May The Bridges I Burn Light The Way – I am Joining SAP !


First things first – I am not really burning any bridges 🙂

“Burning bridges” is usually construed as a negative thing – but I mean this in the most positive way. To move forward, I need to let go of parts of my past career. I will also be reusing most of what I learned so far.

That being said, after seven years of working in the global SAP consulting practice at IBM – today I have submitted my resignation to my manager. I have accepted the role of Global Vice President at SAP Labs, and will be working in The Technology and Innovation Platform team (known to friends and family as TIP) , which is Vishal Sikka’s Board area. Words cannot adequately express how happy and excited I am to join this amazing team.

I have been thinking about a change in my career direction for a while now. I decided about 6 months ago that I wanted a change from a traditional consulting career, and move to a software company. SAP of course was a natural choice given I have worked in that field all my life. To my delight, Vishal offered to hire me with IBM’s concurrence. I owe a lot to John Leffler, my boss at IBM, who was totally supportive of me moving to SAP. I am extremely lucky to have a mentor like John. I decided to stay in IBM till end of 2012 to finish all my commitments here, and start the new year at SAP. January 7th, 2013 will be my first day at SAP.

IBM has been an awesome employer for me. I had a lot of diverse assignments, and worked in 3 continents in my tenure there. My last job as the head of forward engineering was probably the most rewarding. In this role – my team and I were able to take cutting edge innovations from SAP and IBM to our customers. I will miss working with Gagan and the gang, but I am sure I will have an opportunity to partner with them in my new job too. The three biggest lessons I take with me from IBM, as I step into SAP are
1. Talent only wins games, Teamwork wins championships .
2. One needs multiple mentors to have a rewarding professional life
3. Investing in ecosystem relationships is the smart thing to do

Details of my new job are still being worked out – but the general idea is to SAP scale its innovations, and reach a large number of customers and users. My dream is for SAP to be able to run a victory lap someday in foreseeable future with a slogan “Earth Runs SAP”. I strongly believe SAP has the potential to touch the life of majority of the world’s population every day in some form in a few years. Between its smart employees, loyal customers and its extensive ecosystem – I think this is a goal worth attempting ( and for my cynical friends – I’ll add, OR DIE TRYING 🙂 )

I do plan to continue to post on this blog as usual. As you probably know – I blog about pretty much anything that takes my fancy – software, music, food, sports, politics, economics – they are all fair game. Hey, I might even write something about IBM from time to time 🙂

Right out of college, till now, I have always worked for an SI. I have never worked for a software company before. So a part of me is worried whether I will add enough value to SAP. But then, this is an area I know well for many years, and I am still a hands on techie ( for the most part, that is . I am sure someone in my team might contest this notion ). And I know a lot of people at SAP, including several who work in TIP. So I know who to call for help, and I am never shy. So the other part of me thinks I can come up to speed reasonably quickly. I will keep you folks posted on how I manage.

I have been considered an SAP influencer and blogger for some time now. Obviously Mike Prosceno has to kick me out of his program now. It will be fun to see my blogger colleagues on the other side of the table going forward. Knowing them as well as I do, I don’t expect them to cut me a lot of slack with their questions 🙂

There are a large number of friends at SAP who gave me generous amounts of their time in the last couple of months, as I bombarded them with questions on how various things work at SAP. I can’t thank them enough. I am not going to take any names – but you know who you are, and please know that I am very grateful for all your help and guidance.

Last but not least – many thanks to my friends and mentors Vishal Sikka, Abdul Razack and Sanjay Poonen for the opportunity to work in their team. I truly appreciate that.

Wish me luck !

Give Peace a Chance, Please


The song and the singer needs no introduction to most people, so I am not going to attempt that here.

I was busy at work when my wife asked me if I saw the news of the CT school shooting incident. I hadn’t – and I checked internet. And ever since, my mind has been anything but peaceful. Watching twitter and Facebook, it is apparent that most of the world is in shock as well – as it should be. I cannot rationalize in my mind why anyone would do this, especially to little kids.

Personally, I don’t support civilian use of guns. However, I do understand that it is a constitutional right in this country. And I am not an expert on the nuances of interpretation of the second amendment. So these thoughts are just based on my observations, experiences and beliefs, and in no small way influenced by me being the dad of a 7 year old daughter. This is a multidimensional problem – which needs an array of complimentary solutions. I have no claims of having any kind of comprehensive solutions in my mind – but for what little it is worth, I would like to mention a couple of my thoughts on this topic here.

Banning guns altogether is not practical for foreseeable future- although I personally don’t like civilians owning guns. I don’t own guns – but have several friends who own guns. I respect their decision . There might be legitimate reasons to have guns – like self defense in ones home, shooting as a competitive sport, or for licensed hunting etc. As long as users of guns are trained in its use, and guns are kept safely locked – it probably is ok (not ideal, just ok). Also, there is no good reason for civilians to own semi-automatic and automatic guns . These should be controlled severely.

Given how much we value privacy in this country – it is next to impossible to verify if gun owners are being responsible with gun ownership or not. All I can think of is more awareness, education etc leading to self policing gun ownership. In the long term, I hope the education system can influence the next generation sufficiently that they don’t all feel the reason to buy guns. This education is needed not just at schools – it needs to be reinforced at home, and every where else where it is appropriate. As demand for guns reduces, supply will adjust itself. Banning guns altogether will not help the situation at all in this country in my opinion – since that is just an incentive for black markets to flourish. Keeping purchase of certain guns as legal, but reducing demand for guns by education and awareness is about as good a practical solution as I can think of.

A good example of effective gun control is the situation in Japan. But since our situation is not comparable to Japan in many respects – what they did in Japan might not work here. But please do read this article to see how good it gets when there are not too many guns around. A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths

But that is only one part of the issue. Guns are not the only way to do serious harm. In can be debated whether other means like knives etc are as damaging as guns . But the point is, if you take away guns – there are always other ways that a mentally disturbed person or a criminal can use to inflict a lot of harm on us. So – we need some way of identifying and helping such people, and keeping them away from stuff that they can use to do bad things. This is way harder than controlling guns. But without such a social solution to go hand-in-hand with gun control – we will probably not have a comprehensive solution.

May be government has some role to play to help us live in peace – but I think this will be much better accomplished by people deciding for themselves. Maybe social media can help augment the message, or at least foster a good debate that will lead to people making up their minds for good, and acting positively before another awful incident happens.

Lets keep the victims of the CT shooting incident in our thoughts and prayers. And a big salute and huge thanks to the brave staff at the school for what they did. And I hope the media and everyone else respect the privacy of the grieving families.

If Innovation Doesn’t Scale, How Do Vendors Ensure Mass Adoption ?


Few weeks ago, I posted my thoughts on n whether enterprise software companies can scale innovation . I was thrilled to see the quality of debate that this post started – with Thorsten Franz, Michael Bechauf et al jumping in to offer their POVs.

So my next question is – if you cannot come up with innovation after innovation, how do you ensure that the few that have real potential have massive adoption ? Adoption is what makes or breaks software. This is especially true for larger SW companies because they have to make up for the big overheads to remain profitable, keep the lights on existing stuff, and invest in new things. In no particular order, here are a half dozen ideas that come to mind. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but just random thoughts that have been in my mind for some time. Please chime in with your thoughts

1. Evangelize – but more holistically than today

This is easier said than done. Not everyone makes a good evangelist. Evangelists for SW have to cater to different parts of the ecosystem – developers, customers, partners etc. SW evangelists can use some models that seem to work in the world of religion. Evangelists do not preach to the choir – that is just a waste of effort. They are constantly trying to go from place to place and spread the word to people who have not heard the message before. Once people show sufficient interest, the trick is to make sure they don’t change their mind. But the evangelist – who is used to taking extreme stances for good effect on people who need a big leap, are seldom the right people to preach to the already converted. Otherwise, they will run the risk of many of the newly converted ones being put off by their efforts. So there is a need for someone else to take over and keep a steady influence on people who have shown an interest. Compare this to religious groups who meet once a week, and a priest talks to them in a language toned down from the one that evangelists use.

This second part is by and large missing from software evangelism. And I think that is affecting the way adoption is happening, especially with developers. Developers need to be evangelized a few times to get them excited, but if there is no follow up – they will drift away to the messages of the next evangelist.

2. Limit POCs that cannot scale by definition, after the first few are done

When new software comes out, you of course needs a bunch of customers to use it for high impact use cases. And by definition, these POCs are way too specific to be reused elsewhere. There is no way around it – it is a necessary evil in the grand scheme of things. The trick here is to make sure customers don’t look at these as science projects that can shut down the moment vendor team walks out of the door with declarations of victory.

These projects need to be tried out in limited numbers with your most loyal customers. But – set up expectations clearly and for the long term. Agree on what the customer will reasonably need to see for calling the results a success. And then make sure it means – if it is successful, they will take it to production.

This needs some organizational adjustments on vendor side. The black belt warriors who do crazy good POCs seldom have time or inclination to make reference architectures, maintainable code etc. Forcing them to do these will only decrease their efficiency. So I would expect a follow on squad to take up the job of making the project “production quality”, and build as much reuse as possible.

3. Don’t be penny wise, pound foolish – use the ecosystem

Enterprise software companies thrive on ecosystem – so use that to your advantage. No one company can hire enough people to do everything by themselves. There is always a tendency to think that you can make more money by trying to do everything yourself, especially when large amounts of money has been sunk already into products. However, this comes with the risk that adoption will slow down quite a bit. If business is shared with ecosystem partners – you can grow the pie, instead of dividing a small pie into really small chunks. Again – easier said than done. It takes strong sales leadership to take that long term view.

4. Talk where the action is

Existing customers have only so much budget to go around. And existing developers are already fond of you – so they are not running away in a hurry. So – rather than try all the new innovations on the existing base and build up an echo chamber, try to grow the base. This is very very hard – since there is the fear of the unknown. Recruit from places you have never recruited before. Hire consultants from areas you have never hired before. Attract new customers – even if they are only a tiny part of the revenue stream.

5. Software is a game of needs, not a game of wants.

Get better at portfolio management. This is a big problem for enterprise companies – they cling on to everything they ever created. And on top of that – they try to be everything to everyone. When there is only limited budget to go around – why is it that companies try to spread it really thin?

6. If you have money lying around, try financing your customers

Economy is in bad shape. Very few companies want to spend money now – they would rather wait for things to turn for the better before they let go of their purse strings. But if vendors are cash rich – try offering some financing to your customers who have good credit ratings. Not only can you move more product, you will also make some money from interest. Some companies already do it well – but most do not.