On this episode of the Six Five Podcast Enterprising Insights, host Keith Kirkpatrick is joined by Robert Kramer, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, and Guy Currier, CTO at Visible Impact, to discuss the announcements and experiences from Oracle CloudWorld and NetSuite SuiteWorld. He then closes the show by asking them to rant or rave about one item in the enterprise market.
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Transcript:
Keith Kirkpatrick: Hello, everyone. I’m Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director with The Futurum Group. And I’d like to welcome you to Enterprising Insights. It’s our weekly podcast that explores the latest developments in the enterprise software market and the technologies that underpin these platforms, applications and tools. This week I’d like to talk about Oracle CloudWorld 2024, covering the major announcements and takeaways from the event. Then I’d like to get into my rant or rave segment where I take one element in the market and I either champion it or criticize it. To help me out today I have two special guests from the analyst community who also attended CloudWorld. We have Robert Kramer, VP and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy and Guy Currier, CTO at Visible Impact. Welcome, gentlemen.
Guy Currier: Good to be here.
Robert Kramer: Thank you so much, Keith. It’s exciting to see you here and previously a couple days ago.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, absolutely. Well, why don’t we get right into it here? Big event, we had CloudWorld and SuiteWorld co-located in beautiful Las Vegas. Want to get your thoughts, first of all on some of your overall takeaways from the event in terms of usefulness, not useful. Pretty standard stuff or is there something really that stuck out? Robert, why don’t we start with you and I’ll go to Guy.
Robert Kramer: Yeah. I thought it was extremely well put together. I liked how they did SuiteWorld, which is NetSuite’s and Oracle CloudWorld at the same time. It allowed us to go back and forth. Logistics were a little cumbersome because of where SuiteWorld was in a tent across the street at Caesars. At the same time, it allowed us to really see both and get a lot out of it. Now the details we’ll get into later, but from that perspective I thought it was well done.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Okay. Guy.
Guy Currier: Yeah, I mean first year for me to attend any of SuiteWorld. And also, it was interesting to have them both happening at the same time. Not sure how that happened. Frankly, not sure that that was a great idea because I suppose they have significantly different customer bases in some ways, but for us poor analysts, I did feel a little schizophrenia, especially because SuiteWorld, man, razzle-dazzle, wham bam, thank you, ma’am. What a keynote. And there was a little show, there was dancing. Quite impressive. And I also thought that that went with the user interface that NetSuite has just launched. I do think it is like going for a fine meal. It’s not just the taste of it, it’s the presentation of it. It makes it more of a pleasure to use. I thought that was a big deal on the NetSuite side. We’ll talk about a lot of other features and stuff.
Interestingly, on the CloudWorld side, there were two really big announcements that maybe we’ll get into. One being Oracle at AWS completing a trifecta for Oracle because they’re already at Azure and at Google Cloud. As well as enhancements to the Oracle ’23 database to in their words, “Unify relational document and unstructured databases all in one single query available engine.” But it was a meat and potato side to my mind from the Oracle side and the razzle-dazzle, which I’m trying to emphasize is not purely- I mean this is a productivity issue, but the razzle-dazzle side from NetSuite.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that because just to give my impression, when I think of what NetSuite did, they really impressed me. Obviously it was in a neat opening there, a mini-sphere experience. I think that’s what they’re going for. But in terms of the number of new features and enhancements and the breadth of them that are now available on NetSuite, I was impressed and I felt like it’s something that they really had to do. They were falling behind a bit and I think they needed to have a big splash. I mean, I’m not sure what you two thought of that, but for me, I felt like it was something they had to do to come out in the market and say, “Look, we’re here. We’re essentially a subsidiary of Oracle to a large extent in terms of leveraging a lot of their technology.” They need to really demonstrate that they were able to take a lot of the work behind the scenes and then make it actually functional within the platform.
Robert Kramer: You made some good points there because I think a lot of those features should have already been there. I think the user interface should have been there already, but it does look good. But at the same time, I think the competition is coming a little bit more up to speed. They have Microsoft’s product, they have Acumatica’s. They have Infor’s, they have Sage, so they don’t have a stranglehold on that small to medium size like they used to, even though they have 40,000 clients. There’s other choices. That’s what I meant. Some of those other choices have some of these features, but the user interface, I’m not sure I agree with you both. I still think it looks a little antiquated. It looks much better than the Redwood is what they call it.
But at the same time, it doesn’t go throughout the whole system. It’s only partial. We actually use it inside of our company, NetSuite. We’re actually doing an implementation right now. And we think, or some of the people that use it feel it looks like a little bit 2000-ish as far as the look and feel, even some of the newer stuff. I think that’s needed. And I know I’m maybe not agreeing with you guys, but I think what they did was needed. And maybe the razzle-dazzle was a little showy because it was covering up some of the things that they had to do.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think from my perspective, I was looking at it, comparing where they were to where they are now. Because I was at an event they had back in May, and I was thoroughly underwhelmed at that point. And felt like that previous interface and just the fact that it was hard to query information, that was totally, you’re transported back 20 years ago. Let’s quickly shift to the Oracle side. Guy, you mentioned the big announcement there with AWS. To me that seems pretty game-changing because again, to me it’s all about meeting customers where they are and that is a key part of the strategy.
Guy Currier: I think that a key Oracle strategy almost since its founding, is to make the Oracle database the essential enterprise database. And part of that has been the inclusion of Oracle in a lot of other stacks and solutions. Most famously, I think SAP. SAP bought Sybase, SAP created HANA. And yet still Oracle is a foundational component of an SAP implementation. By the same token, with this explosion of NoSQL. And by the way, I should correct myself. What they’re announcing is not a NoSQL but a graph. I mix the two in my mind. What they’re trying to do is sort of unify the traditional relational with document, with graph database functionality all in one interface. When you combine that with the cloud strategy that they had for now three years or so of being able to host with full performance, pricing parity, unified operations, being able to host Oracle in whatever version at another provider, it’s a recognition by Oracle that where the software has moved, including SAP, but just all the software, owned software, everything, that’s moved into these clouds. And they still want to be a reliable core database for any application.
Now that they’ve completed the trifecta, that allows their own Oracle customers, which has always been their primary source of new revenue to continue to do what they’re doing in whatever clouds and maintain the attachment of the application and all the benefits that derive from to Oracle. And the funny thing is everyone anticipated it, everyone expected it. It’s still huge news. It’s huge with Azure. I want to add one other thing. The devil is in the details. Oracle’s famously paying attention to detail here. You cannot discount the pricing parity issue. That wherever you are running Oracle and whether you are managing it through the Azure, AWS or Google Console or doing it through your Oracle console, however you are deploying and managing it, the pricing is going to be the same. That makes a really big difference because it frees up customers to choose what they want to do where and how, and it makes the Oracle option more attractive that way. And that’s not an easy thing to do. Pricing parity is really not an easy thing to do, so I’m impressed by that part as well.
Keith Kirkpatrick: One of the other things that follows on that theme of letting customers do what they want, where they want, if we look at just the way that they’re approaching integrations on the application side, it seems that that is again falling in line with what the industry expects. Robert, can you comment on that?
Robert Kramer: Well, I spent a lot of time on the ERP area and I’ve met with a lot of the leaders. And one of the things that they have a luxury of is like you said, they have the database, they have the OCI, they have the alliances, like you mentioned AWS. But they have a new one which they released with IBM. And they’re putting a lot of time and money into these integrations and these transformations of ERP and companies that want to take more advantage of Oracle applications and they’re bringing in IBM to help them with that. I think that’s a big deal. I think the ERP world is looking to actually utilize the applications a little bit more and versus reaching out to these SaaS applications and adding more technology stacks to these enterprises. I saw a lot of that happening. I’ll comment a little bit more because I know, Keith, you have some theories on that as well. But I see that as being a trend and then IBM is one of those things that shows you that. But also Capgemini also did purchase a company for similar reasons to help out with SAP implementations.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, I mean one thing there that you mentioned which is interesting is if we think about what Oracle was doing on their application side, they made a big announcement about the number of new generative AI functions that are basically incorporated or embedded within the platform. Two things that really struck me. One is, since I’ve been talking to them, they’ve been doubling down on the notion that this generative AI stuff, this is not a bolt-on technology. This is not something that we’re going to ask users to pay an extra 25, 50 whatever, $100 a month. It’s just going to be included in the product. And it’s not free. It is just something added value that comes in. Customers are paying for that license and generative AI is essentially a core component of that functionality.
What’s interesting though is in talking, and I had a one-on-one with an ERP guy there who basically said their big challenge of course is certain customers in certain industries are going, “This gen AI stuff is great, but we’re in a regulated industry. We can’t turn it on for everything because either there’s a regulatory aspect or we’re just not trusting it yet.” And I’m just curious to see what you guys think about Oracle’s approach with this, because obviously they’re definitely are doing the whole, “Hey, come to the cloud here. Let’s make sure that you’re on the cloud and we’re going to give you all of this great generative AI functionality.” Is that enough to get folks to migrate? I mean, I know we can talk about one of their competitors, SAP, which was obviously beating the drum on that for the last several years.
Robert Kramer: I mean, I think you have a very complicated subject matter there. A lot of the enterprises are complicated. I think it’s the flip side, that people think that ERP solutions are complicated, but I think it’s the enterprises. When they’re complicated and then how are they going to use gen AI at the maximum? I think the data management is a gigantic issue. I think the issue is also are these companies ERPs located on-prem or are they in the cloud? Are they a tier two? Were they running tier one on-prem and then another tier that’s in the cloud? Using gen AI is not a flip of the switch, like you said. I think that the data management component is a gigantic component. I sat in on a few sessions yesterday. Snowflake had a manufacturing session, they had a data, a workshop for analysts. And they were saying exactly the same thing that they think that gen AI is the thing of the future, embedded everywhere. But at the same time, if you don’t address the challenges that I just mentioned on top of having a change management process, you’re probably going to have a slimmer chance of having success.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Guy, any thoughts on that?
Guy Currier: Well, I think that Oracle cloud… Let me backup a second. Who and what applications are the biggest consumers of Oracle cloud infrastructure? I don’t have any insider information on that, but I would guess it’s largely Oracle applications. Oracle Fusion, Oracle Fusion applications. They’re not eating their own young. They have been producing their own stacks since even before the acquisition of Sun. And the acquisition of Sun allowed them to build highly. The focus of the company on outstanding customer experience paired with outstandingly high prices I might add. But the outstanding customer experience meant a desire to control and understand the entire stack. And the way they responded ultimately to cloud was not to say, “Okay, now we’re going to try to do that in the other hyperscalers, but we’re going to build our own hyperscaler.” And they’re one of the few companies with the ability to do that. I’m going to get around to the gen AI in a second, but it’s worth noting that they actually have a pretty accomplished SAP practice. Last year they migrated a 180 terabyte SAP implementation over to Oracle Cloud for a Canadian retailer that is a giant implementation, let me tell you. A giant production implementation occurred that was accomplished over a weekend.
They’re taking the same approach to the generative AI work that they’re doing. They’re owning the stack, they’re building their own infrastructure. They’re building in from the infrastructure up and through the Oracle database, which is the foundation of it. They’re building the kinds of controls that you need for compliant or regulated industries or frankly, any enterprise of any size. And in fact, a lot of enterprises of small sizes. I’m not saying, “Oh, you can just trust them.” I wouldn’t say that to anybody. But it’s almost like I wouldn’t call them anywhere on a par with one of the big three. But what you’re looking at is a global cloud environment that has this enterprise focus and yet not the kind of proprietary nature that the IBM cloud does. This may be a differentiated addition to the suite of cloud tools for hosting and building applications that the industry already has, something unique and different.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean I think the fact that they own the entire stack, I mean that’s something that they’ve been leaning into for quite some time. And rightly so because that gives them cost certainty in a way that many, many other vendors that they compete against, whether we’re talking ERP, or we’re talking CX, or we’re talking CRM, whatever it might be that a lot of other competitors don’t have. And that’s why they can go out and say, “Hey, we’re not ultimately concerned about trying to figure out on the back of the napkin, how are we going to make this gen AI stuff work from a cost perspective,” because they’re the ones who can obviously have much greater control over it.
And certainly the other thing is, and this is something I’ve been hearing quite a bit, is when generative AI jumped into public’s consciousness, there was a lot of talk about how expensive it is. And it is, but as any technology starts to mature, you do start to see declines in price and certainly a large full-stack vendor like Oracle is going to benefit from that perhaps more than some of the ones that actually don’t own the technology.
Guy Currier: That’s right.
Robert Kramer: Well, I think both you guys have amazing points. The technology is absolutely there with Oracle, but my point was to actually have a business impact, to actually have success I think there’s some things that need to happen on the other end for the customers to be prepared to actually follow through and take it the whole way where they see that business impact, because that’s what it’s all about. Is it expensive? Are they able to execute? Do they have the staff? Those are some pretty big issues. And is the data ready for AI? But according to Larry, who we we’ll probably talk to about him, he was fabulous. He thinks that everybody’s ready and it should be a fabulous implementation no matter what.
Guy Currier: What else is he going to say? Though, Robert, I mean, tell me what you think. There’s an interesting opportunity here if you are an application manager or enterprise architect or other strategist. Actually, let me put that a different way. If you’re fulfilling that role in a smaller company, in a company that doesn’t warrant a role like that, if you’re some form of an IT strategist or a CTO in a smaller company. Oracle has not exactly been out of reach to you historically, but the kind of investment that you need to make, not just in money but in time and in talent development and management and so forth to take advantage of these Oracle stacks has normally been considerable. But when Oracle embraced the cloud, the public cloud with OCI, I might make these remarks about how their prime customer for OCI is Oracle itself, including NetSuite incidentally.
I might say that, but in fact, it’s still an open cloud that anyone can start using. And there are all kinds of levels of ability now to take advantage of whether it’s the database, Oracle database or Fusion or anything else, even as a smaller firm. And that’s clearly an opportunity Larry is pursuing. But it’s also an opportunity if you are paying any attention to this news that it’s something, just like every cloud, you can try and then leave. You can be agile and nimble as a large enterprise using smaller investments and shorter term investments and you can act like more of an enterprise as a smaller firm. I think that’s a really interesting development. I’m not sure we’re there yet, but that was what I started to sense a couple of years ago from Oracle.
Robert Kramer: Well, I guess a turnkey technology opportunity. A lot of these companies, they’re not having to go to multiple companies to get the technology. I think that’s what you’re referring to. But even if it’s more expensive, the indirect cost savings probably make it less expensive.
Guy Currier: Yes. Because all the management that you get with it.
Robert Kramer: Yeah. They’re all in that area.
Guy Currier: Think of Autonomous Database. Yeah, Autonomous Database is a perfect example of that. This is getting Oracle 23 AI without having to manage any of it. And at least according to the claims, without having to worry about scale. Your app blows up, your application blows up or whatever it is. And yeah, I guess you going to owe a lot more money to Oracle, but at least you’re not worried about the whole service going down.
Robert Kramer: Right. Security is better. Is it more peace of mind, more scalability, more technology opportunities? It’s more peace of mind and ability to grow with the latest technology, one of the powerhouses in the world. I was at this concert last night, by the way. And when I checked out, the point of sale said Oracle Cloud. Just interesting. Because they’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. And it’s one of those things that you’re getting in bed with one of the best companies. There is competition, but at the same time that technology stack is a little bit more important because of the fact that you can have that turnkey that people think.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, it’s interesting if you think about if you’re a customer out there and you’re not a technology vendor let’s say, your core business is not any of this stuff. It’s like me trying to make the decision whether or not I’m going to redo the plumbing in my home or call somebody else. Yeah, it’s going to be a lot more expensive to call a plumber. But on the other hand, when something breaks and it does, my fix is a phone call as opposed to tearing out… Well, I don’t have hair anymore, but whatever it might be. And I think-
Guy Currier: Facial hair.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, exactly. But I think that’s where Oracle, and by extension NetSuite is really trying to position themselves saying, “Look, we are going to handle this. We have this technology, it’s scalable. We’re trying to be as cutting edge as possible.” I think that’s why they’re really hammering home the generative AI messaging around features. Which again, I think that’s all well and good, but ultimately, to Robert’s point earlier, you need to do the homework first in terms of making sure you have a proper data strategy. It’s ready, available, clean, all that kind of stuff. But I think what Oracle and NetSuite are saying is, “Once get to that point, we’re going to take care of it from there and make sure that you’re future-proofed moving forward.” I’m just curious, was there anything that stuck to either of you two that you were surprised about? Obviously we know about the normal conference dog and pony show stuff. But either in terms of product announcement or perhaps something that you haven’t heard or were expecting to hear.
Guy Currier: I thought that last year’s Oracle CloudWorld was a whiz bang. Sorry, I said razzle-dazzle earlier. I thought it was a whiz bang. I mean I couldn’t keep up with this new… What what did they call it? This new X scale cluster or something like that for hosting Cohere and other AIs and stuff. This I’m talking about last year. Last year I think it was the Azure announcement. This year I was impressed by what a continuation of last year’s strategy it was. And I think we can undersell that by saying, “Oh, there wasn’t anything really big.” What struck me was that it was just a great follow-through. And as an analyst or an observer, you want that cool hook. That’s not a cool hook, but if anything it’s more impressive. That was what really… That and the dancers at the NetSuite…
Keith Kirkpatrick: Oh, yeah.
Guy Currier: The dance show at the NetSuite keynote. This was Vegas. It was a perfectly respectable and beautiful dance show and it was pretty awesome too. Those two things.
Keith Kirkpatrick: It was still PG, which is pretty impressive.
Guy Currier: Completely PG. Yes. It was more PG than Cirque du Soleil.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, I don’t know about that. Robert, what about you? Anything jump out?
Robert Kramer: Yeah. I agree it’s a continuation. But at the same time I felt like Safra, the CEO, I was so impressed with her last year. I didn’t think she was as impressive for some reason. I think every time I hear her, she is. Not to say anything negative about her, but the customers that she called up were absolutely wonderful, but at the same time, I didn’t hear the way that she was last year this year. I’m not sure if you guys got that vibe or not.
Keith Kirkpatrick: I certainly did. I felt that, and again, it’s not to pile on her for anything, it’s just I just don’t know what it was. But I agree with you. I felt like she did not bring the energy or the presence that I would’ve expected given her role. And honestly, if it was a continuation of what they were doing last year, there had to be something else there to create this big Vegas-like neon sign. Like, “Hey, we’re still doing some really amazing things.” Which they are, but I got that same impression with her.
Robert Kramer: Just one more thing. I think some of these conferences, I know they take a tremendous amount of effort to put on. They’re expenses, and it’s hard to decide which parts and sessions you want to have and who speaks. But they should be limited to two to three days. They go on. And I think that the people attending them after 48 hours are probably about done with being able to attend a session and get anything out of it. I’m not sure if you guys think that sometimes after two hard days, you’re probably cooked because everybody does stuff at night.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, I would say that, yeah, by the end of the last day I was fairly spent, but I was able to make my way to see Journey, which I will say that was quite entertaining there.
Robert Kramer: Wow.
Keith Kirkpatrick: So glad I stayed up for that.
Guy Currier: Good for you. I did you one better. I left after the second day because I had somewhere else to be. I guess I agree with you.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah. Well, you guys are more-
Robert Kramer: Well, every vendor does the same thing, but after a couple of days, I think it’s, you’ve maximized. You have to know your audience, know your customers, know who’s attending. And they just have so much information that it’s hard to get it done in such a short period of time. But just my 2 cents on that.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Right. Well, I mean echoing that, but if you look at the way that all of these announcements are dropped. And I can’t believe I just used that term dropped, but it’s overwhelming when all of them come out at once and you’re trying to make sense of it while also putting it into context. And I think that’s where it really is, I do wonder sometimes if all of the messaging that they want to get out around it does sometimes get lost. And of course, the other thing is, I think you both mentioned here we had a co-located event with SuiteWorld and CloudWorld. Both coming at the same time from a logistical point of view, for me it meant one less trip. But on the other hand it was twice as much content to absorb and try to make sense of, which is what I’m in the process of doing now.
Guy Currier: Oh, it absolutely is overwhelming. And I don’t agree at all with the decision to do them both at the same time, except that I don’t know why they made that decision. It may have been for a very good reason that’s completely out of my vision. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of customer overlap. That’s why they wouldn’t do that or maybe why they did do that. Sorry. But you’re right, it’s like twice as much information to try and process. And in particular to try and interpret and help people see the perspectives from, it’s overwhelming.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Right. Well, certainly, I’m glad that we all got to catch up while we’re at the event. And what I’d like to do is close out today’s show where I have my segment. Roberts has been through this before, but Guy, if you aren’t familiar, I have a segment called Rant or Rave, where I ask my guests to pick one thing. And it can be related to this conference or just in general the market where they either rave about it, which is giving it a big thumbs up, or they rant about it, meaning a big thumbs down. Guy, since you’re new here, I’ll let you go first if you’d like.
Guy Currier: Oh, great. I don’t get to follow someone’s example, I just have to wing it myself. Well, that probably makes it better.
Keith Kirkpatrick: That’s our thinking. Yeah.
Guy Currier: I’m going to pick a tired subject, but still the shiny subject, which is AI. And I want to rant about the use of the word productivity against AI. And speed, which is a related concept. I’m going to rant because it is clear to me that the benefit of AI is quality and the benefit of AI is reliability. Because as long as you don’t sit there and say, “Okay, AI is going to do some work for me,” but think of it as your assistant in doing work. Then one of the things an assistant can do is put a draft out of something or grab some code for you that is plausible and get you started. And as a world-class procrastinator like myself, it’s really helpful to have a buddy who’s just going to spit out some code or spit out some texts for me that I can then work on and edit. That’s a reliability factor. People can rely on me, I can rely on myself better.
And from a quality standpoint, when you have an extra round of edits or an extra thing that you can do, to build on something, sorry, when you can build on something that something else has created for you, then you’re reacting and you can observe. And you don’t have this ownership you have when you’re the one who started it all. And so I really think that there needs to be an understanding that all this AI is helping us do things better and do things more reliably. And if we got off of this silly notion that we’re going to be able to have half as many people to do twice as much work or any of the other sort of stuff, maybe that’s what’s coming. But to begin with, I’m just tired of hearing the word productivity or speed against AI.
Keith Kirkpatrick: It’s a lot of putting the cart before the horse essentially.
Guy Currier: Well, yeah, because by the way, AI is dumb and it doesn’t reason. And I don’t care what OpenAI says with their latest announcement about Strawberry. We’re not reasoning, we’re simulating reasoning. We’re not writing, we’re simulating writing. We’re not discussing, we’re simulating discussion. And once you have that in your mind, you’re just like, “Okay, I don’t have to take any of this at face value. I still need to be an expert. I still need to know what I know how to do. And that’s how I’m going to approach it. It’s going to make my work better and it’s going to make me more likely to hit deadlines,” or however you want to put reliability.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Right. Okay. Awesome. Robert, you.
Robert Kramer: That was pretty good. I don’t know how I could follow that. Maybe I’ll piggyback. I agree with you, but I’m going to rant a little bit that your shop has to be set up. There has to be some responsibility for the companies. And to focus not on the features of what AI can do, but the business impact. And there has to be a process in place. There has to be transparency throughout the company, the understanding of what it does and what it can do. And to have that data management structure put in place. But it’s a sequence of things. You have to have the people, you have to have the data. You have to make sure that your application and know what the results are going to be with the AI embedded. And then first of all, what you’re actually trying to do and then working your way backwards and then get it done.
Because if the fact is all of these companies, they’re not even sure what AI is going to do for them. And if they don’t know, then how are they going to execute? That change management process and putting the people in place and owning that responsibility is a big deal. Because I don’t think the companies, they want to push the responsibility to the vendor. And that’s one of the things, because even in the ERP world, I understand that because the finger pointing was there, but at the same time, the companies didn’t set things up properly. They have to own this, and they have to know what AI’s going to do. If they don’t do it, you should suspect failure because it’s a big deal. On the flip side, if you follow everything that you guys have been talking about and you execute, success will be there. So it’s there. I think the percentage of AI success is probably 50% or less right now. I think it’s getting high remarks of what it can do, but it hasn’t done it yet. But we’re optimistic.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Right. Interesting take. I’m actually going to rave about something. And it honestly has nothing to do with what I’ve heard at Oracle or NetSuite. It was really another vendor conversation I had about generative AI. And their approach really was saying, “Look, we know that everyone is talking about, ‘Oh, we’re going to be having thousands of agents basically replacing human workers,” so forth. And they’re saying, “No, we’re going to take this a lot slower. Because in the reality of the situation, particularly for regulated industries, certain companies, they are not going to be wanting to go at this at warp speed. They want to take a very stepwise approach and say, “Okay,” like Robert was saying, “Let’s figure out why is it that when we use AI right now, we still get duplicates and things like that?” Well, because you actually haven’t cleaned your data to begin with.
And why is it that people can’t see the real value in AI? Well, because you’re doing it in such a way where you’re almost abstracting away what’s really going on in looking at how the data is actually being pulled together. And unless you have that, you’re never going to get that confidence that it’s not some magic black box where there’s, who knows what’s going to happen. And obviously there are a lot of other things that go into that in terms of different strategies for grounding and tuning and all that. But ultimately, when we’re talking about ultimate business decision makers, often the C-suite, they’re not going to want to get bogged down on that. They’re going to want to just make sure that they take a very measured approach. And this vendor that I spoke with, I’m not sure they’re ready to let me say who they are, but they basically said they’re going to take a much more cautious approach to rolling out features because they believe that that is actually going to yield a greater benefit and actually more trust in that vendor as opposed to the ones that are just saying, “Hey, we have all these new agents and just trust us and give us a ton of money. And whiz bang, here are the results.”
Guy Currier: Whiz bang, razzle-dazzle.
Keith Kirkpatrick: There you go.
Guy Currier: Meat and potatoes.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Good callback. Well, gentlemen, that’s all the time we had today. I want to thank you, Guy, and thank you, Robert, for joining me here on Enterprising Insights.
Robert Kramer: Thank you.
Guy Currier: Yeah, thanks. It was a pleasure.
Keith Kirkpatrick: Great. All right. Well, I’ll be back again next week with another episode focused in on the happenings within the enterprise application market. Thanks to all of you for tuning in and be sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast on your preferred platform. And we’ll see you next time.
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
