Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s President of Technology, is retiring after 23 years of leading some of the company’s biggest innovations.
T-Mobile announced Ray’s intention to retire by Fall 2023, with Executive Vice President and Chief Network Officer Ulf Ewaldsson taking his place. Throughout his tenure, Ray helped the company transition from a 2G carrier to the 5G powerhouse it is today.
During that time, Ray was a fixture in the company’s commercials, quarterly calls with investors, and the company’s biggest product announcements.
“Under Neville’s network leadership we have accomplished so much together, and it’s amazing to think that milestones he’s helped T-Mobile achieve – the many network firsts, breakthroughs and innovations – have brought us to where we are today, taking the crown as the nation’s overall network leader,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert. “There are so many things Neville has contributed to this company but one of the most important has been his commitment to building the best, most effective Technology team in this industry that will continue to deliver for our future. Neville and his team have worked tirelessly to bring the Un-carrier from last to best in network performance and made T-Mobile’s network a true competitive weapon. What’s even more exciting is that we’re just getting started! As this next chapter of the Un-carrier story is beginning to unfold, we owe a lot of gratitude to Neville for all he’s done to carve this path that will continue to lead us into the future!”
Sievert continued, “This has been a thoughtfully planned succession and I am thrilled we have an excellent leader in Ulf Ewaldsson to lead our Technology teams. When Ulf joined T-Mobile four years ago, he brought years of experience and deep network strategy leadership capabilities that allowed him to hit the ground running and bring our leading 5G network to life. That’s exactly what he did – and what he will continue to do as President of Technology, leading the best team in our industry! Our goal is always to build a strong bench of leaders who are ready to fill key positions when they’re needed, and this is a perfect example of that approach.”
Ewaldsson joined the company in 2019 after a 27-year career at Ericsson. He was quickly promoted to EVP and Chief Network Officer in 2021. Ewaldsson has played a crucial role in helping T-Mobile achieve many of its recent milestones, especially in the 5G race. There’s no doubt Ray will be missed, although Ewaldsson certainly has the experience needed to succeed him.
“We have seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic,” says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer. “A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign. We don’t see customers going back. Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world.”
We’ve been really pleased with the growth we’ve had since going public a few years. We have also seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s obviously a horrible pandemic and our number one priority has been the health and wellbeing of our employees so we can take good care of our customers. As you can see in our Q1 earnings we did see an acceleration of our bookings to 59 percent.
Traditionally, if you look at the billings-type metric they have been in the mid-30s’. A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign.
Companies To Stay In This Digitally Transformed World
One of the things we’ve seen with the pandemic impact is that it has really accelerated the path that companies were already on to drive that digital transformation. We don’t see companies after the pandemic settles down going back and saying they want more paper and more manual processes.
Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world. They are going to use DocuSign and other fantastic services to do that.
The Future Is Going To Have eSignature At The Center
We really think that the future is going to have eSignature at the center of what we call the overall Agreement Cloud. Companies want to be more agreeable. They want to be easier to do business with and be easier to do business for. They’re going to not just use DocuSign for signature but all of the other components of preparing agreements and managing those agreements digitally once they’ve been created. That’s why we’re excited about our very robust future.
We just past a billion dollars in revenue (for DocuSign eSignature). We are only four percent penetrated today and we’re six times larger than the next biggest player in the space. There’s not a lot of penetration yet in that core business. Notary is still predominantly done manually. We are making investments there. We believe we can bring the same ease of use that we brought to eSignature we can bring to notary.
AI To Power The DocuSign Agreement Cloud
Much bigger than that, even expanding upon the opportunity of eSignature is that broader Agreement Cloud opportunity. We think this is the next big cloud opportunity. You are going to see companies increasingly say I don’t just want to do the workflow and signature. I also want to drive the creations of those agreements. I want to think about artificial intelligence and search capability to manage my agreements. This would enable me to actually manage my business and make my company more agreeable.
Those are some of the investments we’re making. That’s why we just finished the acquisition of Seal Software last month so we can bring additional artificial intelligence and analytic capability to help people run their businesses better.
“Slack has already transformed the way we work at Salesforce,” says Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor. “Since we have deployed Slack internally, we sent 46% fewer e-mails. And in the last 30 days alone, our employees have sent nearly 60 million Slack messages and conducted 500,000 Slack Huddles. We run Salesforce on Slack.”
Not only has Salesforce transformed the way they work with Slack but so are the customers of Salesforce. The company sees Slack as a core platform for powering digital transformation.
“Customer 360 and Slack are powering this transformation for companies in every industry in every region of the world,” said Taylor in yesterday’s earnings call. “Slack outperformed our expectations in the first full quarter as a part of the Salesforce family. The number of customers on Slack who spent over $100,000 was up 44% year-over-year. The adoption of Slack Connect was up an astonishing 176% year-over-year. Slack is not just a product, Slack is a network, and it’s just incredible to see that growth.”
The company seemed pleasantly surprised about how transformative Slack is to the operations of large enterprises. As Slack brought on millions of new users during the pandemic they focused on innovation that has made Slack much more than a simple communications platform.
“Slack also continues to innovate at an unbelievable pace,” notes Taylor. “Slack Huddles, which is Slack’s new real-time audio capability, is already used weekly by over 1/3 of Slack users. And Slack Clips, the new asynchronous video capability, are being played nearly 1 million times a week. And this month at Slack Frontiers, which I hope all of you have watched; and if you haven’t, you can watch it online. Stewart and the team are now the next generation of Slack’s platform, and it’s going to truly transform the way companies think about workflows and automation.”
Customer 360 and Slack are powering this transformation for companies in every industry in every region of the world, according to Taylor.
Slack outperformed our expectations in the first full quarter as a part of the Salesforce family. The number of customers on Slack who spent over $100,000 was up 44% year-over-year. Adoption of Slack Connect was up an astonishing 176% year-over-year. Slack is not just a product, Slack is a network, and it’s just incredible to see that growth.
Slack also continues to innovate at an unbelievable pace. Slack Huddles, which is Slack’s new real-time audio capability, is already used weekly by over 1/3 of Slack users. And Slack Clips, the new asynchronous video capability, are being played nearly 1 million times a week. And this month at Slack Frontiers, which I hope all of you have watched; and if you haven’t, you can watch it online. Stewart and the team are now the next generation of Slack’s platform, and it’s going to truly transform the way companies think about workflows and automation.
“That is definitely what I saw firsthand,” said Co-CEO Mark Benioff. “I was like, how could it be that an airline is basically front-ending their entire system with Slack? That’s a shock to me.”
“Slack is the system of engagement for every workflow, every application, every person on your enterprise,” added Taylor. “It’s really an amazing platform vision. And absolutely watch Slack Frontiers. If you haven’t seen it, I think it will blow your mind.”
“Every CEO and every Board I talk to is focused on how they can succeed in this era of flexible work,” says Taylor. “According to Slack’s research, 93% of workers are looking for flexibility when they work, and 76% are looking for flexibility where they work. Companies need to connect their employees, their partners, their customers from anywhere because we all know we’re not going to be in the office 5 days a week.”
“Our offices aren’t going away,” he said. “It’s just that your digital headquarters is going to be more important because it’s truly the infrastructure that connects all of it, and especially in this new normal. And Slack and Customer 360 together are really powering this transformation.”
Kaseya has acknowledged as many as 1,500 businesses may have been impacted by the ransomware attack targeting its software.
On July 2, Kaseya began learning of a coordinated attack against its software. Kaseya makes IT management software, and its customers provide managed IT services to somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 small businesses.
The company says it immediately shut down the software being targeted, although an estimated 800 to 1,500 businesses have been compromised.
“Our global teams are working around the clock to get our customers back up and running,” said Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya. “We understand that every second they are shut down, it impacts their livelihood, which is why we’re working feverishly to get this resolved.”
The perpetrators appear to be the REvil gang, most recently responsible for the ransomware attack on meat processor JBS. That attack resulted in JSB paying an $11 million ransom to prevent excessive strain on the world’s meat supply.
In this case, the group initially demanded a $70 million ransom. According to CNBC, REvil has privately lowered the demand to $50 million.
Watch this webcast to learn more about migrating your tax processes to the cloud. It is now possible to accelerate your indirect tax processes with cloud technology. By utilizing tax technology you can address critical infrastructure changes, provide faster and more reliable access for remote users, increase scalability, and reduce costs.
Implementation of a new tax technology throughout your business can make it easier to scale for growth, as well as integrate with your ERP, point of sale (POS), and subscription billing service. According to a survey conducted by CIO.com, 78% of IT professionals expect digital transformation to greatly impact their organization within a year. How are you going to change your business?
In this on-demand webcast, Heather Ingram, cloud practice leader from Vertex Consulting, and Vince Morasco, cloud manager from Vertex Product Management, will walk you through multiple areas to consider before, during, and after the migration.
“We are really seeing the impact of this hybrid work model,” says Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. “We are seeing the preparation for hybrid work and the return to the office. Customers are absolutely believing this is going to occur and they’re investing in it. Customers are turning to us to help them create the trusted workplace of the future.”
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, discusses on CNBC and in their quarterly earnings call how customers absolutely believe that the hybrid work model is in their future:
Customers Are Preparing For Hybrid Work Environment
Over the last couple of quarters, we’ve seen significant investment in next-generation wireless infrastructure to be ready for their employees to come to the office. As you load these wireless networks they are going to need campus refresh underneath them, and we’ve seen exactly that. The Catalyst 9000 platform has had four consecutive quarters of increasing growth sequentially.
We are really seeing the impact of this hybrid work model. We are seeing the preparation for hybrid work and the return to the office. Customers are absolutely believing this is going to occur and they’re investing in it.
Trusted Workplace of the Future
Let me now touch on Infrastructure Platforms. We saw strong demand across a majority of our portfolio, led by our next-generation Enterprise Networking and Service Provider solutions, as companies accelerate the modernization of their infrastructure. This modern infrastructure delivers higher performance and faster access to data while offering the best user experience in an increasingly distributed environment.
Customers are turning to us to help them create the trusted workplace of the future, with Wi-Fi access points, video endpoints, cameras and IoT sensors feeding data into DNA Center and DNA spaces. We’re enabling operations teams to remotely monitor workplace conditions for a safe return to office.
We’re also working to provide visibility beyond corporate networks, which is increasingly critical as our customers accelerate their adoption of SaaS and cloud solutions for hybrid work. At Cisco Live, we launched the industry’s first enterprise-wide full stack observability offering by integrating ThousandEyes cloud intelligence with our Catalyst switching portfolio and AppDynamics. This provides IT with visibility and actionable insights across both external and internal networks to provide a seamless digital experience for users. And with users more distributed than ever, it is vital that they have the most efficient and secure connection to the cloud.
Building the Internet of the Future
Our deep partnerships with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft allow native connectivity from our SD-WAN fabric to each of these cloud offerings. With our technology, customers can reduce deployment times and connect branch offices to cloud workloads in minutes. In our Webscale business, we delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of strong order growth, which increased over 25% in the quarter, and over 50% on a trailing 12-month basis.
Our Webscale customers are starting their 400 gig upgrade cycles and aggressively pursuing long-haul build-outs while our Carrier customers are exploring new architectures to realize the full potential of 5G. We are building the internet for the future by creating breakthrough innovation with our routing, optical and automation technologies to deliver significant economic benefits.
Customers Consuming Cisco Technology In New Ways
Recently, we launched a new routed optical networking solution, integrating our scalable, high-performance routers and Acacia’s pluggable optics, which offers significant cost savings. Last week, we announced our intent to acquire Sedona Systems to extend our cross-work automation platform to build on these capabilities. We also expanded our Silicon One platform, from a routing-focused solution to one which addresses the Webscale switching market, offering 10 networking chips ranging from 3.2 terabits to 25.6 terabits per second, making it the highest performance programmable routing and switching silicon on the market. We know our customers increasingly want to consume Cisco’s technology in new and more flexible ways.
At Cisco Live, we launched our new As a Service portfolio, Cisco Plus, and our first offer, Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud, combining our data center compute, networking and storage portfolio. Cisco Plus includes our plans to deliver networking as a service, which will unify networking, Security, and observability across Access, WAN and Cloud domains to deliver an unparalleled experience for our customers.
Turning to Security, we had a record quarter, surpassing $875 million in revenue, up 13% as we expanded our reach with customers around the world. Our Security strategy is focused on delivering a simple and secure experience. We have an unrivaled ability to provide end-to-end Security capabilities across users, devices, applications and data, on any network or any cloud.
Powering Business Transformation
Wellbeing is top of mind for so many right now as we face a new way of working. This is why we launched People Insights to help people monitor and manage their wellbeing. These new features, devices and capabilities combined with Cloud Calling and Cloud Contact Center provide our customers with the most comprehensive and inclusive hybrid work platform.
Last week, we announced our intent to acquire Socio Labs. By integrating Slido and Socio Labs into our WebEx platform, we will also be able to provide the most comprehensive internal and external event management solution on the market. In summary, we had a very good quarter. I’m so proud of the continued success of the business transformation our teams are driving.
“Digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic,” says Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri. “What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities.”
Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO of Workday, discusses how the pandemic will drive digital transformation forward at an even faster pace:
Digital Transformation To Be Faster Trend Out Of Pandemic
The first three quarters during the pandemic were challenging. The vagaries of subscription accounting models are such that it is a lag indicator. We expect new bookings growth to accelerate this year and that is our primary indicator and the way we run the business. We’re very excited about where we’re headed. That acceleration will probably take at least a year to show up in subscription accounting numbers just because of the way the model works.
What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities. In many ways, companies like Nike that are just such great market-leading companies, recognize that they needed to move this capability to the cloud. So I think actually digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic.
Employee Engagement Rose To The Top Of The List
It comes back to the flexibility and agility that that cloud solutions like Workday provide. We’ve been very fortunate. We’re so happy to have Laboratory Corporation of America become a customer. J&J is a customer. Visor’s a customer. AstraZeneca is a customer. I just feel honored to be able to support these companies who are doing the best they can to save our lives and are just doing amazing work with the vaccines and testing. We’ve always had a strength in the pharmaceuticals and diagnostics role. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they’re successful because they’re taking care of all of us.
Coming back to what we learned during the pandemic, employee engagement just rose to the top of every CEO’s list and every head of HR’s list. In a remote work orientation, it was harder to really understand how do employees think about the company they work at, their engagement level, their comfort with their manager, and if they are feeling fulfilled at work. We were already down the path at Workday with something called Pulse Surveys. We recognized that this emerging trend was going to be critical going forward.
We Fell In Love With Peakon So We Acquired Them
We concluded that we had to get in this market now, the market’s happening now, and Peakon is the well-known leader in this category. Peakon is a UK-based company with an amazing management team. We fell in love with the product and the management team so we made them part of Workday. They’re one of the new generations of companies that’s machine learning first.
They really use machine learning in the right way to guide decisions and really give you insight into how employees are thinking about the company that they’re working for and how engaged are they. That is a supercritical set of information that’s going to drive companies going forward.
“Business is really simple, and people are more productive, and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.”
Bill McDermott, CEO, and President of ServiceNow says that only one in four digital transformation projects actually deliver positive ROI due to lack of integration:
Most Digital Transformation Projects Don’t Deliver
We have a situation on our hands where digital transformation, cloud computing, and business model innovation, are all converging at once. ServiceNow is the platform, of all the enterprise platforms, that really makes business work. One of the big lessons that business has right now is trillions have been poured into digital transformation yet only one in four projects actually deliver positive ROI. The reason for that is lack of integration.
Our system integrates with all the existing systems as well as all the collaborative tools in the enterprise. From day one, the customer gets it up and running swiftly because it’s in the cloud. They begin to derive value from it because you automate the way the work is done and ultimately, you’re now in a position to serve your customers the way they want to be served. It’s a speed game and ServiceNow is at the top of its game.
Companies Have To Create New Business Models
We’re an example. If you’re going to grow your company you’re going to take advantage of digital transformation. This is the only way out and it’s the only way forward. In the 20th Century companies put in big heavy on-premise systems. The issue is now they can’t, in a frictionless economy, immediately pivot those business models because they haven’t digitally transformed their business.
About 25 percent of the opportunity of businesses out there today over the next three years will come from white space places they are not in today. They have to create new business models. They have to think about new partnerships and new routes to market. Without the baseline of a platform like ServiceNow they’re not going to get there.
That’s The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation
I am very optimistic that the economies of the world not only are going to recover but actually going to do very well this year because people are going to be investing in digital transformation. We have seen that does not cost jobs. On the contrary, it frees people up to do things like go after new markets, derive new ideas, and so forth, because the AI revolution is also on.
We have built-in machine learning and AI into our platform. So 80 percent of the soul-crushing work people don’t want to do is done by the Now platform. The 20 percent that involves a human immediately gets initiated through a workflow order from the Now platform.
Business is really simple, and people are more productive and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity. That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.
Fastest-Growing Pure-Play SASS Silicon Valley Company
If you look at our actual earnings results, they were stunning and obviously achieved beyond expectations performance across the board. We also followed that through in the guide. We’ll continue to be the fastest-growing pure-play SASS Silicon Valley company. We will continue to have the best margin profile of all of them. Obviously, we’re going to continue to gain market share in industries around the world, in geographies around the world, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific, and Japan.
We will also gain market share on personas. Lots of people are getting the memo now that ServiceNow obviously dominated the IT automation market but the same backbone platform has enabled us to change the employee experience, the customer experience. In these tough times with COVID we can write low-code onto our platform in minutes and roll out new applications to hundreds of thousands of people so companies can move super fast.
We keep the guide consistent with the revenue that we generated in 2020. If there’s an upside to that… fantastic. That’s what good companies should do. They should go beyond expectations when they can but we stand by the guide and we’re looking forward to having a great year.
ServiceNow Was Born In The Cloud
The whole idea of ServiceNow is so different than SAP which was a company that needed to pivot to the cloud in 2010. We did that and that was very successful. ServiceNow was born in the cloud. It’s a very young company with tremendous growth opportunity on the organic front. Having said that, (we would be in interested in an acquisition) if you have a situation where there is a partner out there that has a substantial TAM, that can be highly complementary and synergistic with ServiceNow on the revenue side.
It also would have to do great things for the customer, because we have a precious platform and we jealously protect the integration power of that platform. A lot of things would have to be right but I can tell you as responsible business people we always look at it. We don’t need it to make our goals but you always have to look at it. We do want to be the defining enterprise software company the 21st century. That’s our plan.
“COVID has really impacted the aerospace industry in this nation and nations around the world disproportionately to other industries… and the Air Force has not been exempt from these impacts,” says former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Dr. Will Roper:
COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force
COVID has really impacted the aerospace industry in this nation and nations around the world disproportionately to other industries. The Air Force has not been exempt from these impacts. We have had to go into a wartime posture and engage with exceptional authorities and funding to keep the aerospace industry, which allows us to go to war, whole.
But aside from the crisis response that we’ve all been in it’s forced us to do some serious reflection about how we engage with production and supply chains going forward. How does the Air Force need to change the way it views its future self so that we’re not just more ready for a crisis when it occurs but we’re actually designing better systems, doing better engineering, and using technology more effectively? Systems that we need to go to war are going to be hidden behind doors where their vulnerabilities are never going to be exposed because of secrecy.
Secrecy Hinders Our Ability To Digitally Go To War
We’re moving into an era where we’re leveraging commercial technology more frequently. Because of that, we can no longer hope that secrecy, keeping our systems classified, will be the sole means for us to be secure. We need to find a new paradigm where openness is also part of our security posture. Now we’re not going to be able to copy commercial industry one for one. Our systems in many cases don’t have a commercial analog. We can’t quickly replace them.
We’re not in a competition where spirals occur in years. Many of our aerospace breakthroughs, especially those in technologies like stealth, take time to do. Secrecy is going to continue to be part of the equation. But secrecy can’t be the catch-all approach to how we ensure systems are able to digitally go to war and be ready to fight in a cyber environment against an adversary as capable as we are.
Containerization Solves The Secrecy Problem
The software development capabilities that technologies like Kubernetes or containerization and Istio bring in to the Air Force. It’s amazing that companies like Google that have now transitioned this to an open-source driven initiative have solved a lot of what we would have to solve as a military. How do you write code in a development environment, in that tech stack that may also represent the physical aspects of your system, but it certainly represents the software components?
How do you go from your development environment out to the edge securely and know your code will run the same way. Containerization solves that problem for us. The military is behind and adopting it. It’s not old but this technology is moving through industry as fast as Linux did. If we don’t get off the dime we will be left behind. Keep pushing the Air Force and Space Force on this. Do not let us get comfortable.
“What’s interesting here about the SolarWinds hack, in particular, is that it’s what’s called a supply chain attack,” says Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel. “This means the attack was made on the code that was shipped to the SolarWinds customer. Then there is this new notion in security called shifting left. By left, it means is closer to the developer and earlier in the development process.”
Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel discusses how the SolarWinds hack signals an increased focus by hackers to target software earlier in its development:
The SolarWinds hack was definitely a very big one. It’s not especially surprising to see new important hacks like this one but definitely a very impactful one. What it makes very clear is that there’s going to be even more of an arms race when it comes to security. It’s not surprising companies are transforming. They’re having more and more of their activity that is happening online is happening in software. So there’s much more that can be done by attacking that software.
What we do is we gather as many signals as possible across observability and monitoring. This is the way we come from and across security. What’s interesting here about the SolarWinds hack, in particular, is that it’s what’s called a supply chain attack. This means the attack was made on the code that was shipped to the SolarWinds customer. Then there is this new notion in security called shifting left. By left, it means is closer to the developer and earlier in the development process.
There’s something really interesting there when it relates to us (Datadog) in how we can solve the problem for our customers by bringing security earlier into the development process and tied in more to the operations and the development of the application. That’s definitely something that we’re investing in and something that we think is going to be a big area of investment for customers in the future.
“Once you get to the cloud all of a sudden the lid is off,” says Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. “People can just pursue their backlogs and whatever they can imagine. We’re now in a situation where technology is ahead of what people are capable of and imagining what they could actually do with it. That’s really a big part of what you see in Snowflake’s growth profile, a completely variable paradigm.”
Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, says that on-premise data centers can only accommodate a tiny fraction of what their real demand for data analytics really is:
Once You Get To The Cloud The Lid Is Off
The important thing to understand is that there’s a couple of long-term secular trends that are coinciding and driving the development of the market overall. One is, as everybody knows, the movement towards cloud. It’s really a modernization play. We’re moving from on-premise data centers and we’re taking workloads to the cloud because we get to take advantage of better economics and utility models. Then we no longer have to manage capacity, we pay by the drink and all that sort of thing.
The other aspect that’s really important for our business is that we’ve had an extraordinary amount of pent up demand. The on-premise data centers could only accommodate a very tiny fraction of what their real demand for data analytics really is. Once you get to the cloud all of a sudden the lid is off. People can just pursue their backlogs and whatever they can imagine. We’re now in a situation where technology is ahead of what people are capable of and imagining what they could actually do with it. That’s really a big part of what you see in Snowflake’s growth profile, a completely variable paradigm.
Notion Of Headquarters Is Evaporating
We don’t have a yearning to go back to where we were. I can see why people would have that because of lockdowns and things of that sort. From a business standpoint, there’s a lot of positives to the shock to the system that we received. It’s almost like a wake-up call that is just opening our eyes to the opportunity. This whole notion that the office is your workday home we just realized that it’s nonsense. In other words, offices need to be there for specific purposes, for events, for training, for meetings specifically, but not a place to hang out nine to five. That’s definitely changing. It’s going to really reduce the real estate footprint that companies have.
The other trend and you’ve seen it with companies leaving California, the likes of Oracle and HP and Tesla, and so on is that the whole notion of headquarters is pretty much evaporating in front of our eyes. We’re no longer operating with a physical center of the universe. We’re completely virtual. We’re connecting as needed. We’ve been operating for the better part of a whole year without a headquarters and it’s just fine. All of a sudden everybody’s staring at each other and saying like what is the headquarters anyway. You’ve seen companies like Pinterest and you’re writing up massive leeches in San Francisco and saying we’re going to be headquarter-less. It’s just a concept whose time has gone away… and that’s very profound.
We Are Buying Talent And Technology, No M&A
Usually, big M&A is a function of people running out of market and running out of a lot of opportunity. They’re trying to invade adjacent territories to give themselves new runway. That is obviously not the case for Snowflake. We’re in a tremendous marketplace and we are buying talent and technology. We sometimes refer to it as stem cells that we can use that we don’t have ourselves that we can build very specific technologies around that are very much built snowflake way. We can really enable our platform mission or footer. That’s really been our mode. If you looked at our history we don’t have a history of doing big acquisitions.
“It’s a question of understanding what’s hybrid as opposed to pure public,” says IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. “I look at both Microsoft and Amazon as likely partners in this journey, not as being the one and two. In the hybrid world, the question is where does the client want to decide where the workload runs? They can run it on Amazon, they can run it on Microsoft, they can run it on IBM, or they can run it on private. What is the technology platform that goes across all of those? Red Hat gives a great answer to that technology platform.”
“There are many capabilities people need around integration and cybersecurity,” adds Krishna. “We’ll bring those to bear. Then we will bring our services to bear for those clients who would like to get that help both in improving the skills of their own people or for us to do the work for them. That is why you see us report $24 billion dollars in the trailing 12 months on total cloud revenue. That’s a hybrid market and not a singular public cloud market.”
“Digital transformation was the opportunity for our generation before COVID,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “Now with COVID, it has accelerated and exacerbated all the issues of broken systems and siloed operations. Before COVID they didn’t want to be told to go into a cubicle. Do you think after COVID once this thing clears up at some point in the future they are going to be told to go into a cubicle? No, they’re going to be digital.”
Digital transformation was the opportunity for our generation before COVID. Now with COVID, it has accelerated and exacerbated all the issues of broken systems and siloed operations. People are not realizing that 75% of the workforce by 2025 will be millennial generation people. Before COVID they didn’t want to be told to go into a cubicle. Do you think after COVID once this thing clears up at some point in the future they are going to be told to go into a cubicle? No, they’re going to be digital.
They’re also going to absolutely expect their employer to give them the best tools. The big idea if you want to give the customer a Michelin 3 experience is you have to fuse the employee experience and the customer experience on a common platform. This way most things can be automated for the customer on a self-service basis. The things that can’t be automated can immediately be workflow ordered to get the right person in the right place with the right skill set at the right time. That’s what we do and that’s why this is a thrilling moment.
Now Platform Is the Standard For Digital Transformation
The Now platform has become the standard for digital transformation in business today. If you think about most of these companies they’re grappling with the future of work. They have to accommodate their employees. They have very distributed workforces. How are they going to get them the tools that they need and onboard them properly? In some cases, they never even meet the people they hire. Then obviously, how are they going to manage the experience they have digitally?
This also goes direct to the customer. How do you go direct to the consumer? How do you make sure you give them a great service so they stay loyal to you? The ServiceNow Platform is at the epicenter of all of that. More and more, developers are building new innovation on the fly on the Now Platform. The Now platform has become a standard for large enterprises around the world. The ecosystem and the network effect building on that are truly sensational. We’re extremely fired up because we want to make work… work better for people all over the world. What we’re trying to do is get to the essence of everything.
“The biggest takeaway from our research is that organizations should expect cybercriminals to become more brazen as the potential opportunities and pay-outs from these campaigns climb to the stratosphere,” says Josh Ray, who leads Accenture Security’s cyber defense practice globally.
“Since COVID-19 radically shifted the way we work and live, we’ve seen a wide range of cyber adversaries changing their tactics to take advantage of new vulnerabilities,” said Accenture’s Josh Ray. “In such a climate, organizations need to double down on putting the right controls in place and by leveraging reliable cyber threat intelligence to understand and expel the most complex threats.”
Sophisticated adversaries mask identities with off-the-shelf tools
Throughout 2020, Accenture CTI analysts have observed suspected state-sponsored and organized criminal groups using a combination of off-the-shelf tooling — including “living off the land” tools, shared hosting infrastructure and publicly developed exploit code — and open source penetration testing tools at unprecedented scale to carry out cyberattacks and hide their tracks.
For example, Accenture tracks the patterns and activities of an Iran-based hacker group referred to as SOURFACE (also known as Chafer or Remix Kitten). Active since at least 2014, the group is known for its cyberattacks on the oil and gas, communications, transportation and other industries in the U.S., Israel, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Australia and other regions. Accenture CTI analysts have observed SOURFACE using legitimate Windows functions and freely available tools such as Mimikatz for credential dumping. This technique is used to steal user authentication credentials like usernames and passwords to allow attackers to escalate privileges or move across the network to compromise other systems and accounts while disguised as a valid user.
According to the report, it is highly likely that sophisticated actors, including state-sponsored and organized criminal groups, will continue to use off-the-shelf and penetration testing tools for the foreseeable future as they are easy to use, effective and cost-efficient.
Ransomware feeds new profitable, scalable business model
Ransomware has quickly become a more lucrative business model in the past year, with cybercriminals taking online extortion to a new level by threatening to publicly release stolen data or sell it and name and shame victims on dedicated websites. The criminals behind the Maze, Sodinokibi (also known as REvil) and DoppelPaymer ransomware strains are the pioneers of this growing tactic, which is delivering bigger profits and resulting in a wave of copycat actors and new ransomware peddlers.
Additionally, the infamous LockBit ransomware emerged earlier this year, which — in addition to copying the extortion tactic — has gained attention due to its self-spreading feature that quickly infects other computers on a corporate network. The motivations behind LockBit appear to be financial, too. Accenture CTI analysts have tracked cybercriminals behind it on Dark Web forums, where they are found to advertise regular updates and improvements to the ransomware, and actively recruit new members promising a portion of the ransom money.
The success of these hack-and-leak extortion methods, especially against larger organizations, means they will likely proliferate for the remainder of 2020 and could foreshadow future hacking trends in 2021. In fact, Accenture CTI analysts have observed recruitment campaigns on a popular Dark Web forum from the threat actors behind Sodinokibi.
Verizon partners with Microsoft to create new ways for enterprises to accelerate the delivery of fast and secure 5G applications to enable state of the art low-latency IoT solutions.
Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge network integrated with Azure edge services can enable ultra-low latency, many times faster than the blink of an eye, according to Verizon, which can help businesses tap into real-time data analysis and delivery. Applications incorporating computer vision, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, digital twins or machine learning can be enhanced with 5G and MEC on the customer premise, helping transform the way industries such as retail, transportation, and logistics operations.
Think of automated high-precision asset localization, tracking and positioning in manufacturing. In healthcare, the increased speed, reduced latency and high bandwidth connectivity of 5G networks could enable real-time precision medicine leveraging mixed reality and AI capabilities as well as seamless and fast sharing of large files to improve patient care.
“We have built a network that provides real-world, 5G-enabled solutions TODAY,” said Rima Qureshi, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Verizon. “By bringing together Verizon’s 5G network and on-site 5G Edge platform with Microsoft’s expertise in cloud services, we will enable the development of the next-generation technologies everyone has been envisioning.”
The collaboration brings Azure cloud and edge capabilities together with Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge, a mobile edge computing platform designed to enable developers to build applications for mobile end-users and wireless edge devices with ultra-low latency. By utilizing on-site private 5G, businesses will be able to realize increased power efficiencies and reduced costs of end user devices while addressing their privacy and security needs.
Logistics and supply chain solutions company Ice Mobility is already testing on Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge platform, integrated with Microsoft Azure. The company is using 5G and MEC to help with computer vision assisted product packing. By gathering data in near real-time on product packing errors, the company has the potential to improve on-site quality assurance and save 15% to 30% in processing time.
“We are especially excited to join Verizon and Microsoft to test how 5G and MEC can improve the quality assurance process,” said Mike Mohr, CEO of Ice Mobility. “They truly have listened to our needs to provide automated real-time quality oversight and feedback, which will enable us to cost-effectively launch unique new products, while maintaining the highest execution standards, significantly increasing throughput and reducing costs. And, this is just the beginning.”
“By leveraging Verizon’s 5G network integrated with Microsoft’s cloud and edge capabilities, developers and businesses can benefit from fast, secure and reliable connections to deliver seamless digital experiences from massive industrial IoT workloads to precision medicine,” said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president Azure for Operators at Microsoft.
Moving forward, Verizon will explore opportunities to co-innovate with Microsoft to deliver new value to industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare.
Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network enables throughput at least 25 times faster than today’s 4G networks*; delivers ultra-low latency; and offers very high bandwidth. Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband is expected to eventually enable 100 times larger data volumes than 4G; and the ability to connect more than a million devices per kilometer. Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service is available to people in 55 cities and its 5G Nationwide service is available to more than 200 million people in more than 1,800 cities around the U.S.
A Dell Technologies commissioned an independent survey of 4,300 worldwide business leaders indicates a massive shift toward digital transformation in 2020 accelerated by the pandemic. The survey indicates that 80% of organizations globally have fast-tracked some digital transformation programs this year. But just 41% accelerated all or most of their programs. Dell says that this is the third installment of their Digital Transformation Index (DT Index), designed to show how businesses are adapting to unprecedented uncertainty during a global pandemic.
Incredibly, 79% are reinventing their business model as a result of the disruption caused by the pandemic and 50% of international business leaders worry they didn’t transition fast enough. The study notes that digital transformation is not easy, 94% of businesses surveyed say they are facing entrenched barriers spanning across technology, people, and policy.
According to the 2020 DT Index, the following are the top-3 barriers to digital transformation success:
Data privacy and cybersecurity concerns (up from 5th place in 2016)
Lack of budget and resources (#1 in 2016, #2 in 2018)
Unable to extract insights from data and/or information overload (a jump of eight places since 2016)
“We’ve been given a glimpse of the future, and the organizations that are accelerating their digital transformation now will be poised for success in the Data Era that is unfolding before our eyes”, says Michael Dell, Chairman, and CEO, Dell Technologies.
Additionally, the survey reveals a huge shift toward remote work. About 25% of employees worked remotely before the pandemic and today it is more than 50% of all employees are remote. According to the survey, remote work has become the new normal.
Top IT Investments Are For Emerging Technologies
Prior to the pandemic, business investments were strongly focused on foundational technologies, rather than emerging technologies. The vast majority, 89 percent recognizethat as a result of disruption this year, they need a more agile/scalable IT infrastructure to allow of contingencies. The DT Index shows the top technology investments for the next one to three years:
Cybersecurity
Data management tools
5G infrastructure
Privacy software
Multi-Cloud environment
And recognizing the importance of emerging technologies, 82 percent of respondents envision increased usage of Augmented Reality to learn how to do or fix things in an instant; 85 percent foresee organizations using Artificial Intelligence and data models to predict potential disruptions, and 78 percent predict distributed ledgers – such as Blockchain – will make the gig economy fairer (by cutting out the intermediary).
Despite these findings, only 16 percent are planning to invest in Virtual/Augmented Reality, just 32 percent intend to invest in Artificial Intelligence, and a mere 15 percent plan to invest in distributed ledgers in the next one to three years.
SAP announced that a new IDC economic impact model predicts the revenue SAP partners generate will nearly double over the next four years.
“The pandemic has driven digital transformation into every corner of the enterprise to allow businesses to adapt and continue operating as usual,” said Steve White, program vice president, channels and alliances, IDC. “As the economic situation continues to unfold and businesses move their focus from resiliency to recovery, those that leverage digital and cloud-based solutions will be more agile and future-proof, and we’re seeing that acknowledgment drive significant adoption.”
SAP commissioned the research to explore the impact of the current economic landscape on the partner ecosystem. The data shows that due to the pandemic-driven increase in remote work, digital transformation efforts are advancing, and companies are expected to spend more on cloud-based solutions. This translates into a $204.4 billion cloud market opportunity for SAP partners from now until the end of 2024. This cloud revenue figure represents 68% of the total net-new opportunity for our partners over that period of time.
“This research confirms the vast and continually growing market opportunity for SAP partners,” said Karl Fahrbach, chief partner officer, SAP. “SAP’s next-generation partnering movement drives partners’ sustained growth by establishing partner-centric sales and service and connecting with customers in new ways across their life cycle. This higher level of ecosystem engagement can increase customer satisfaction, lead to faster time to value and enhance customer lifetime value.”
IBM and ServiceNow are partnering to provide enterprise solutions that utilize AI to automate IT operations. The new joint solution combines IBM’s AI‑powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and IT service and operations management products. The solution raises up deep AI‑driven insights from their data and then recommends actions for IT organizations to take that help them prevent and fix IT issues at scale.
“AI is one of the biggest forces driving change in the IT industry to the extent that every company is swiftly becoming an AI company,” said Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “By partnering with ServiceNow and their market-leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs. Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a powerful new way for clients to use automation to transform their IT operations.”
“For every CEO, digital transformation has gone from opportunity to necessity,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “As ServiceNow leads the workflow revolution, our partnership with IBM combines the intelligent automation capabilities of the Now Platform with the power of Watson AIOps. We are focused on driving a generational step improvement in productivity, innovation, and growth. ServiceNow and IBM are helping customers meet the digital demands of 21st-century business.”
ServiceNow says that in today’s technology‑driven organization, even the smallest outages can cause massive economic impact for both lost revenue and reputation. They note that this partnership will help customers address these challenges and help avoid unnecessary loss of revenue and reputation by automating old, manual IT processes and increasing IT productivity.
Here is what IBM and ServiceNow are planning:
Joint Solution: IBM and ServiceNow will deliver a first of its kind joint IT solution that marries IBM Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market‑leading ITSM and ITOM Visibility products to help customers prevent and fix IT issues at scale. Now, businesses that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical incident data into the deep machine learning algorithms of Watson AIOps to create a baseline of their normal IT environment, while simultaneously having the ability to help them identify anomalies outside of that normal, which could take a human up to 60% longer to manually identify, according to initial results from specific Watson AIOps early adopter clients. The joint solution will position customers to enhance employee productivity, obtain greater visibility into their operational footprint and respond to incidents and issues faster.
Specific product capabilities will include:
ServiceNow ITSM allows IT to deliver scalable services on a single cloud platform estimated to increase productivity by 20%.
ServiceNow ITOM Visibility automatically delivers near real‑time visibility from a native Configuration Management Database, into all resources and the true operational state of all business services.
IBM Watson AIOps uses AI to automate how enterprises detect, diagnose, and respond to, and remediate IT anomalies in real time. The solution is designed to help CIOs make more informed decisions when predicting and shaping future outcomes, focus resources on higher‑value work and build more responsive and intelligent applications that can stay up and running longer. Using Watson AIOps, the average time to resolve incidents was reduced by 65 percent, according to one recent initial proof of concept project with a client.
Services: IBM is expanding its global ServiceNow business to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform. Highly‑skilled IBM practitioners will apply their expertise to facilitate rapid delivery of valuable insights and innovation to clients. IBM Services professionals also will introduce clients to intelligent workflows to help improve resiliency and reduce IT risk. ServiceNow is co‑investing in training and certification of IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.
“Businesses are facing increased pressures to match the digital pace of a cloud‑first market in order to meet the demands of their customers,” said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, DevOps, and Management Software, IDC. “The C‑ suite is transforming workflows to deliver insights and automation for more efficient customer engagement models and cost containment strategies for the business while simplifying IT operations and increasing collaboration between IT and business stakeholders.”
“Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous,” says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. “COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.”
Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous. What COVID did is it accelerated many of the initiatives, many of the use cases, the things that companies needed to build to be competitive in this digital era were accelerated.
They were accelerated because of COVID, because of social distancing, work from home, and migrating a lot of these business processes to software and into the cloud and modernizing all of this. COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.
I’m Not Very Concerned About Microsoft
I’m not very concerned (about new competitors like Microsoft). It’s the same reason that (I wasn’t concerned) when Amazon started building products in the communication space or Facebook or Google or even Blackberry once announced that they were going to compete with Twilio. First of all, we’re no stranger to competition. This is a huge market. It’s no surprise that a wide variety of companies have products in the communications domain.
We compete by focusing on our customers, listening to what they need, and building differentiated APIs, a differentiated platform, and a differentiated super network. We’ve got a 12-year head start on anybody entering the space. The last thing I’ll add is that we are not a company that is very focused on competition. We’re focused on our customers. That focus has driven us for the last 12 years and has served us very well. We will continue to focus on the things our customers need in this enormous market and be able to take a lot of market share.
Digital-Native Companies Want APIs That Work
Strangely, I don’t think Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wakes up every day thinking about Twilio. But we are also no stranger to pricing competition. In fact, that is how most companies have tried to compete with us through our 12-year history. They come in with an inferior product and they say we’re going to be cheaper. But it turns out that the biggest enterprises on the planet or digital-native companies, what they want are APIs that work, mature, scalable, and that work everywhere around the world.
We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and money to build the leading platform out there and what we found is that customers value that. So we’re no stranger to people trying to undercut us on price. What we think and what we hear from our customers is that they want quality, they want reliability, and they want HIPAA compliance. They want all sorts of capabilities that let them power their business and that’s what we offer.
Low-Code, No-Code, and Yo-Code
Low-code is a really exciting area. There are three buckets. There’s low-code, no-code, and then yo-code for the people who love to write code, developers. We’ve got products really for that whole spectrum. The typical way a developer might build on top of Twilio is to write code and host it themselves. We have a Twilio Functions product that allows us to host the software for our customers. Then we have Twilio Studio which is a drag and drop designer for the non-developer to be able to build out sophisticated workflows like interactive voice response systems on top of Twilio.
We have embraced really all three of those categories of builders. We do believe that at every enterprise there is a large number of builders with different skill sets who are building the future of how those companies engage with their customers. We want to enable all those people to succeed on Twilio.
“The barriers have broken down now in digital transformation because of people working from home and the need to adopt faster,” says Brenda Harvey, General Manager at IBM Asia Pacific. “We see continued growth of hybrid cloud and of cloud services after the pandemic. It’s touching every element of a company’s business processes from the inside out and the outside in.”
The benefits coming from new personalized services, workflow automation, infusing AI to help drive this more personal experience, are actually driving better business impact. When we think about hybrid cloud which enables you to leverage all of your investments across your infrastructure we’re actually seeing two and a half times value than traditional models. We’re also seeing the benefits from regulatory cloud and capabilities that we’re putting into our platforms. We just announced a financial services cloud and we’ll do the same with insurance and healthcare.
We’ll take the costs out of the regulatory risk and compliance while providing more value from a business perspective. We’ve had a number of relationships across multiple industries including BNP Paribas, MUFG Bank, Adobe, across telecom with Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel, Verizon, and even Schlumberger and Ernst & Young. Companies are seeing the value of these platforms. In fact, in the study, 94% of the respondents said that by 2022 they would have a new business platform model that would continue to power their business.
Barriers To Digital Transformation Have Broken Down
We see continued growth of hybrid cloud and of cloud services after the pandemic. It’s touching every element of a company’s business processes from the inside out and the outside in. The inside out includes HR, finance, risk compliance, procurement, supply chain. Then the outside in, marketing, sales, customer engagement, and customer service. With marketing at marketing events, we saw a 3X response into our Think Digital than previous years because we could have more reach. So now marketing is taking into account a digital transformation of the clients’ needs.
Customer service and engagement are the number one priority of our clients. They are building and investing in the contact center to improve the experience and drive more value. This cloud platform will bring in new capabilities with 5G such as IoT (internet of things), blockchain, and of course quantum capabilities. We’ll see the technology advance while the cultural change is advancing too. The barriers have broken down now in digital transformation because of people working from home and the need to adopt faster.
We are going to be the most important software company in the world,” says Planatir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp. “We are going to deliver the world’s best software with the most efficient way of delivering it. Well over 90% of our growth in the first half of the year came from our existing clients. Our existing clients, the most important clients in the world, are really happy. Of course, we are going to expand those really happy clients who happen to be the coolest people on the planet.”
Alex Karp, co-founder, and CEO of Palantir Technologies Inc. says his company which initiated a direct listing today on the New York Stock Exchange will become the most important software company in the world:
We are very focused on building software a long time before others build it. We are going to be the most important software company in the world. We are going to deliver the world’s best software with the most efficient way of delivering it.
What’s interesting about our client list that people ask is how can you have this super valuable company when there are only 125 customers? To which I respond, yeah, but they are the 125 most interesting institutions in the world. These aren’t just any institutions. We don’t go out and advertise who uses our product but I would say the list of our clients is the single most impressive list of institutions in the world I’ve ever seen. We want to keep these clients.
Well over 90% of our growth in the first half of the year came from our existing clients. What does that mean? Our existing clients, the most important clients in the world, are really happy. Of course, we are going to expand those really happy clients who happen to be the coolest people on the planet.
We’ve built this product which has gotten very little attention called Apollo. Apollo allows us to maintain and deliver software to any number of clients while essentially not growing our Palantiring force at all. We are planning, now that we have Apollo, to grow the number of super cool customers all over the world. We can do it without raising our headcount. What you are going to see is that we are going to continue building with our clients.
Why, because they are the most interesting clients in the world and they clearly based on our numbers like us and some love us. Now with Apollo, we can deliver the whole stack in six hours. I don’t think any other company I’ve seen in the world can do that and we can do it with efficiencies that I don’t know any other company is going to do. We can do this with a small number of people sitting in one office that we have maintaining, updating, and providing them with new products we build.
They don’t have the Frankenstein monster that takes two years to build and has to be maintained with either human hours, like in the government contracting case, or by purchasing new product or compensating salespeople.