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Welcome to Protocol | Enterprise, your comprehensive roundup of everything you need to know about the week in cloud and enterprise software. This Monday: why enterprise tech firms are so eager to help with the vaccine rollout, Christian Klein on his tough road ahead transforming SAP and the new skirmish in the open-source community.
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The global vaccination effort is proving to be just as difficult as everyone predicted — but name a software firm, and it's probably trying to help.
Even setting aside the challenges of actually shipping and storing the temperature-sensitive treatments, each state in the U.S. is managing its own distribution efforts, creating a patchwork system that complicates nationwide tracking efforts. Compounding that problem, issues with the underlying data are sending health officials in places like California, Texas and Virginia scrambling to figure out just how many people have been vaccinated.
What's startling is the scale of what's still to come: Right now, just a small segment of the world's population is being dealt with. Expand it out to the nearly 15 billion vaccines that will need to be administered across the globe over the next year, to people who need to be tracked to know who has received it, and the world is facing "the greatest workflow challenge of our time," according to ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. It's why the company is launching a new product to help enterprises and governments manage the task:
The products will be improved over time, a reflection of the sense of urgency to get the systems out into the wild as soon as possible.
Part of the reason for deploying these tools is demand among corporate clients for a central system to oversee the vaccination status of their own employees, ServiceNow GM Mike Luessi told Protocol. It shows that, while the early vaccine rollout has been a government-led initiative, enterprises also anticipate a need to manage it internally.
The business opportunity here is evident. You can tell by looking at all the other enterprise tech firms that have moved quickly to release new products to help aid in the COVID-19 response.
Will software emerge as the ultimate savior when the dust settles on the pandemic? Probably not. But that's not the ultimate goal for the providers: Instead, the pandemic served as a major leap forward for the industry more broadly that could prove lucrative for years to come.
It's nearly impossible to envision a scenario where these ongoing digitization efforts don't continue, if not accelerate, for some time yet. And that's music to the ears of sales teams across the software industry.
— Joe Williams
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
Trouble in open source: Elastic ramped up its feud with AWS, taking Elasticsearch and Kibana off of the permissive Apache 2.0 license and forcing AWS to fork the two projects. Legal experts think there may be a trademark case to be made, but whether it's worth the trouble remains an open question.
The German renaissance: In one day, Christian Klein became the sole CEO of SAP and a father (the latter, for the second time). That sort of trial-by-fire is something he's got to get used to: Klein has a tough road ahead in transforming the software vendor for the cloud era, but he has a strong vision and some early wins under his belt.
Uphill battle for the Alphabet union: The Alphabet Workers Union represents just 710 of the company's more than 200,000 employees in the U.S. That's a big problem, Anna Kramer reports, as recruiting additional members could prove challenging.
Fourth-quarter earning announcements are already in full swing, but things ramp up for the software industry this week.
Jan. 26: Microsoft and AMD earnings
Jan. 27: SAP CEO Christian Klein hosts "RISE with SAP," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins speaks at Bloomberg's "The Year Ahead" conference, ServiceNow earnings
Jan. 28: Atlassian earnings
Jan. 29: SAP earnings
Oh, and a little request: Send me any hot takes or research notes, as well as any noteworthy upcoming events that you know of, to include in future newsletters. I'm jwilliams@protocol.com.
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
Thanks for reading. We'll be back with Protocol | Enterprise on Thursday.