In this special “On Location” video, John Siefert talks with Bob Evans and Tony Uphoff about their latest impressions from Cloud Wars Top 10 company conferences SAP Sapphire taking place May 16-17 in Orlando, Florida, and ServiceNow Knowledge 2023, taking place May 14-18 in Las Vegas.
Highlights
00:08 — Bob Evans is on location at the SAP Sapphire show, and Tony Uphoff is at the ServiceNow Knowledge events. These are two big events with tons of announcements, incredible speakers, and keynoters. John Siefert asks Bob to fill him in on the hottest stuff going on at Sapphire.
0:37 — Bob answers that SAP is a company entering its second half-century, which might make people wonder if it has anything left in the tank, but he’s “blown away” by the sense of newness and innovation, and SAP’s mindset in not allowing itself to get trapped in the past.
01:19 — Business Network, which floundered around inside the company for a long time, is coming to life. Business Network’s now for industries across four different segments. Thomas Kurian was here from Google Cloud, to really pump up China turning the whole thing around, along with the connectedness of Datasphere, Google Cloud, BigQuery, and its data cloud so customers can get everything. It’s very refreshing.
02:06 —John asks Bob about the news of SAP and Google Cloud coming together, which is why Thomas is there. He asks if there were any big takeaways from that. Bob replies that customers felt, even if they didn’t put it into this precise complaint, that they have magnificent companies out there and neither can do this individually. Why couldn’t they get out of their own way?
02:52 — Partnership have really gone wild here. SAP’s done deals or expanded relationships with Microsoft, UiPath, IBM, and Google Cloud over the last few weeks. And China. How can these partnerships enhance, unlock, and unleash the potential of that data so that customers can do things that they might have dreamed about, but never had the capability before to do?
03:42 —”And in a multi-cloud world, that’s what it takes, right?” John says. It’s no longer their partner ecosystem. It’s a plural partners ecosystem to meet those customer needs. He turns to Tony and asks him about his experience at ServiceNow Knowledge.
03:57 — Tony feels “an almost intoxicating level of momentum.” ServiceNow is clearly growing and evolving at a very rapid rate.
04:39 — Tony met with CEO Bill McDermott and asked him how much time he spent with customers. He said 50% of his time. This is four or five years into the role. So ServiceNow is not just gratuitously customer-centric.
05:24 — ServiceNow made a series of announcements around supply chain lifecycle management, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and more. While the announcements were interesting, Tony reports that the positioning of how they talked about it was really notable.
05:39 — People are familiar with the consumer use of generative AI but how will it work inside the platform? The company gave a series of “very straightforward use cases of generative AI applications in the platform, Tony describes.
06:12 — “I lost count of how many times either McDermott or another executive has used the term ‘We are the end-to-end platform for digital transformation,” Tony says. Reflecting on where ServiceNow came to where it is today, its end-to-end digital transformation premise, John says, is “so much more customer-centric,” as ServiceNow emphasizes modernizing enterprise resource planning (ERP) approaches to align with customer-specific business outcomes.
07:20 — It’s important to consider the customer’s point-of-view and apply that to the tone of voice and culture that’s being built in the organization.
08:31 — Bob talks about how SAP’s Christian Klein worked with the Chief Digital and Technology Officer of Pfizer for the two organizations to collaborate on building an industry network.
08:47 — “Pfizer just topped $100 billion in annual revenue,” Bob says, as the company reported that “they have the most ambitious set of product rollouts ever” within the life sciences industry. SAP has helped unlock the business network for life sciences industries by interconnecting the pieces to move faster, scale bigger, and gain more end-to-end visibility.
