Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending IvaluaNOW, Ivalua’s bi-annual user conference in Chicago. It follows closely on the heals of its other user conference, IvaluaNOW in Paris, which it held in early April. Founded in 2000, Ivalua provides cloud-based strategic sourcing and procure-to-pay solutions to enterprises to drive source-to-pay digital transformation tailored to fit their unique needs. Ivalua has more than 450 employees working out of 13 offices on five continents, and has headquarters in Redwood City, California and Paris, France. It currently manages more than $500 billion in annual spend for its more than 300 global customers, and it boasts a customer retention rate greater than 98%.
On Day 1 and Day 2 of the event, Alex Saric, Ivalua’s Chief Marketing Officer, welcomed to the stage renowned magician, technology extraordinaire, and mononym enthusiast, Moulla, for augmented-reality based magic. At first, Moulla’s presence on stage seemed more theatrical than in keeping with the themes of the event, which were #LoveProcurement, and “The Art of Procurement.” But like all good artists, Moulla wove theatrics into substance. He gave the audience a live, in-the-flesh demonstration of the magic of augmented reality — of the power of using cutting-edge technologies to blur the line between the digital and physical realm and make 1 + 1 = 3. And his magic spoke to the duality of business technology — to its promises and illusions, and how the best technologies make it difficult to tell the difference.
Google search “Moulla” and “umbrella” and you’ll find what is essentially his opening act from Day 1. Picture this: Moulla stands in front of a dark and wet forest projected onto a screen, huddling and shivering as it begins to rain. Suddenly an umbrella appears — he reaches for it and, voila, he seemingly pulls it from the screen behind him. And then another appears, and after chasing it away, he pulls it back and into the physical realm. Now he has two umbrellas. He repeats the act once or twice more. How did he do it? I don’t know. I know that he couldn’t have possibly pulled the digital umbrella from the screen into a physical facsimile. Did he pocket these umbrellas? Were they suspended in place from the stage? Were they taped to the screen? I don’t know (and please, no one tell me — it’s better in my head).
Moulla then played a card trick on us…but not any card trick we’ve ever seen. He went to another projector on stage, placed his hands flat atop it, and a digital deck of cards appeared. He began to scatter them across the screen and then asked for audience participation. One lucky fellow was asked to visually pick a card on the screen and keep it a secret. Moulla “shuffled” and then stacked the deck, and then pulled a hard deck from the screen. In the deck, all the cards were facing up, except for one card. Moulla asked the gentleman which card he selected (the 10 of Hearts). To everyone’s suspense, Moulla flipped over the card to reveal…the 10 of Hearts. How did he do it? I don’t know. Did a deck of cards suddenly emerge from the screen? Did he have one up his sleeve? And how did he pick the guy’s card and then isolate it from the deck? The fix was in from the start; I just don’t know how.
On Day 2, Moulla raised the stakes of his acts. He pulled Ivalua CEO, Dan Amzallag onto the stage and asked for his brand new iPhone. Moulla inflated a balloon, pressed it against the phone and then let the air out, causing the balloon to encase the phone. Moulla did this ostensibly to protect the phone from what he was about to do to it; but realistically this was probably what military and intelligence personnel refer to as denial and deception. Moulla then pocketed the iPhone in his jacket and pulled a hammer from his bag. He asked Dan to confirm that it was a real hammer by banging it on a table. Moulla then pulled Dan’s phone from his pocket (or did he?), and then after some playful banter about whether he would or wouldn’t, Moulla promptly smashed Dan’s new iPhone.
Upon review, the phone had some life in it. To finish it off, Moulla placed the phone in a blender, asked an audience member to pick a number between 1 and 10, and when that audience member yelled out “Five!” Moulla set the blender to five, pulverizing the now definitively deceased iPhone. Then it was picture time. Moulla cajoled the wary CEO to take a picture with the audience using a facsimile of his old phone that now was projected onto the screen. After the picture, Moulla implored Dan to adjust the size of the ginormous iPhone on the screen down to life size, and then suddenly, from the screen appeared his iPhone, unscathed and fully functional. And on that phone? All of his apps, and the picture that he had just taken with Moulla and the audience.
How’d he do it? Well, I’m no magician, but it’s reasonable to assume that the phone Moulla encased with the balloon either was not Dan’s phone to begin with, or was switched under cloak of the balloon with another phone. Moulla probably had the sacrificial phone marked, or had a separate pocket from which he pulled it. The picture? There were cameras on the stage, and it was likely transferred in the cloud between devices, like Dan’s iPhone. I still don’t know how the phone got “back” to him…probably the same manner in which Moulla scored all those umbrellas on Day 1.
Final Thoughts
Moulla’s acts were not about procurement or supply management, but they were about the magic that technology can perform today — both real and illusory. Augmented reality is blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds — between what’s real and what’s projected on screen. Blockchain distributed digital ledgers, cloud computing, and connected devices are connecting those two worlds — taking physical objects and mating them with permanent, unalterable digital records that follow the object wherever it goes. Artificial (augmented) intelligence is applying advanced algorithms to trillions of bytes of data, making sense of it, and putting data to work for us — the way it should be.
Advanced technologies like these are, in a very profound way, allowing knowledge workers to relegate robotic work to robots, and rediscover their own humanity in the process. That is the essence of business technology — bringing humans closer to their true selves and realizing their full potential. There is also a lovely paradox to it all: there are often complex explanations for how technology works, and for those that know what’s behind the curtain, it may not seem so magical. But for many others, what they see is unknowable, but totally believable; and it is nothing short of magical.
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