In this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions podcast, Kerry Boudreaux and Joe Tolod, Head of Oracle Alliances, discuss the complexities and nuances of an organization’s digital journey. Joe shares insights from his extensive experience in the Oracle ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of understanding the unique digital transformation needs of each customer. The conversation covers the challenges of moving legacy applications, the significance of a unified platform, and strategies for mitigating risks during the transition to modern cloud technologies. Joe highlights the need for curiosity and collaboration between IT and business leaders to drive successful digital transformation.
Chapters
01:00 Meet Joe Tolod
02:55 Introduction to the Digital Journey
05:33 The Destination of Digital Transformation
08:38 Challenges in Moving Legacy Applications
15:37 The Importance of a Unified Platform
22:40 Mitigating Risks in Digital Transformation
EPISODE 2
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi and welcome to this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast. It’s The Digital Journey. My name is Kerry Boudreaux and I’m the Senior Vice President of Sales. I want to welcome our guest Joe Tolod. Joe, welcome.
Joe Tolod
Thanks, Kerry. Great to be here.
Kerry Boudreaux
Before we dig into this episode, Joe, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional career? I find it amazing that you’ve spent pretty much your entire career within the Oracle ecosystem. That’s why I’m so excited to have you on as our guest. But just kind of share with us a little bit about yourself.
Meet Joe Tolod
Joe Tolod
Sure. Well, I’ve been in and around tech, IT, database applications for a little over 30 years now. I have been in and around not only from the vendor-side, meaning from an Oracle and other software side, but also from the business-side as well, right? I’m a former CIO, but then went back into Oracle. I was at Oracle for a long time, and then went to some larger SIs, Hitachi Consulting, Fujitsu, and now here at FourthSquare, where we’re helping customers in their continued digital transformation journey.
Kerry Boudreaux
You are FourthSquare’s Senior VP of Strategic Alliance. Is that what your role is?
Joe Tolod
Yes, and along with that, it’s kind of all hands-on deck, right? So, we do a little bit of everything from alliances to sales to customer success to really, you know, looking at the customer from a 360-degree point of view, right? It really is all about solving problems and helping our customers solve their business problems.
Kerry Boudreaux
I’ve seen you actually in action solving those problems. And I love how you work with customers and work through their problems and their issues and come up with a solution. I think you’re going to give us some amazing insight today. So Joe, let’s talk about this thing that we call a “digital journey”, right? An organization’s digital journey. What exactly do we mean by that?
INTRODUCTION TO THE DIGITAL JOURNEY
Joe Tolod
Well, digital journey is different for every single customer. I’ll take it from a couple different perspectives because I think that’s one of the things that we do very well here at FourthSquare. Imagine that any enterprise, any company is like a bright, shiny, beautiful diamond. A diamond has many different facets and thousands of facets and they have different people working on those particular facets.
Some facets are on the complete opposite side, right? So at FourthSquare, as we help a customer, and it doesn’t matter if it’s IT, if it’s line of business, if it is the finance team, HR, they’re all working on their particular facet. Now, what we have as a talent in terms of the totality of FourthSquare and how alliances play into this is that we help that customer to understand that everybody’s working on the same bright, beautiful diamond.
Sometimes it may seem like one side is different than the other side and there’s conflicts, but our skill is walking each person around that diamond to appreciate the specifics of what the business-side is looking to accomplish, which is different than the concerns that IT has around security, reliability, backups, and all these different things, right?
So that is where we help a customer understand their journey, and no journey is a straight line. It’s always going to be a journey from A to Z. Sometimes the business users are only really focused on Z. Sometimes the IT side is still stuck in, you know, at step H. Sometimes some of the business users get a little frustrated through that journey as they try to get to that Z.
Helping them make that journey and understanding that everybody is working on the same mission, that same bright, beautiful diamond is part of that digital journey. Getting them to be more efficient, start shedding a lot of the thoughts that IT is just a cost center, but helping really show that IT is strategic and should be there on a regular basis at the table to help the business to progress, to increase revenues, to be more efficient. That’s really our mission in the digital transformation.
THE DESTINATION OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so when I think about going on a journey, I’m like, OK, we’re going on a journey, but where? Right? So what is the destination? What is when they are when an organization is going on their digital journey, in your mind, Joe, what is the ultimate destination where they want to go? What is in your mind? What is Nirvana for from a from a digital perspective for organization?
Joe Tolod
Sure, this is where if you look at what FourthSquare is and what even our logo, that’s getting to the fourth square, right? Getting to that leadership quadrant. Every single organization, doesn’t matter what the organization is, you always want revenues to go up and to the right. That’s up to that leadership quadrant. So if you look at our logo, it is getting to that fourth square where the green square is.
For every single organization and everybody eventually wants to get there, it is to the most efficient way of running your enterprise from a back-office perspective, right? Doesn’t matter if it’s financials, supply chain, HR, CX, meaning CRM or sales cloud or service cloud or all these things. Everybody wants to be running the most efficient as possible.
Now that journey is not necessarily a straight line. It’s not as easy because of the burdens of IT from the past. It’s very appropriate as we’re rolling through the holiday season. So I call it the Ebenezer effect. So you have different aspects of an organization, especially IT.
That is, IT is Ebenezer Scrooge, right? He has to deal with the ghosts of Christmas past, all the things that are legacy, all the things that are still running. They may be running on unsupported stuff, right? But he still has to maintain it. Nobody, very rarely does everybody have any sort of appreciation or, you know, it’s more of a headache in terms of costs for whatever is being maintained in the past. And you have the ghost of Christmas present.
You wonder why IT teams are a little cranky, a little bah-humbug, why business leaders are bah-humbug about the money that they have to spend. It’s because they are mired in the current problems of having to not only keep the lights on, but maintain business and help it to continue to grow.
And then you have the ghost of Christmas future where you know what? If you don’t grow, you die, but change is required in order to grow, but that’s really hard to do. So that is something that IT, as well as the business, has to appreciate in this whole journey as we get up to that leadership quadrant.
CHALLENGES IN MOVING LEGACY APPLICATIONS
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, that’s very interesting using an old Ebenezer Scrooge, an old Christmas story to kind of lay the foundation. When organizations are making this journey, you talk about the IT department and the business owners having to come together and start making some of these decisions.
When you have some of these projects, you know, along this digital journey. These are huge projects, right, Joe? I mean, you move one part and another part is going to move. So tell me, what are what are some of the challenges? Let’s take applications, for example. What are some of the challenges that that organizations face when they’re moving, say, legacy applications? You know, these on-prem applications.
Joe Tolod
Well, some of the decisions are, what is the appetite for change within the organization? And it depends on the personality of the organization itself, as well as the leadership and how they want to drive this. There is one way to go about it, which is the quickest, but also one of the most difficult ways to go about it, is to go directly to Oracle SaaS Fusion, but it takes a lot of ability to absorb that change.
To be able to slay the ghost of Christmas future and make sure that you continue to move forward so that you can grow, everybody knows that eventually everything is going to go to SaaS. That is, if we use the mountain analogy, that is the most direct way to the top of Mount Everest. So that journey, that direct journey is the quickest, but it’s also very steep and very fast, right?
And so you have to balance that out with what the needs are of the organization, what the state is of the current applications, those on-premise applications, in order to make that assessment. And FourthSquare can absolutely help out in that and understanding what is the best route for a customer to go to, whether it’s the quickest way to the top of the peak to that fourth square or a more prescriptive way of getting there. So we could help out not only in that journey. Ultimately, the end goal is SaaS, digital, AI, everything that is efficient, but there’s different routes to get there.
Some of the routes are actually doing a lift and shift or move and improve of the existing application, which is sitting on a legacy data center. But we can move that to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was purpose-built for Oracle applications for stateful, large enterprise resource planning applications, HCM applications, CX, all these different things to where you have a more efficient platform in order to put it on, as well as database cloud services that little do Oracle.
Some Oracle customers do not appreciate the fact that that is your actual Oracle hack. So you can save money not only on your current cost, reduce the complexity from a legacy data center, all the way to, you having reduce even your Oracle support costs by moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Database Cloud Services. Setting that up, OCI is the foundation of all things Oracle when it comes to cloud, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from a PaaS or database, but also for all the applications, Fusion applications run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
So from a security standpoint, it is by far superior. And quite honestly, why would you ever want to spend the money to secure or to create a foundation? You can never spend as much money as the big guys. And this is meaning Oracle or any other of the platform providers out there to secure your environment.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, we have a lot of business users, non-IT folks that tune into the podcast here. So you used some acronyms OCI. Is that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Joe Tolod
Yes, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was purpose-built from the ground up. And Oracle had recruited, and I’ve been an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure partner from the get-go, before it was even called Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. I was an incubation partner when Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was actually called, initially, bare metal cloud.
So Oracle went back to the drawing board. They had really architected OCI Gen 1 to be very similar to AWS and Azure. And it did not meet the needs of a customer running Oracle applications, meaning e-business suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, very heavy, intensive applications that are very database intensive.
They went back to the drawing board and actually asked founders and engineers from the other platform providers and said, what if you could build it better? No more noisy neighbors, no more this, no more that, all the different things that they were running into issues. And that’s how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure came to be. They built it completely from the ground up, similar to what we’ve seen in the server world.
Everything from a cloud platform perspective has continued to evolve. There’s a reason why in the server world we have an application server, a database server, a web server, different services that serve different purposes, right? Same thing in now cloud infrastructure. There are specific, and OCI is one of those, that is purpose-built for stateful applications that require a lot of database horsepower.
IMPORTANCE OF A UNIFIED PLATFORM
Kerry Boudreaux
You used another term here, and it’s always a little bit of a fuzzy term. But I really think you can shed some light on it because of your knowledge, Joe. And that’s the term platform. Now, we’re out there. We’re selling applications. And one of the big benefits of selling Oracle applications is because everything is built on the same platform. ERP, HCM, supply chain, EPM, all of those we say are on the same platform. Can you kind of shed some light on what we mean by that?
Joe Tolod
Sure, I think the better way to give a little bit of context or give some substance to what a platform is. It really is how does a company want to set up their digital core? The foundation, the groundwork, everything that everything wants to be built on, right? The legacy side of it that is where we’re coming from is that data center.
Where either you have a data center that’s internal within your own four walls, or you have outsourced that work to somebody to maintain. Those data centers are complex. You have networks, you have power, you have cooling, you have hardware, you have a lot of maintenance to that.
So part of this is modernizing to a true digital core that is simplified from a point that you don’t have to maintain those things. You don’t need to have a team that is in there, you know, monitoring the hardware itself, but you have a vendor like Oracle who can do that for you. Setting up that digital core gives you the foundation that you can build everything off of. That application will always need some sort of operating system, some sort of digital core, along with a database that stores or draws all that information to that application and powers everything.
At the last Open World, Open World 2024 that we went to in September, Larry Ellison said that data has gravity, right? So that data is what drives that application. The data that’s in that application is what feeds the organization. That’s how organizations can make their business decisions.
And ideally, with FourthSquare’s help, we not only want you to be able to make decisions from the data that you have, but also ask better questions. So those applications that you use from an ERP and HCM and EPM all rely on that and having a solid, modern digital core that you can build the next generation or that future-proofed digital landscape is what we advocate for and how we help customers to become more efficient.
Kerry Boudreaux
Gotcha. So I can see where an organization’s IT environment could be super complex if they had different applications on different platforms. For example, if they had licensing and permitting on, say, Acela. And then they had ERP and HCM, say, on Central Square, the databases could be Central Square. They could have their databases in AWS and a seller could have everything in Microsoft Azure. All of those technologies, having to manage all of those technologies, and then getting them to integrate efficiently, is that what you’re talking about?
Why don’t you take all of these applications, all of these business processes, and move them all to Oracle products and onto the Oracle platform where you only have one environment to manage, one platform to manage, and all of these applications, because they’re built on the same platform, they seamlessly integrate. Is that what you’re talking about, having the benefits?
Joe Tolod
Somewhat, I mean, that is, you can, if you can, if you have the ability to choose one vendor, that is, that’s amazing, right? But we’re, but in the reality of it is, you know, from the beginning of cloud, I’ve always called it a “Franken Cloud”, right? So we put together these, we stitched together all these different parts, just like Frankenstein. And the best thing, the one thing that is the reality and what we’ve seen out there with our customers is that many times systems are not integrated.
Many times, systems are running in their own specific silos, and then they have to determine how they move data around or what reports can be run so that you can really stitch together the information that you need. Oracle has partnerships across the board with all the cloud vendors now.
Oracle has partnership primarily with Microsoft. So you have the Microsoft-Oracle Interconnect. They now have a partnership with AWS, as well as Google, that really comes to the reality that it is a multi-cloud kind of world. So the first step is doing an assessment as to what does your landscape actually look like? What do you have? How much is on-prem? What cloud providers do you use?
What’s the business goals that you have in order to make your citizens, constituents, your customers all happy, right? Or deliver to them the services that you need. Now, many times what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of customers out there who still don’t integrate that information.
But once you are on a platform, the way that Oracle has it, you start with infrastructure on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. And then from the platform as a service, you have your databases as well as Oracle Integration Cloud that can help to put together building those bridges between those silos of businesses and applications that are there. And we’re off to the races, right? Now you can join different applications together and then determine what’s the next step. Again, continuing your journey up and to the right in order to get to the leadership quadrant, moving things either to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or using Oracle SaaS, you have now that ability to start joining everything together and making things more efficient.
MITIGATING RISKS IN THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. So I think we’ve just coined a new phrase from the way you’re explaining it. It’s the digital journey to the FourthSquare. So one last thing I want to touch on is when I go out and talk to customers, Joe, and talk about them moving off of legacy applications and legacy whatever and moving them to the next generation cloud technology.
They’re like, that is just too much risk that we are willing to take on. From where you sit, Joe, what are some of the things that an organization can do to help mitigate those risks, help minimize that risk to continue on that digital journey, know, up to the fourth square, up to that leadership quadrant that you’re calling it?
Joe Tolod
It starts with really, where do you want to find your efficiencies most? If we take it from a infrastructure and database perspective, from an IT perspective, many times IT is just mired in just keeping the lights on. Moving the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure becomes an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Database Cloud Services relieves you of the task of maintaining hardware, maintaining manual backups, maintaining everything that you have.
So it is really modernizing everything that’s been done for the last 30 years to the next to the following 30 years. Taking those low, value-added tasks and really helping to automate those tasks so that your team can do higher level or actually address their backlog, the things that they need to get to so they’re no longer in the business of keeping the lights on. Let us monitor that. Let’s move you to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, deliver to you efficient, low cost managed services because you have done that so that you can free your teams up to do that. From a business perspective, a lot of the perspective is, you know what? If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
There are a lot of customizations. There’s a lot of manual intervention. There’s a lot of updates. When tax comes around, what do we have to change and do that? A lot of the things in the legacy applications are very heavy, and you have to do a lot of development work. Moving to a SaaS application relieves you of that duty to do that, where all you have to do is really review what the new changes are in the tax code, in this, in payroll, all of that presented to you for you to review so that now you become a reviewer instead of a developer, and you can go ahead and move forward efficiently to get those things done so that you can close the end of month faster. You can run your reports better so that you can actually layer on Oracle EPM, Enterprise Performance Management, or other tools out there to be more efficient.
So it’s really about automating less value-added tasks and elevating your team to be able to address the things that they really want to address and their backlog, the things that make them happy and actually excited to come to work as opposed to doing mundane tasks.
Kerry Boudreaux
In life, we tend to stay where we are in order for us to avoid change. You know, when the fear of staying where we are surpasses the fear of moving forward and making a change. That’s when we change. That’s when we change our behavior. And I think of this when people come to us and say, you know what, the risk to move is just is just too great. Well, what about the risk of staying where you are staying status quo? When does that risk outweigh the risk of moving forward, that’s when people will change and start moving on their digital journey to that to that fourth square. Is that fair to say is that?
Joe Tolod
Absolutely. What we, think, I think our talent and the way that, you know, the authentic nature of FourthSquare and everybody here is our curiosity, right? We want to bring that curiosity to our customers to constantly be curious. Sure. Could you still do the same things the same way that you have? Absolutely. But It’s never going to resolve the current problems that you have.
We would rather move forward and be curious about the problems that you have and what can we do to address either anyone of those. Right. And it’s not one set answer. It’s really more of what is this? What is how do we solve the problem that is in the right pace for the right change for your organization. It’s really about where we want to be.
You know, a lot of times in IT, they won’t do anything unless they have to, unless it’s coming to end of life or end of support or that it’s necessary, right? But what we want to encourage is at the rate of digital disruption, of the rate of technology advancement, especially with AI, especially with all the new tools, right? How can we help you to be curious, but be curious in a safe environment.
How do we help you to make sure that you can do things at your pace, at your budget, without being concerned about the number of resources that have to be put onto this or taken away or that you have less resources? We’re curious about your organization and we want to help you to discover or understand how you guys can get better.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, that’s awesome. One of our one of our core mantras here at FourthSquare is we take a 360-degree view of you, the customer. And I’ll tell you what, Joe, you have really illustrated that fact that that is truly what FourthSquare does. And you know, again, I’ve seen you work with customers and you do that more than anybody else.
Joe, thank you so much for spending time with us and not just sharing your time, but your vast knowledge of what we do and how we approach our customer engagements.
Folks, thank you for joining us here at the FourthSquare Solutions podcast. I’m Kerry Boudreaux, and we’ll be back in two weeks. From all of us here at the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, until next time, continue to ask yourself, how can you transform your business through technology and innovation? Take care.
If you’d like to learn more about FourthSquare and the services we offer, click here to contact us. You can also call us at (972) 919-6135. We’ll be happy to speak with you.