking of the next tool for efficiency or patching gaps to consistent architectures for effective holistic outcomes. This is an ecosystem problem and can only be addressed at an organizational architecture level”.

Founder Shield Co-Founder & CEO Benji Markoff

Benji Markoff is the Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield. He has an obsession with culture and the science behind it. He wants his legacy to be the success and positivity that everyone who works at Founder Shield brings to the world, whether at Founder Shield or in any their future endeavors. He hopes that Founder Shield provides a platform for unlimited success and happiness for all that work there.

Advice from Benji Markoff, Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield

“It’s old news that cybercriminals have beefed up their attacks, with ransomware and phishing topping every bad actor’s to-do list, it seems. The pandemic spotlighted weak links in cybersecurity systems nationwide, and hackers didn’t waste one minute to attack — back door, front door, didn’t matter. Hybrid work schedules and burnt-out IT specialists make the waters even murkier. Naturally, cyber liability insurance is a hot commodity currently, and the insurance industry plays a significant role in helping companies stay protected. Unfortunately, the attacks keep coming. Flip the script, though, and all these negative headlines can serve as lessons learned. For starters, let’s remember that cross-functionality value also translates to cybersecurity training. The more employers raise awareness and implement in-depth training, the lower they’ll fall on a hacker’s checklist. Keep cybersecurity top-of-mind throughout your entire company. Also, don’t be shy about relying more heavily on your managed service provider (MSP). These companies are ever-broadening their scope of services. If eyes and ears are what you need, start negotiating new MSP contracts.”

Hexnode Founder and CEO Apu Pavithran

Apu Pavithran is the founder and CEO of Hexnode. Recognized in the IT management community as a consultant, speaker, and thought leader, Apu has been a strong advocate for IT governance and Information security management. In addition, he’s passionate about entrepreneurship and spends significant time working with startups and empowering young entrepreneurs.

Advice from Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode

“Enterprise customers in 2022 are looking for a seamless digital experience that they can adopt immediately. Unfortunately, while catering to this need businesses tend to overlook the cybersecurity risks involved in making this possible.

In practice, cybersecurity decisions mostly take the backseat when associated with budgetary needs and business priorities, however, what comes with that is a successful ransomware attack that can completely turn the equation upside down. So, while adopting a flexible working environment in a constantly changing IT landscape, I would strongly recommend having a device security policy and a UEM in place. This helps keep your sensitive information safe by making sure employee devices are always compliant.

A patch management solution that comes along with the UEM solution will monitor your devices to make sure that there are no security vulnerabilities. The solution will also make sure that your device is running on the latest OS update and protected from threat actors.

Endpoint security solutions like UEM’s will help secure businesses to an extent, But having the right tools can’t always ensure that your businesses are 100% secure. The biggest threat is always the human element in cyber security. So make sure that in your flexible work environment your employees are cyber aware with regular cyber awareness classes that cover updated cybersecurity best practices.”

Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott

As CEO of Ivanti, Jeff Abbott oversees all aspects of the company’s growth strategy and direction. Before becoming CEO of Ivanti in October 2021, Jeff served as Ivanti’s President since January 2020. Jeff has over 25 years of experience working for enterprise software and services companies, including Accenture, Oracle, and Infor. Jeff holds degrees from the University of Tennessee and Georgia State University. He sits on the National Alumni Board at the University of Tennessee and has previously held board positions with the Georgia Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Posse Foundation.

Advice from Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott:

The rapid shift to remote work has accelerated growth in new digital systems and workflows, leading to expanded enterprise attack surfaces. At the same time, threat actors have matured their tactics and targeted enterprise security gaps. For example, attackers have increasingly waged phishing attacks at mobile devices, which remote workers are using more than ever before, via text and SMS messages, instant messages, social media, and other modes of communication, beyond just corporate email. Ransomware has also continued to evolve, with attackers increasingly leveraging known vulnerabilities that have remote code execution and privilege escalation capabilities. Ransomware is a business, and threat actors are incentivized to find companies that are more likely to pay.

Organizations are struggling to proactively combat these growing cyber threats. A new study by Ivanti revealed that 71% of IT and security professionals found patching to be overly complex and time-consuming. 57% of respondents stated that the global transition towards a decentralized workspace has made patch management more complex to deal with. And 53% said that organizing and prioritizing vulnerabilities takes up most of their time. This is alarming because the longer vulnerabilities remain unpatched, the more exposed a business is at risk of an attack or ransomware.

To effectively mitigate risk, companies should implement a Zero Trust security strategy. At its simplest, Zero Trust provides organizations continuous evaluation of their employee devices, endpoints, assets, and networks that business relies on. As part of an overall Zero Trust strategy, companies should invest in automated controls that proactively perform cyber hygiene tasks and reduce security risk across infrastructure and applications. This includes leveraging a combination of risk-based vulnerability prioritization and automated patch intelligence to identify and prioritize vulnerability weaknesses and then accelerate remediation. A proactive, end-to-end risk-based assessment strategy can drive business value and further reduce the mean time to detect, discover, remediate, and respond to cyber threats.

Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith
As Orchestral’s Head of Revenue Technology & Operations, Dale leads the digital infrastructure team responsible for integrating customer-facing operations across marketing, sales, and customer success to deliver extraordinary customer experiences that accelerate revenue performance. Dale has over 30+ years of experience in the tech industry, including several roles that include engineering, marketing, business development, and product management. His current startup, Orchestral.ai, provides AI-enabled IT workflow automation & orchestration technologies that facilitate digital transformation for some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Advice from Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith

“Although there is an increasing amount of attention given to automation within the cybersecurity sector, there are still many gaps between the countless tools and SOAR/SIEM platforms found in a typical enterprise’s cybersecurity infrastructure.
To be sure, cybersecurity automation is a welcome and necessary focus for innovation in threat intelligence and response. But, as organization’s adopt cybersecurity automation, they are likely to discover that significant human intervention is still required to bridge the “silos of automation” that naturally develop around highly specialized security tools and platforms. It is at this point when the focus should shift to “cybersecurity orchestration”. Cybersecurity orchestration intelligently integrates all of the different and disparate tools, platforms and siloed automations so that information is shared across the entire cybersecurity infrastructure. In this context, cybersecurity automation and cybersecurity orchestration are complimentary stages of focus for developing security infrastructure capable of coordinating a truly “autonomous” threat response.”

Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián

Rodrigo Tumaián is co-founder of Prometeo, a startup in the fintech area. He is also a co-founder of Truss, a company that provides information security services in the financial sector. His extensive experience working with national and international companies has enabled him to learn to adapt to any type of environment and help customers across a broad spectrum of business models, industries and revenue levels.

Advice from Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián

“When we talk about Cybersecurity month to encourage awareness around the topic, we should keep in mind that it is something we must take action on every day. The repercussions that are caused when we find ourselves in the middle of a problem or a serious cybersecurity issue, profoundly impact our digital ecosystem. Constantly promote cybersecurity awareness – that’s what we’re focused on internally and with every customer – and we’re product of what we’re accomplishing with them and seeing them and we are very proud of what we have accomplished.”

Rapid.Space Founder and CEO Jean Paul Smets

Jean Paul is an entrepreneur, with 20 year experience and success in enterprise open source software for B2B markets. As Founder and CEO At Rapid.Space, he leads product and business development . Before Rapid.Space, Jean Paul founded Nexedi S.A the largest FLOSS publisher in the EU (4 M€ income). He founded VIFIB which invented edge computing in 2009 and contributed its technology to Rapid.Space. He holds a PhD in computer science, graduated from ENS Ulm and joined “corps des mines”.

Advice from Jean Paul Smets, Founder and CEO at Rapid.Space

“If you use a cloud service, make sure your cloud provider does not have access to your passwords or credentials (most have access and password leaks happen in average every year, as we all experienced). If you use containers, make sure you understand that they do not provide strong isolation (containers from other users on the same host may be able to access your sensitive data through security escalation, such as the one which happened to Azure in 9/2021)”

ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland

Art Gilliland is CEO at Centrify and brings proven success in the global enterprise software industry-leading large organizations in product development, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, go-to-market strategy, and SaaS operations. He most recently was SVP/GM of the Symantec Enterprise Division of Broadcom, reporting to the CEO, where he led the integration and business operations post-acquisition. Before Symantec, Art held executive positions at Skyport Systems, HP, Symantec, and IMlogic.

Advice from ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland:

“As organizations execute on their digital transformations to adopt cloud and SaaS infrastructure it will become more essential to adopt tighter control over who has access to what. Investments in tighter controls over privileged access by using multi-factor authentication, centralizing identities, and enforcing least privilege can go a long way to securing modern infrastructure. This investment can not only make the user experience more seamless for those who need and should have access, but can also simultaneously harden defenses to reduce risk of becoming the next hack or ransomware victim.” — Art Gilliland, CEO, ThycoticCentrify

Jan 11

How Services CPQ Helps Close Revenue Gaps

Bottom Line: Professional services (PS) organizations need to close the gaps in their CPQ selling strategies to win more deals, capture more revenue and protect margins from ongoing price pressure.

Why Services CPQ Is Too Slow Today

When PS organizations compete in sales cycles, the first competitor to have a complete quote with accurate pricing, schedules, and an engagement plan will often win. However, getting a complete quote out fast is a major challenge for most PS organizations today. Many PS organizations manually create their quotes by taking into account a broad base of factors that include the following: talent profiles of employees and the market value of their skills; utilization rates; direct and indirect engagement costs; typical gross margins by type of engagement; and, competitive pricing. The average PS organization takes six weeks to deliver a quote or proposal. John Ragsdale’s excellent recent article Automating Services Quote-to-Cash: Emergence of CPQ for Services provides useful insights into what needs to change for PS quoting and selling to increase its velocity.

Getting Services CPQ Right Is Hard

Gaps that drain revenue and margin grow wider when PS organizations attempt to use product-centric CPQ platforms to sell services. Too often, PS organizations attempt to wedge their quoting, pricing, and revenue management into a product-based CPQ system – and get mediocre results at best. Earlier in my career, I led a product management team that defined, created, and launched a quoting system for professional services inside a large IT organization. The most valuable lessons learned from that experience include the following:

PS bundles only work if they have simple, solid direct cost structures. Adding a synthetic SKU that represents a PS bundle only works for the most simple, automated PS engagements. Think of those PS engagements with long-standing direct cost structures that are simple, clear and easy to implement. Attempting to group PS bundles can easily lead to quoting mistakes that drain margin when a product-centric CPQ system is used for PS.
The greater the differences in PS revenue management, the more the need for a new CPQ platform. Many PS organizations are making a mistake by attempting to make product-centric CPQ platforms work for their unique costing, pricing, and selling needs. My team and I learned that the more a PS revenue model is unique and one-of-a-kind, the more it requires a unique CPQ platform.
Getting product-based CPQ rules and constraint logic right is hard in PS. Our teams’ biggest challenge in recycling IT’s CPQ app for PS was how difficult it was to get the rules-based engine to work for the wide variety of variables in a common service engagement. Rules created for transaction velocity needed to be reworked for greater variety. PS engagements didn’t follow a common logic structure like a product, making the constraint logic code only somewhat usable.
Only launch after CRM and Revenue Management integration is complete. Our team was handed a project that had languished in IT for nearly a year because PS selling teams wouldn’t use it. The problem was that the quoting module ran batch updates to a series of databases to get customer records and fetch the latest price tables off of a mainframe. In addition, CPQ wasn’t connected in real-time to CRM or Revenue Management.

Closing Long-Standing Services CPQ Gaps

The more a Services CPQ app can close the gaps between CRM, PSA, Revenue Management, and CPQ apps and their workflows, the more effective it will be stopping margin and revenue leakage. Having APIs that share data in real-time between CRM, PSA, and Revenue Management within each quote creation session has the potential to save thousands of hours a year. FinancialForce’s recently announced Services CPQ shows how a platform-based integration strategy works. The following graphic shows how revenue potential increases as a Services CPQ’s systems become more integrated.

FinancialForce’s approach to taking on the challenge of providing an enterprise-grade Services CPQ is noteworthy for several reasons, including the following:

Real-time visibility and control of Services CPQ Effectiveness. Having Services CPQ, PSA and Revenue Management on the same Salesforce platform provides the visibility and control PS sales managers need to track quoting effectiveness by program, geography, customer segment, and rep. The more real-time the data integration across these systems the greater the potential for revenue growth in existing accounts and winning new ones.
Changing professional services quotes in real-time without impacting sales cycles is possible. Due to the integrated design of Services CPQ, one change made anywhere on a quote will replicate through the entire system and change all related factors immediately.
Getting in control of professional services engagement dates and utilization rates by associates helps reduce time-to-market and assures better time-to-customer performance. Keeping track of the myriad of factors that influence a services quote using a manually-based process is too slow for how quickly engagements are decided. Instead, having a single, unified data model that can track effectiveness and provide updates on how they impact engagement project plans is needed to excel at selling with Services CPQ. Adopting an agile CPQ strategy that relies on an integration thread to unify all systems is the secret to scaling and selling more with an agile approach to services CPQ.
Pricing needs to be one of the core strengths in an integrated Services CPQ platform. Realizing how a customers’ requested changes to a professional services engagement will impact costs and margins gives PS teams with an integrated system a formidable pricing advantage. FinancialForce’s approach to solving the Services CPQ challenge shows the potential to take on this challenge and provide its PS customers with the insights they need to upsell engagements – and not lose margin doing it.
A must-have for any Services CPQ platform is support for channel partner collaboration and team quoting. For any Services CPQ to scale up and deliver its full potential value, there needs to be support for customizing partner selling experiences while providing for team selling and quoting. FinancialForce solves this by relying on the Salesforce platform. By closing the gaps between the systems Services CPQ relies on, the channel selling teams and partners gain greater flexibility in defining customized products.

Conclusion

Services CPQ needs to scale out on a platform to achieve its full potential by providing the analytical insights to track engagement lifecycles and customer lifetime value by engagement. FinancialForce has proven they can do this in their Spring 2021 release. Taking on the most challenging aspects of a Services CPQ architecture starts by providing insights and guidance on how best to optimize the mix of associates and their utilization and billing rates, locations of each engagement, margin threshold levels, and the expected duration of each engagement. Additionally, the world’s leading professional services organizations could use an automated Services CPQ solution as many of them don’t rely on enough data, letting revenue leakage happen without knowing it.

Oct 17

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2021 State Of The Machine Learning Market: Enterprise Adoption Is Strong

data science, machine learning, enterprise software, AI, artificial Intelligence

59% of all large enterprises are deploying data science (DS) and machine learning (ML) today.

Nearly 50% of all organizations have up to 25 or more ML models in use today.

29% of enterprises are refreshing their data science and machine learning models every day.

The higher the data literacy an enterprise can achieve before launching Data Science & Machine Learning initiatives, the higher the probability of success.

These and many other insights defining the state of the data science and machine learning market in 2021 are from Dresner Advisory Services’ 2021 Data Science and Machine Learning Market Study. The 7th annual report is noteworthy for its depth of analysis and insight into how data science and machine learning adoption is growing stronger in enterprises. In addition, the study explains which factors drive adoption and determine the key success factors that matter the most when deploying data science and machine learning techniques. The methodology uses crowdsourcing techniques to recruit respondents from over 6,000 organizations and vendors’ customer communities. As a result, 52% of respondents are from North America and 34% from EMEA, with the balance from Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

“The perceived importance of data science and machine learning correlates with organizational success with BI, with users that self-report as completely successful with BI almost twice as likely to rate data science as critical,” said Jim Ericson, vice president, and research director at Dresner Advisory. “The perceived level of data literacy also correlates directly and positively with the current or likely future use of data science and machine learning in 2021.”

Key insights from the study include the following:

59% of large enterprises are deploying data science and machine learning in production today. Enterprises with 10K employees or more lead all others in adopting and using DS and ML techniques, most often in R&D and Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC)-related work. Large-scale enterprises often rely on DS and ML to identify how internal processes and workflows can be streamlined and made more cost-efficient. For example, the CEO of a manufacturing company explained on a recent conference call that DS and ML pilots bring much-needed visibility and control across multiple plants and help troubleshoot inventory management and supply chain allocation problems.

The importance of data science and ML to enterprises has doubled in eight years, jumping from 25% in 2014 to 70% in 2021. The Dresner study notes that a record level of enterprises sees data science and ML as critically important to their business in 2021. Furthermore, 90% of enterprises consider these technologies essential to their operations, rating them critically important or very important. Successful projects in Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) and R&D helped data science and ML gain broad adoption across all organizations. Larger-scale enterprises with over 10K employees are successfully scaling data science and ML to improve visibility, control, and profitability in organizations today.

Enterprises dominate the recruiting and retention of data science and machine learning talent. Large-scale enterprises with over 10K employees are the most likely to have BI experts and data scientists/statisticians on staff. In addition, large-scale enterprises lead hiring and retention in seven of the nine roles included in the survey. It’s understandable how the Business Intelligence (BI) expertise of professionals in these roles is helping remove the roadblocks to getting more business value from data science and machine learning. Enterprises are learning how to scale data science and ML models to take on problems that were too complex to solve with analytics or BI alone.

80% of DS and ML respondents most want model lifecycle management, model performance monitoring, model version control, and model lineage and history at a minimum. Keeping track of the state of each model, including version control, is a challenge for nearly all organizations adopting ML today. Enterprises reach ML scale when they can manage ML models across their lifecycles using an automated system. The next four most popular features of model rollback, searchable model repository, collaborative, model co-creation tools, and model registration and certification are consistent with the feedback from Data Science teams on what they need most in an ML platform.

Financial Services prioritize model lifecycle management and model performance monitoring to achieve greater scale from the tens of thousands of models they’re using today. Consistent with other research that tracks ML adoption by industry, the Dresner study found that Financial Services leads all other industries in their need for the two most valuable features of ML platforms, model lifecycle management and model performance monitoring. Retail and Wholesale are reinventing their business models in real-time to become more virtual while also providing greater real-time visibility across supply chains. ML models in these two industries need automated model version control, model lineage and history, model rollback, collaborative, model co-creation tools, and model registration and certification. In addition, retailers and Wholesalers are doubling down on data science and machine learning to support new digital businesses, improve supply chain performance and increase productivity.

Enterprises need support for their expanding range of regression models, text analytics functions, and ensemble learning. Over the last seven years, text analytics functions and sentiment analysis’ popularity has continually grown. Martech vendors and the marketing technologists driving the market are increasing sentiment analysis’ practicality and importance. Recommendation engines and geospatial analysis are also experiencing greater adoption due to martech changing the nature of customer- and market-driven analysis and predictive modeling.

R, TensorFlow, and PyTorch are considered the three most critical open-source statistical and machine learning frameworks in 2021. Nearly 70% of respondents consider R important to getting work done in data science and ML. The R language has established itself as an industry standard and is well-respected across DevOps, and IT teams in financial services, professional services, consulting, process, and discrete manufacturing. Tensorflow and Pytorch are considered important by the majority of organizations Dresner’s research team interviewed. They’re also among the most in-demand ML frameworks today, with new applicants having experience in all three being recruited actively today.

Data literacy predicts DS and ML program success rates. 64% of organizations say they have extremely high literacy rates, implying that DS and ML have reached mainstream adoption thanks partly to BI literacy rates in the past. Enterprises that prioritize data literacy by providing training, certification, and ongoing education increase success odds with ML. A bonus is that employees will have a chance to learn marketable skills they can use in their current and future positions. Investing in training to improve data literacy is a win/win.

On-database analytics and in-memory analytics (both 91%), and multi-tenant cloud services (88%) are the three most popular technologies enterprises rely on for greater scalability. Dresner’s research team observes that the scalability of data science and machine learning often involves multiple, different requirements to address high data volumes, large numbers of users, data variety while supporting analytic throughput. Apache Spark support continues to grow in enterprises and is the fourth-most relied-on industry support for ML scalability.

Jul 9

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Four Interesting Insights From Gartner 2020 CRM Market Share Update

“The worldwide CRM market grew from $61.6 billion in 2019. The CRM market grew 12.6% to $69.3 billion in 2020, a strong performance but with wide variations in growth due to pandemic impacts. However, CRM generally continues to thrive and grow above the overall software industry average rates, which were 8.8% in 2020”.

“CRM accounted for the largest share in the overall enterprise software market at 29%”

“Salesforce’s CRM revenue grows by 18.8%, Reaching $13.5 billion In 2020”.

“SAP and Oracle each witnessed a slight decrease in market share to 5.2% and 4.4%, respectively, in 2020, down slightly from 5.7% and 4.7% in 2019”.

“The worldwide CRM market grew by 12.6% to $69.3 billion in 2020, up by $7.77 billion from 2019. CRM is the software market and the third fastest-growing” according to the Gartner, Market Share Analysis: Customer Experience and Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2020, by Julian Poulter, Yanna Dharmasthira, Neha Gupta, Amarendra, 16 June 2021.

Gartner found that “Digital commerce grew at a rate of 17.1%, up from 13.2% growth in the prior year, highlighting the shift to digital”. The research firm also defined a new CRM submarket called Cross-CRM comprised of Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Voice of the Customer (VoC) spending. According to Gartner, “Customer Service and Support (CSS) also continues to be the largest segment in the overall CRM market, accounting for 35.5%share. The following graphic compares the top five vendors’ revenue by subsegments:

Additional interesting insights from Gartner latest CRM market share update include the following:

Five vendors comprise 35.6% of an increasingly fragmented CRM market. “Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, and Microsoft jointly held share in the CRM market is at 35.6%, up slightly from 35.2% in 2019, while still leaving a highly fragmented 23% stake for 81 named vendors (that we track in market share) and 41.5% stake for the remaining large number of other software vendor”s. “Shopify grew 41.5% year on year, a higher rate than the previous year’s 38%”.

Salesforce, Microsoft, and Adobe grew faster than the market in 2020. “Salesforce’s CRM revenue grows by 18.8%, Reaching $13.5 Billion in 2020”. Microsoft’s CRM Revenue grew by 17.5% in 2020. Sales is its largest segment with 61% of its CRM revenue and achieved 13.7% growth, above the sales average growth of 10.9% suggesting Dynamics attractive price point, integrated with Power Platform and Office and as a unified CRM suite, are appealing to buyers”. Adobe is the most significant marketing software vendor with its “CRM revenue totaling $2.4 billion in 2020 (just ahead of Salesforce at $2.35 billion), up from $2.1 billion in 2019”.

$55 billion of 2020 CRM sales were cloud-based, comprising 79.4% of all sales, increasing from $47.7 billion in 2019. Gartner believes that “Cloud growth was slightly slower due to the pandemic, and on-premises software (new license and software support services) still had very small growth of just over 4% up from the previous year”. Vertical market niche-based applications are sold on-premise, including those tailored to the specific needs of banking, financial services, manufacturing, and process industries’ operations.

“North America and Western Europe hold the largest share in the CRM market, with 59.6% and 20.7% stakes, respectively”. According to Gartner, “Mature APAC and Japan emerged as the fastest-growing regions with 19.2% and 17.5% growth rates respectively. Adoption lags in these markets compared with North America and Western Europe, and this higher growth rate shows more investment as companies catch up. At the moment however, Mature APAC and Japan together only account for about 9% of the overall CRM market share”.

Global spending on Customer Service and Support (CSS) grew 12.9% in 2020, down from 14.78% in 2019. “The CSS market saw growth of 12.9% in 2020, down from 14.78% in 2019, reaching $24.6 billion, up from $21.8 billion in 2019”. “The leading vendor in the CSS segment is Salesforce , with $5.3 billion in revenue,with service being its biggest cloud, overtaking sales in 2020”, according to Gartner. The next three top vendors include Genesys, Oracle and Zendesk – with Zendesk replacing SAP at No. 4 Zendesk, achieved revenue of $866 million and a growth rate of 25.1%”.

Source:

Gartner, ‘Market Share Analysis: Customer Experience and Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2020’, Julian Poulter, Yanna Dharmasthira, Neha Gupta, Amarendra, June 16, 2021 (client access required)

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