In my conversations with customers, they almost always talk about change. This change—in technology, in expectations, in their businesses, and in their teams—is not unusual, but as I am sure you have seen, its impact is growing.
That’s why we made a change ourselves. In the past, we held separate events for different business audiences. This year we wanted to create an applications community that reflects the way you work—with integrated systems across departments and business units, no matter the size, industry, or location of your organization.
And that’s exactly why we are hosting (MBX) and (MCX) in Las Vegas next week. At these two co-located events, we are bringing together marketing, sales, and service with HR, finance, and supply chain, because we are seeing more and more similarities between each area. Of course, the specifics are incredibly important and change significantly, but whether I am speaking with finance, supply chain, or marketing leaders, the same themes keep coming up. See if they sound familiar to you:
1. Changing expectations: You’re trying to stay ahead of changing expectations. Not just from customers, but from employees, partners, and a myriad of other stakeholders. And we all know the catch. Expectations are not only skyrocketing, but are constantly evolving. It’s a moving target.
2. Adaptable Organizations: As things erupt externally, you are feeling some of the same turmoil internally. Are your teams in flux? Are your employees’ roles, skill sets, and positions changing to meet the needs of today’s experience and service-driven economy? If they aren’t, they will be soon.
3. Humans + Machines: Emerging technology is coming, but you’re not sure how or when. I see artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) reshaping workforces, improving decision making, accelerating processes, and driving efficiencies. Machines are freeing up business users to be more creative problem solvers, and this is changing the working relationship between people and technology.
Our (including you) are facing some very real challenges—staying ahead of changing expectations, building adaptable organizations, and realizing the potential of the latest innovations. To turn these challenges into opportunities, we are focused on five key areas:
Your experience: It’s all about you. We are committed to partnering with you to tackle your most complex challenges, help run your operations, and help you achieve the best business outcomes.
Most complete suite of apps: We don’t want you to have to compromise by choosing between breadth and depth. That’s why we are committed to providing one, integrated, best-of-breed applications suite, which brings teams together, creates a single source of truth, leverages data to its fullest, and drives end-to-end business innovation.
Best technology: We want to help you eliminate IT complexity so you can focus on what matters to your business. This means providing you with bullet-proof security, high-end scalability, mission-critical performance, and strong integration capabilities. You shouldn’t have to worry about how it all works.
Speed of innovation: We want to help you stay ahead of constantly changing expectations and business demands. To do this we send continuous product updates to keep you ahead of the latest innovation cycle. We’ve also infused the suite with AI/ML capabilities. The result: quick value and a leg up on the competition.
Modern UX: We want to make using enterprise technology as engaging and intuitive as possible. No matter the device, we deliver a simple yet powerful user experience. And across the organization structure, everyone gets a unified experience, which can be personalized.
We will be sharing the latest on each of these areas at the events through customers, partners, and sessions. We promise that you will walk away with a much better understanding of what emerging technologies can do for your business and why the time for being in the cloud is now. And, promises to keep things lively—he and I will wrap things up on Thursday noon. I’ll be the short one.
