One On One With Inoapps CEO Andy Bird

Consulting: How much has the pandemic shaped your priorities and the areas of the business you'll be particularly focused on?

Bird: When the pandemic first hit, it was deeply concerning for us because we got our start in the oil and gas market, and still have a strong customer base in the industry. The cratering of petroleum prices in the face of weak demand was a blow to many of our customers. We worried that the knock-on effect could be that our projects were at risk of being put on hold. Massive change tends to favor investments in enterprise technology though, and we have grown explosively during and into the recovery phase of the pandemic. While we pride ourselves on high-touch, personal service, we certainly learned how much client engagement can be completed from a distance. This proved more challenging on the change management side of the business, which is focused exclusively on people rather than software and hardware. Having won for instance the change management contract for two London boroughs, Havering and Newham and their shared service organization One Source, our team found itself having to engage and involve people in a project in new ways. The boroughs were implementing Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), which really requires broad employee participation as just about everyone in the company will use self-service features of the system.

Our team improvised and overcame it by, creating everything from cartoons to communicate key messages to game show formats for educational sessions. The game show format imparted information while also helping us figure out how well borough employees had absorbed essential concepts on how to navigate and use their new HCM environment. The team created cartoons to illustrate processes in an accessible fashion, encouraging employees to 'Be like Bob' and complete simple processes in the HCM software.

Change can bring out the best in a team, and it was gratifying to see people pull together, solve problems creatively and think on their feet. It remains to be seen how much or how little travel and in-person meetings will be a part of our projects post-pandemic. On the one hand, there is value to being in the same room together and seeing each other's faces and body language. We like our customers and enjoy meeting them and we come to see them as friends who we value and care about. But we now understand how few in-person meetings we can get away with, and that will give us options for how we structure projects in the future.

Consulting: Will you be looking to expand headcount? Any preliminary numbers or goals you're able to share?

Bird: As of the autumn of 2021, Inoapps exceeded 500 people across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with a customer-driven goal to rapidly double in size to 1,000 people, all focused on helping companies realize the value of Oracle software and technologies.

We are not hiring for specific projects, but rather to satisfy prolonged and growing demand among our existing and prospective customer base. This means Inoapps is already on a rapid growth trajectory, on target for $100 million in revenue for 2021 with the help of an acquisition—putting us on pace to double again in short order. Those joining Inoapps can feel secure that we have the momentum and customer base to keep them busy along with the potential for them to grow professionally with the company. Between long-standing relationships with loyal client organizations, our first forays into more proactive global marketing and the momentum Oracle has in the market, Inoapps will be the place to be for skilled, caring and collaborative technology services professionals.

Consulting: Looking at the market broadly, what are some of the big consulting opportunities you're seeing that you're most excited to capitalize on?

Bird: We will capitalize on the growing need among our customers and prospects to focus on change management. Through technology embedded in its applications and platforms, Oracle is automating an increasing number of repetitive technical tasks and offering solutions with more built-in functionality for companies to adopt rather than adapting software to meet one-off processes. So more of the focus of software implementation will be on people. We have perhaps the strongest team and most highly developed processes to help our customers and prospects master the human side of their enterprise software equation.

The increasing focus on cybersecurity also creates opportunities for us. Well-publicized hacks of open-source databases and technologies are making stakeholders realize the value of a highly secure database like Oracle's new Oracle Autonomous Database (OAD) and technology stack like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OAD with its self-patching capabilities closes the security gaps left when exploits are spotted and addressed in patches that are not put in place. OCI includes a maximum security zone where security features cannot be turned off. For other portions of the application that must be more open, OCI relies on a proactive system called Cloud Guard that spots threats from unusual locations and IP addresses and automatically remediates them or flags them to someone who can act. All the security features are visible and configurable through the Oracle Security Advisor, enabling continuous improvement over time.

As security is becoming more important, Oracle is the vendor of choice in this area and has become even more rigorous in response to emerging threats, which creates opportunities for us as people look to us on how to leverage these technologies in their organizations.

Consulting: In what areas are you currently seeing organizations focusing their transformation efforts, and what forces are driving them?

Bird: We see our customers being both pushed off of legacy systems that may be on-premise making them harder to use for a remote and far-flung organization and pulled towards the attractiveness of newer and evolving cloud technologies. The need to quickly deal with changes including acquisitions and divestitures is a benefit many organizations are working towards for instance. But the overarching trend is a move away from legacy systems and onto a modern cloud architecture.

Consulting: What do you see as the overall state of the enterprise software market?

Bird: The market for enterprise software and related services is strong as both the public and private sector try to keep up with trends, many of which have been around for years but were sped up by virtue of the pandemic. These trends include increasing demand for easy-to-use and transformational technologies, an increasing focus on cybersecurity in the cloud and the move from on-premise to cloud-based applications. Worldwide, analysts expect the enterprise software market to grow by more than 7 percent this year. On top of that, our technology group is experiencing growth as our customers move more and more of their workloads to the cloud. One study found that the number of organizations moving advanced workloads to the cloud has increased by 25 percent (19.59 percent in 2021 vs. 15.48 percent in 2020). More than a third of respondents also opt for a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud approach.

So, where organizations choose to run their enterprise software will be much of the enterprise software story this and next year. This momentum towards the cloud is already lifting Oracle shares according to financial analysts, as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers customers a pure-play environment where all the elements of the infrastructure are designed to work together, and Oracle Cloud applications are guaranteed to work. As cloud becomes more of a business requirement, the state of the market will focus on making cloud safe, functional and predictable—and that will favor Oracle.

Consulting: What are some of the biggest challenges clients in the industries you serve are facing currently as the economy rides ongoing pandemic aftershocks?

Bird: We serve large, complex organizations across a broad spectrum of demographics. Across the board, we are seeing companies under tremendous pressure to meet demanding stakeholder requirements not just around revenue and margin, but customer experience. And that customer may be the end user of a product or service, or it may be employees using a self-service system of a human capital management application, or a regulatory body for whom we can automate reporting. The roller coaster ride of the pandemic may have made executives more aware of the need for real-time insight—data in context of company performance—so they can spot changing conditions and react accordingly. Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is therefore something we see a lot of interest in.

We see many of our customers struggling to make effective decisions on how to lift and shift their legacy Oracle applications or even applications from other vendors to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and we will be helping with those transitions.

But if we call out specific industries, the petroleum sector has been through a protracted period of ups and downs economically, and we have been right there with them. Inoapps got its start in the oil and gas industry, and in recent years a significant number of our customers have been buffeted by first a historic price drop that caused companies to pull back on exploration and production and then a global pandemic that once again idled exploration and production as workers laid down tools sick or as prices were too low to bother with. Now, petroleum prices are rising again and should stay in a viable state until supplies recover. That is unless some new variant of the COVID-19 virus does not cause demand to sink again. Managing the impact of commodity price swings like these requires enterprise software capable of integrating the front-office, general ledger and risk register with operational systems used in the oil field. The point where operations start losing money based on commodity prices or where entering a new field or activating a new rig become attractive must be clear in data visualizations, and software must enable an executive or management team to then drill down from visualizations into the functionality below to ensure management's decisions are acted on.

Our customers in the higher education sector also find the shift to virtual and online instruction a challenge. They must add or drop sections or classes as demand for in-person and virtual instruction shift back and forth. University officials are challenged to account on a more granular fashion for what classes are profitable, which are not and ensure the institution stays on sound financial footing as course work offerings change rapidly. Universities must also try to balance the cost versus resulting revenue from new students, and really require something like a student planning engine.

Consulting: What unique challenges are presented from a culture and employee experience standpoint with the move to work from home?

Bird: Inoapps has been a highly virtual organization for a long time, and the main employee experience factor we see with working from home is that our competitors who are more insistent on in-office work will continue to lose good people to Inoapps.

Our customers are finding though that things like the self-service features of a human capital management (HCM) application are becoming more important as employees are more remote. Not only are human resources personnel kept very busy—at Inoapps, for instance by onboarding new employees—but in our customer organizations they are physically removed and often in different time zones. It is critically important today that employees of any company can get the information they need and change everything from benefit elections to home address and emergency contact in their enterprise system themselves.

Consulting: Transformational tech like AI and IoT get a lot of attention—but where do you see these things actually driving benefit for your customer base right now? As an Oracle-only shop, you have deep insights into the company's products and services. What new products or technologies from Oracle do you see as most disruptive, important or attractive to your customer base?

Bird: Perhaps no automated technology will change enterprise computing as much as the Oracle Autonomous Database (OAD), which uses machine learning and AI to eliminate manual database administration tasks and close gaps in data security by automating the application of patches.

Our own work for customers is more immediately impacted though by automation that helps our consultants configure an instance of Oracle Cloud Applications so that we can achieve in hours what had previously taken days. This technology is perhaps a harbinger of things to come in other sectors as the automation writes itself around the customer data set each time it is used. Given the broad diversity of customer business models, process flows, country-specific regulation and other unique elements, this approach to automated automation is the only way to truly address the workload associated with implementing and maintaining an enterprise application.

The technology is evolving too to address the regression testing of both new and updated software. As Oracle pushes down mandatory quarterly updates, many organizations have a hard time keeping up with the requirement to test how these affect their production environment and may push them live only to find business processes broken and business functions inoperable. An automated approach to testing these will make life easier for every Oracle customer, and we are in a position to leverage this technology on their behalf.