Social Media In Marketing – Is It Too Much To Ask For Peaceful Co-existance?


While I have no claims at all to be a social media expert – I am an avid user of social media, especially twitter, Facebook and my blogs on SCN and WordPress. All of this week, I have been on vacation in the island of Hawaii – and although I kept away from work email (ok, except checking email couple of times on day 1), I was on twitter and Facebook when time permitted with hardly any “guilty” feeling. Social media never felt like “work” to me so far – and that has now changed.

I was both pleasantly surprised, and also pretty dismayed by what I saw on social media this week.

First about the surprise – when we drove up to Hilton Waikoloa for starting the second part of vacation, I was told I could not checkin for a few more hours. I have been a VERY loyal customer with Hilton, and have had a diamond status with them for several years. So I felt this was unacceptable, and I said so on twitter from my iPhone. To cut a long story short – I got a response in almost real time from Hilton customer service via twitter and then email, and got checked in pretty quickly afterwards. And then the customer service guy checked in again one day later to make sure I am treated well. I am totally happy with this – and needless to say, I will remain loyal to Hilton going forward too. In short – social media was pretty freakin awesome.

While we were having a lot of fun enjoying our little vacation , Oracle Open World was happening in San Francisco,CA. Since I was on and off twitter, I kept on getting infrequent updates on what was happening at the event. It was all rather low key till Larry Ellison took a swing ( rather small swing too, in my opinion, considering what the man usually does) at SAP HANA. Now, obviously SAP did not need any complex predictive analytics to figure out that Ellison will say something in his keynote about HANA.

Next thing I knew – twitter was ablaze with that news. The response from SAP was quite good in the beginning. Vishal Sikka, SAP Board member and CTO, wrote a very good blog on why Oracle is wrong about what they are saying, and why HANA is fundamentally different in architecture. Steve Lucas got interviewed by Business Insider on this topic too. Personally, I thought that was not the best medium for Steve to make his first response, but it was an ok article in general. Both Vishal and Steve sent a few tweets too. All was good till this point, and I did not pay much attention on twitter stream for next several hours.

And when I returned to the hotel room that evening, for the first time since I started using twitter, I felt that following only a relatively small set of people ( 186 as I am typing this) was actually a nuisance. My whole stream had like 90% hana content. It was mostly SAP employees pulsing existing HANA articles (including some of mine) and videos using the Oracle Open world hash tags of #OOW and #OOW12 . Some of the people who pushed out hana content at crazy high frequency are people who in the past have never done such a thing.

My first impression was ” Oh boy, SAP is in panic mode” and then ” This is a centrally organized offensive play – I am curious to see how far it will go” . And this is where my dismay at social media set in.

In fairness to SAP, obviously they had to do something to counter Oracle’s false accusations. And social media being a nascent tool in marketing toolkits – I doubt there were any established “best practices” for this type of social media defense (or offense depending on how you look at this, I guess) for SAP to use.

SAP is considered by many inside and outside the company as an expert in social media. So when SAP does something, I think it probably gives the impression to others that this is “best practice”. That comes with the “halo effect” attached to leaders. And if SAP should continue to be viewed as leaders in this space, they should seriously consider if this is how the future of social media should look like , especially in the context of marketing.

My own opinion is that SAP handled this in a rather heavy handed way. Looking at it with a quantitative lens, probably SAP got the results they wanted. They took over a good part of the traffic with hash tags #OOW and #OOW12 with HANA content. They clearly did a lot more than just story correction. As much as social pundits might enjoy the idea of marketing and corporate communications using social for more things – I think the net result is just more overhead for people who use these platforms, and event organizers. The need for sophisticated filtering just got more important and troublesome, in my mind.

But from a qualitative viewpoint – it looked rather tasteless to me. Taking over someone else’s event tags – especially using sponsored tweets, while that event is in progress is borderline bullying, and that is not what I expected a company like SAP to do. SAP has a long history of being on the right side of these things, taking the high ground. When excessive reaction happens – it just gives an impression that panic has set in. There is absolutely no need for panic – HANA is clearly superior to the EXA* products in what it does.

So far I have personally not seen any customer backlash – but then I have not seen or talked to any customers this week. Next week, I will be meeting several, and then much more the following week at Teched. It remains to be seen how customers view SAP’s social media onslaught.

Unlike SAP, Oracle does have a reputation of taking hard and aggressive stances on these issues. However, apart from a handful of tweets etc, I did not see Oracle trying to return the favor to SAP in real time. Of course it could be argued in two ways.

1. Oracle chose to focus on their own event, and chose not be bothered with SAP reactions.

2. Oracle had nothing to say, because SAP so comprehensively beat them on the topic.

I have no idea what was the real reason, but my instinct is to believe that Oracle, and other SAP competitors might now feel that it is totally fair game to target SAPPHIRE and SAP Teched events and try to take over the social media conversation around those events. SAP has multiple events coming up in the next few weeks – so we will know soon enough which way Oracle will go. I seriously hope Oracle will let it pass this time, and not try to respond in kind. It is not just Oracle – SFDC, Workday et al are all possible competitors who might choose aggressive social media strategies against SAP. For their part, I also hope SAP will resist the temptation of spending significant time at their events responding to Oracle and others, and just focus on their own stories.

Failing which, my back up plan is to take a break from twitter for a while. I used to think till last week that not checking email frequently will kill me. A week of vacation proved me wrong,so I am betting I will survive for a bit with out twitter too 🙂 .

Added http://aragonresearch.com/vendor-wars-customer-events-and-twitter/ This is what Jim Lundy of Aragon Research had to say about this matter. A good read.

After Larry Ellison Keynote, I Can’t Wait For SAPTeched 2012, Las Vegas


SAP Teched is just around the corner – about 2 weeks from now. The timing is also perfect – since SFDC and ORCL would have finished, and SAP will need to explain why it has a better strategy than competitors, without sounding defensive or reactive. After seeing the tweets from my pals who attended Oracle Open World, I am all the more curious about SAP messaging at Teched.

For the techie in me – SAP Teched is the ultimate event.For one, I can walk around without wearing a tie and a suit. Second, I get to hang out with a lot of techies way smarter than moi and learn from them. Last time in Madrid, Thorsten taught me River in 2 hours – may be less. This time around, I will be trying to get smart on Netweaver cloud – just need to figure out if I should bug Mattias Steiner or Dick Hirsch to be my teacher. And finally – I am always excited to hear what Vishal Sikka has to say in his keynote.

I am typing this from US Airways Flight 45 to Kona, Hawaii, for a week of vacation. The last call I had before we took off from PHX was from Vishal. He is never short on passion for what he does. And consequently, he never ceases to amaze me. He has a clear vision of where he wants to take SAP on technology front, and has never once been annoyed when I have given him some candid feedback. And one of the things that seems to be foremost in his mind is making sure SAP has a comprehensive platform strategy, of course powered by HANA. I expect to hear a good story from Vishal on platform direction in his keynote.

There are 3 things I expect to hear at Teched with respect to platforms . I already touched this subject in more detail in my last blog https://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/sap-needs-a-better-cloud-and-platform-story-and-a-good-story-teller/

1. Is SAP’s platform strategy primarily inside out (protect the turf) or outside in (open to the world to do what the larger market cares about) ?

2. SAP historically has been a product company. What is the future? Is it aspiring to be a platform company or continue to be a mix of product and platform?
Both are valid and can co-exist – but SAP does need to express what is their priority for next 5 years or so.

3. When SAP did the netweaver messaging back in the day – it morphed from a big fascinating “change the world” type thing to “it is a good way to package today’s and tomorrow’s SAP products”. How will SAP avoid a repeat of this mistake?

The challenge for SAP is to build a platform story that does not sound like boiling the ocean, as Vishal himself says. And SAP needs to be specific. As Jon Reed would no doubt attest, at the last teched we could never get a straight answer from SAP executives on whether HANA supports multi-tenancy or not. And today, ORACLE went ahead and announced its DB is going to be multi-tenant. This is a big deal if your intention is to attract cloud providers to build on your platform. SAP needs to make sure its messaging and technical abilities don’t have a big gap between themselves. Multi-tenant database has some advantages in my opinion. It should at least in theory make it easier to build apps on top, and provide faster access to data than letting applications abstract in a layer above the database. There are of course architectural differences between ORACLE and HANA, but if those are not to an extent that a customer cares, then it practically won’t matter. Larry Ellison did not seem to tout any business use cases as far as I could tell from the tweet stream, so that is definitely an area SAP can outshine Oracle.

Outside the platform – I am keen to see if there is any further news on SAP’s database ambitions. ORACLE is a good example of a company who is in a financial sweet spot because it controls a fundamental layer in enterprise software stack. If SAP manages to get control of that share, it will be brilliant for them. But I am not going to bet on that happening unless there is a larger platform play that ecosystem buys into, and DB just happens to fit into it. I do expect SAP to come out with a larger number of HANA customers – I am guessing 700 +/- 10%. Any more than that will definitely make their competition sit up and take notice in my opinion.

As far as I know, SAP has no stated hardware ambitions. I am not convinced SAP can become a big cloud player without a HW play to go with it. They also need a more comprehensive datacenter consolidation/integration story to be taken seriously as a cloud player. I doubt this will change in Teched – but I really think SAP should consider it seriously

If the Ariba deal closes and legal teams allow it, I would like to hear how SAP plans to make use of its amazing network. I will be disappointed if Ariba is treated as just another cloud business. It might need to stand alone for business and organizational reasons, but I would expect to hear a platform unification or integration story.

Integration is a hard topic to deal with,to say the least. SAP will probably charge for integration, and not everyone will like that. We recently had a friendly debate on this on twitter. Customers generally do not always attach sufficient value to anything that is free. And SAP only have themselves to blame for getting customers used to huge discounts on list prices. So when a customer buys 2 SAP products and wants to integrate – should they pay extra? or should SAP just bake the price into other software? On principles of fair play – I think making integration free or very cheap is the right thing to do when both sides are SAP products. But I would guess that SAP sellers will probably throw in the integration as a deal sweetener to make the customer buy. So may be it all works out the same in the end.

Mobility has a similar challenge. Why charge extra to expose an existing application through a mobile device, when customer already pays for backend systems ? It is a nuanced discussion – due to the arbitary nature of defining what is existing and what is new. The answer varies between POV of customer and SAP. On the bright side, SAP does have a good strategy on MDM with Afaria. The rest of it just needs to evolve some more. But they are getting there at a fair clip, with Sanjay Poonen and team leaving no stone unturned. Pricing is much simpler to understand now too. I would really like to see Sanjay up on stage during one of the keynotes to explain the future of mobility.

One final thing I am keen to learn from SAP is the progress it has made with developer and start up initiatives. Without these succeeding – there is no point in having a platform to begin with. I know there are multiple people trying to make it work at SAP – and from outside looking in, I am not sure I always understand how everything fits in. It doesn’t matter really to me – as long as there is some concrete results to show.

I will close out this post with something I wanted to do for a while – a BIG shout out to Mark Finnern, the herder-in-chief of SAP Mentors. The Mentor program is not perfect – and Mentors will be the first to admit it. But we are all unanimous in our opinion, I believe, that without Mark doing what he did/does/will do – we probably won’t be as effective as we are. If I were in Mark’s job – I would have gone crazy a long time ago. SAP should be incredibly proud to have Mark as an employee.

SAP Needs A Better Cloud And Platform Story, And A Good Story Teller


This past week, there was a 2 day influencer event in Palo Alto where SAP explained (or tried to explain) its Cloud, Mobility and DB&T vision to about 16 of us. SAP paid for my airfare and hotel and ground transportation. Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish – you are the best at what you do.

We started with cloud on Day 1 .  Cloud session was led by some of the smartest people I know in SAP, yet it did not go as well as I expected.  None of us in the room seemed to understand what the cloud story really is even after SAP tried a few times. As a technology fan, it did not matter to me that SAP had a sub par performance in the same week as Dreamforce was happening, but I am not sure if everyone else in the influencer gang look at it that way.

Sanjay Poonen and his team did the best job at the event when it came to explaining SAP strategy on mobility. I would say Sharron Ruddock, the COO for mobility, deserves special mention for  how well she explained mobility pricing. Steve Lucas and team took second spot – a close second I should say – with their HANA and DB&T story. And cloud brought up the rear.

If I travel back in time, when SAP execs were pitching ERP to customers, it was all about the business needs that ERP solves. It was not based on ABAP and Basis that a sale was made (which I felt bad about at the time, since I made a living as an ABAPer).  Fast forward to cloud era – and the whole conversation started with technology. Isn’t the whole idea about cloud that we don’t need to worry about technology as much as before?  SAP missed the boat on this one, and should try to revise the story line before their next attempt at Teched and SAPPHIRE.

It is not to say technology vision is less important – it is vastly important. But technology does not serve a purpose without tangible business benefits. If SAP has to succeed in cloud – it needs a VERY strong play as a platform.  This is also where that old DNA question comes to mind again. SFSF has the DNA for cloud based Apps without a doubt. But has that acquisition helped SAP inherit something useful for platforms ?  If it has, then someone needs to point it out, I did not see it.

There were a few highlights that definitely caught my attention. My friend Sethu, who is the deputy CTO at SAP, explained to things that are important.  The most important one is that SAP should not have multiple platform pitches – like mobility platform, analytics platform, Neo platform and so on. There should be  just one SAP platform going forward – which unfortunately does not have a name yet. Sad to say – this important memo did not reach the other parts of SAP in time. We got great explanations of mobility platform and Netweaver cloud platform right after Sethu told us there will only be one platform. The second thing that caught my attention from Sethu was that SAP is aiming for a unified semantic layer for everything that works on SAP platform. This is a much needed aspect of the platform story, and I am waiting to learn more about this.

SAP also has a good integration story that Nayaki Nayyar explained. I had met her once at Madrid last year, when we co-judged innojam before SAPPHIRENOW there. Cloud integration is critical to SAP’s cloud and platform future, and Nayaki explained that there is an integration technology they developed called Netweaver Cloud integration , and that it has two components – PI on demand, and Data services on demand.

The integration concept is webservices based. That is good – I get that, but that is not to say it completely reduces integration costs. It still needs harmonizing security, data, IDEs, and a consistent way to meter the services and components.

I am not fully convinced of the integration story on cloud. To begin with – I am shocked SAP positioned it as Netweaver brand. I don’t know a lot of clients who think of netweaver as a best in class integration platform. And calling its components as PI on Demand and Data Services on demand just gives the impression that SAP just repackaged something to make a new offering. Nayaki clarified that it is not so – and that it is all brand new.  I am sure I have said it before, and will say it again – without an acquisition story to go with it, I doubt SAP will have credibility in market with an integration story.  There are a variety of acquisitions possible based on what SAP can afford from TIBCO to snaplogic.

There is no MDM on the cloud from SAP in this whole cloud integration story. So essentially, one of the existing transaction systems will need to be treated as the master for the data that integrated systems will play with. I am sure this is just a matter of prioritization for SAP on where to invest for short term. While this is ok in convincing bloggers, I am not sure this is a good story to tell customers who typically need a longer term roadmap. Not having an MDM on cloud story makes it harder for them to buy into this integration strategy in my opinion.

I liked the analogy that Aaron Au used (he is the SFSF CTO, and a very friendly guy) of how Amazon evolved from “it is all about the shopping cart” to “shopping cart is just a small part, and only used to close a transaction” to explain how SAP is looking at User Experience.  It is probably the best explanation of Systems of Engagement concept that I have heard from SAP till date. What did not happen unfortunately is that SAP could not tie this example to their products and strategy in a coherent way.

Rainer Zinow was articulate as usual on the ByDesign side. I finally understood the thinking behind Financials on Demand. It is good to know it is not exactly carving out financials out of Bydesign. In fact nothing is carved out – just some parts are activated and others kept inactive. And the business case is mostly the ability to do Mergers and divestitures faster, by moving those entities to the cloud solution first.  That is a story I can live with and I see value in it. I did not hear a ByDesign for Large Enterprises story – maybe I missed it, or maybe there is no such thing. In any case, I think ByDesign and B1 ( Richard Duffy is an excellent speaker I might add)  did not get sufficient coverage in this event.  At least there were no surprises.

I don’t recall anything earth shattering in terms of bold new use cases for cloud. May be the intention was to set the foundation with this meeting, and make the big announcements at Teched or SAPPHIRE. Or maybe I missed out the transformational message when it was mentioned. In any case – there were heavy weight cloud experts in the room with me amongst the influencers, and one of them might explain that part better.

Sameer Patel could not present his vision for social and collaboration in the event proper, but he took time at lunch to educate me on that. I am duly impressed – and it is a grown up version of how social and collaboration should work in enterprises, and it puts it in the context of business processes where it belongs.  Sameer gets the prize for the best elevator pitch of the day.

There was a slide shown at the end of the meeting, but put under NDA – which is kind of sad, since that was the best part of the story. Maybe the next time around, they should start with that picture and work back to the technology issues and solutions. I know it sounded cryptic – but I respect SAP’s reason to put an embargo.

Bottom line – SAP should do some serious homework on unifying the theme of their cloud story . Knowing many of the people involved in this, I don’t have the slightest doubt that SAP will get its act together quickly. It is not to please us bloggers that they should do it – if they don’t do this in quick time , there won’t be much attention from their customers who are getting better messages from other vendors. HANA will run fine for SAP for another year with no issues – but without cloud and mobility picking up pace big time, SAP might not live up to big ambitions of its leadership team. And as much as the story is important, SAP needs to find a good candidate from inside the company or outside to say that story clearly to the world.

This was way longer than I expected when I started the rant here, and I am sure I missed a lot of points. But given my day job needs me to to run back to my customers 🙂