And Vijay Says…

I didn’t get a lot of sleep past night – maybe 4 hours . And as I am on to my third cup of coffee this morning , I had a short twitter conversation on the ever green topic of strategy and execution . I couldn’t help post a few random thoughts

I did learn some strategy stuff in business school. It was ultra boring then – and it is ultra boring now . I am only dinging how it is taught – not the idea of having a strategy itself . Countless hours were spent debating mission, vision, strategy, and the like in those two years . None of that helped me one bit – heavily academic stuff .

The first time I started having a sense of strategy and execution being aligned was when I had to hit a hard target in IBM . One year of doing that taught me more than all those books and debates till then. It is quite simple – the best and most viable strategy is execution .

My conspiracy theory on the reason of this misalignment is as follows

A big reason people can’t deal with execution is because they get rewarded in early school life for the steps they take to get a solution for a given problem . If those steps appear to be right – you get a pass , even if the final answer is wrong . The other lesson from school – which is more recent , and it was not the case for my time in school – is that “everyone is a winner”. After 12 years of this indoctrination – I wonder how anyone can survive in corporate world .

Real life seldom rewards the steps – only the outcome matters . My teams past and present have yelled and screamed at me for saying effort doesn’t matter, only results do . And almost everyone of them have thanked me for taking that stance consistently . Hard work that doesn’t lead to desired outcome does not come with a pleasant prize . Same deal with “everyone is a winner” – what a bunch of bull . Every one is not a winner – in sports or in life . Get over it the soonest you can .

There is no such thing as “Strategy was awesome , but execution sucked “. That can also be said as “that was an awful strategy set by people who had no idea how the world works”. Strategy and execution are distinct only because of the time dimension – you need a strategy in most cases before you execute. But the moment the execution starts – there is no distinction , and these two things should converge . Based on feedback from execution, strategy should evolve . And when they converge this way – there is just execution .

People who consider strategy as key and execution as stuff beneath them in organizations needs to think why the big boss is called “Chief Executive Officer” and not “Chief Strategy Officer”.

This is how I view it – Strategy people get direction from the CEO. The non-PC way of saying this is – execution rules, strategy drools .

Dennis Howlett posted this today and was the first thing I read today morning.
http://diginomica.com/2013/09/25/user-experience-trumps-technical-excellence-gartner-bi-reports/
He and I also had a quick google hangout on this topic – and I thought I might as well add a few comments here.

First – Customer Experience and Technology Excellence should not be looked up on as mutually exclusive things.
For short term, they can be mutually exclusive – but certainly not for mid to long term.
They are both needed for a viable solution – BI or otherwise.

Second – I have no arguments that new generation BI tools focussed heavily on CX and were amply rewarded for that by customers directly, and by investment community indirectly. Valuation of these companies are many multiples above incumbent vendors – as a ratio of market cap to revenue. And rightfully so – they opened up a new battlefront and used that advantage to the fullest. I applaud them.

Third – For a second, I don’t believe that this is detrimental to incumbents. The big companies have work to do to up their innovation game – and from what I see, that is being taken care of already. Even better, at least where I work – there are serious product plans on leapfrogging over the new competitors and disrupting their game. of course it all depends on execution – but I am betting on good execution this time.

Big companies have many things going for them – large footprint of loyal customers and partners, steady revenue (yes, including maintenance ), large R&D and sales force and so on. Smaller companies don’t have these luxuries. But on the other hand – these keeps the smaller vendors very focused on execution.

Four – although there are a few cases where new vendors are replacing existing vendors, in most customers the new solutions are strictly additive. They continue to use their classic systems because they are rock solid – and for the last mile usecases, they resort to the new tools. Large vendors of course would like to get a part of this action too – and have their work cut out.

Five – Analyst reports like Gartner MQ use aggregate data. With larger vendors, there is always the risk of the older technology being the larger part of their footprint. When customers on older versions get interviewed, they can only answer based on what they have. What was great CX last decade probably sucks this year. And this will skew the data in awkward ways for the larger vendors. No on-premises company can force upgrades down a customer’s throat. SaaS vendors have a definite advantage on this front.

There are a few more, but time is up and I have to run to my day job and make a cool new announcement 🙂

My introduction to SQL was learning Oracle 8.x around 1996 or 97. And since that time, I have heard about Larry Ellison. Interestingly – that is around the first time I heard of Hasso Plattner too . Till then I only knew of 5 IBM engineers being the founders of SAP. I have deep respect for both the gents – they have a lot in common, despite having such different personalities. Of course I have only seen Hasso at close quarters, not Larry. Having worked at IBM for many years, I also have the greatest respect for the DB engineers and researchers there.

When SAP entered DB market seriously with Hana – my first thought was that it was a terrible idea. DB is the stickiest part of the stack at customers. I also remembered being tutored in IBM by the sales leaders that if you own the lowest levels of the stack – like HW, OS , DB and middleware, you own the account for ever. What I did not know at that time was that SAP’s plan was not to be yet another DB vendor – they wanted to change how DB works fundamentally. SAP wanted to play offense in a game that had moved on to heavy defense as the winning strategy. That is not just a sales and marketing thing – it needed a level of engineering that is extremely sophisticated. I was sufficiently convinced that SAP had a real chance of changing the market – and I bet my livelihood on it.

IBM is a great place to get trained in enterprise software. I learned from my first year there that all competitors have to be respected, but none should ever be feared. Competition is the best thing about this industry – keeps everyone on their productive best. Few months ago, IBM came up with DB2 BLU and now ORACLE has come out with 12c. I think both are good moves and both companies will use it to try and negate the impact of SAP Hana. And this is great validation of SAP’s strategy to change how DB should work. What is also not too surprising is that Oracle and IBM chose incremental steps to find some common ground with Hana – rather than go all out. For one – this fits well with their strong defensive strategy of protecting existing instal base, and two it needs a level of engineering that takes more time than what they had since they realized SAP made the right bets. But all things said and done – still a good move that is positive for the enterprise software market.

I give Oracle full marks on messaging – I thought it was absolutely brilliant to say “don’t need to change anything, just flip a switch and reap the benefits of in-memory DB”. That is a simple and elegant message. And it is not trivial to come up with such good messages. It is very easy to understand and appreciate at a high level. Nicely done.

Ellison did say many things in his keynote that Hasso and Vishal from SAP have been saying for years – why RAM is faster, why columnar DBs work better and all of that. All of which are good statements, and he has the credibility to say these things about databases. He definitely was in his elements talking about databases – and I enjoyed watching it. It was also a nice change of pace from the opening act from Fujitsu.

SAP Hana is fast and it is in memory, and it is column based – and looks like 12c does all of this too in some way. But that is just a fraction of what makes Hana special. SAP views Databases very differently from Oracle. HANA is a full fledged platform – which supports all types of processing with one copy of data . Not only does it store data in memory and in columns, it pushes down processing closer to data – and reduces the number of physical layers needed traditionally in an application. It has built in libraries for predictive and statistical functions. It has built in app server and web server. HANA can seamlessly integrate with other big data systems like Hadoop. That is a long winded way of saying – a database can and should be so much more. SAP showed it can be done in one system without needing to club together many different applications – at multiple productive customer projects, not in some proof of concept labs environment.

Oracle could have done a lot more – but chose to just do only very little. I am sure they have the engineering brilliance to do more, and a sales force who could have made use of such innovation. That is disappointing for the techie in me – and I hope they do way more in future and push the envelope on what a DB can do.

I was also kind of confused on why Oracle chose to do Column and row stores with multiple copies of data (unless I misunderstood what Larry said in the keynote). Enterprises already can’t deal with the many redundant copies of data – why would you add to that problem with a “modern” solution?

I have more questions – why is OLTP faster now ? What is the behavior of the system when it starts up ? What happens when there is not enough memory – will it use disk ? What happens when an app needs data in rows and columns ? How much of DBA effort is needed – how smart is the system in deciding what goes into memory and what does not? how much does this “switch” cost a customer? and many more. I am hoping that more details will be available through the conference, or in the weeks that follow. I am hoping there are good logical answers to all of these details.

There were two general types of questions on twitter after the keynote – will be now see a Hana vs Oracle bake off on speed ? and will 12c slow down hana deals and put pricing pressure on hana ? I think both are genuine questions worth asking .

If 100X performance is all 12c is capable of, then we probably won’t need to do any bake offs. There are enough customers who have way more performance gains with Hana than 100X. In any case – raw speed is only one part. What you do with that speed is what happens – and Hana has applications purpose built to exploit the speed – using the other capabilities in Hana like predictive and geospatial cpabilities for example. And given the head start Hana has over 12c, it is hard to imagine Oracle catching up in incremental steps like it seems to be doing.

On slowing down deals and pricing pressure – I have no idea given I don’t work in sales. Nor do I make sales or pricing decisions for SAP. However, from past sales experience – I think this is a factor of how well Oracle and SAP can educate their customers on the technology options. I will definitely be curious to see how it plays out in market. Customers do not buy on technology merit alone – I know that well. Given Hana grew pretty fast and has thousands of customers in last 2 years, I doubt customers will have any issues in seeing its value proposition.

Oracle is a great competitor and will not just sit back and watch hana eat its lunch – as an engineer, I just hope that they bring in some serious innovation to database technology, to back up its messaging. I will be the first to stand up and applaud if they do that. And for SAP, I am sure the intention is to continue to try as hard as we can to maintain and increase the lead on innovation front.