by twieberneit | Sep 12, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 12, 2024, Zoho released a new, AI-rich version of Zoho Analytics that brings self-service BI to any persona in business. The release added more than 100 features and now offers powerful AI and ML capabilities. These enable diagnostic insights, predictive analytics, and automatic report and dashboard generation. “Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions. The new version of Zoho Analytics has added power, intelligence, and flexibility to serve a broader range of businesses and users than competitors in the market.” The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform now offers more than 500 connectors to other systems, including streaming analytics. Overall, the new release offers new capabilities across four main categories: Data Management Hub: Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights to accelerate business success BI Infusion with Generative AI: Zoho Analytics has introduced Generative AI capabilities across the BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML): Zoho Analytics now features the DSML Studio, allowing users to simply and quickly build custom machine learning models, which, for example, analyze or predict customer churn. n of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Platform Extensibility: Zoho Analytics is more deeply extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. Zoho Analytics is a composable platform on which any analytical solution can be built. Alun Rafique, CEO and Co-Founder of Market Dojo...
by twieberneit | Jun 12, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
Zoho’s annual main customer event Zoholics took place in Austin, TX last week. The company presented updates to products and strategy and gave partners the opportunity to present themselves on a big show floor. In parallel to the event, Zoho published some interesting news about product enhancements in four areas, namely security and privacy, CRM for Everyone, collaboration, and platform tools. In addition, Zoho reaffirmed its AI strategy. Of course, CEO Sridhar Vembu set the scene in his usual humble, yet no-nonsense way. He detailed out, why Zoho is truly different. Zoho’s strategy of transnational localism with a clear focus on investing into employees is well known by now, and we see it working. Explaining the strategy with another twist, Vembu laid out five principles that will continue to be essential for every business software vendor to thrive: Investing in a full product portfolio with breadth and depth Offering attractive bundles that have deep value Investing into exceptional service and support Improving interoperability with more prebuilt integrations Getting close to the customer with a strong local partner ecosystem With 55 tightly integrated apps and growing, value-oriented bundles, and a thriving ecosystem, Zoho is certainly on a strong way following these principles. Another topic is the way applications get built by software developers. Vembu compares developers to artisans and postulates that software development will become ten times more efficient with the help of generative AI. The developer’s role will change to become far more one of a scientist, leaving the mundane tasks to the system. This way, the whole development cycle as such changes considerably, also enabling vendors to deliver...
by twieberneit | Jun 6, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On June 5, 2024, SAP announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire WalkMe. Walkme is a leader in the digital adoption platform (DAP) market. DAPs are about the elimination of digital friction from workflows to turn the business application tech stack into a competitive advantage. You can read the complete announcement here. WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization. By combining WalkMe with SAP’s earlier acquisitions Signavio and LeanIX, SAP intends to complement its business transformation management portfolio to better help customers through their transformation journeys. According to the press release, WalkMe helps organizations boost enterprise productivity and lower risk by enabling consistent, effective and efficient use of software and the workflows it enables. Its DAP works on top of an organization’s application landscape, detects where people encounter friction and provides the tailored support and automation they need to complete the job to be done, right in the flow of work, across any application. Importantly, WalkMe will continue to fully support non-SAP applications. “Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.” The acquisition...
by twieberneit | May 31, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |
The news On May 29, 2024, Salesforce reported its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025. Highlights are a total quarterly revenue of $9.133bn US, resembling a year-over-year growth of 11 percent a current remaining performance obligation of $26.4bn US a remaining performance obligation of $53.9B US an operating margin of 18.7 percent. Diluted earnings per share of $1.56 The company reported a revenue guidance of $9.2bn – $9.25bn US for the next quarter and a full year guidance of $37.7bn – $38.0bn US, resembling growth rates of 7 – 8 percent and 8 – 9 percent, respectively. With these numbers, Salesforce ended up at the lower end of last quarter’s guidance on the revenue growth side while exceeding the earnings per share projection and slightly lowered the guidance for the fiscal year 2025. The result: The company’s share price dropped from $272 to bottom out at $212. The bigger picture Salesforce is the big gorilla in the CRM and CX industry. The company has surpassed SAP as the biggest business software vendor in the last 18 months. This is largely thanks to the extraordinary growth that Salesforce showed in the past years and secondly because of SAP’s still ongoing transition from an on-premises vendor to become a cloud vendor. All three, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP report a higher cloud application growth. But then, the big games in town are generative AI and infrastructure. All of these companies, including Salesforce, are investing heavily in their own artificial intelligence capabilities in a race to provide superior business applications. Plus, several other ones, including Google and, specialist vendors....
by twieberneit | May 14, 2024 | Blog |
By now, everyone has recognized that we are in an AI hype. Again. It is probably the fourth since Joseph Weizenbaum developed the famous ELIZA, a natural language processing program that was intended to explore communication between humans and machines. In the early nineties we saw another wave when we saw the first neural networks; in the tens of this century, we saw machine learning making strides and now … Now we have generative AI. And every vendor – and buyer – jumps on it, often thinking of drastically improving business and employee performance – or replace some employees with technology – and of enjoying the ultimate competitive advantage. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Adapting and using AI tools gives a temporary advantage at best. Why temporary? Temporary, because technology is nothing that the competition cannot use. In fact, they will do the same and with that, any, or at least most, competitive advantage gets leveled again. And why at best? Because you might not get an advantage at all, for several reasons. Chief of them is missing corporate readiness. AI can be a very helpful tool, but it is a tool, that needs an organization to be prepared across several dimensions. Regardless of how these dimensions are laid out in detail, they include Strategy and leadership, infrastructure, people, culture, governance and last, but not least, data. Not being prepared in one or more of these dimensions can greatly diminish the projected benefits of adopting AI technology. A simple yet obvious example would be the employees being hesitant to use the provided tool if they feel that...