2012 looks likely to be a good year for SAP Business Analytics, as long as it works on iPad


As always, I started the year picking my customers’ brains on what they would like to see happen in 2012 in their companies.  I also checked in with a few colleagues to make sure what I am hearing is not isolated. These are all long existing SAP shops. I will restrict this post to discussions around BI to keep it brief.

 

It is kind of funny that every one of them said BI is top priority, and that they won’t do it anymore unless it worked well on iPads ( I hope they meant tablets in general, but literally they all said iPad) .  One executive mentioned he does not care for iPad and that he needs his information on iPhone.  Ease of development and deployment are pretty high on the agenda. I pointed everyone to Steve Lucas’ blogs right after I read it. I have not checked back for reactions yet.

 

Since I know the future of Xcelsius is a hot topic for my friends on twitter, I probed a little on that topic. Surprisingly – no one seemed to care a lot about Xcelsius itself working on iPad. They know the flash issue, and they all think SAP will do something to get them mobile BI. No one seemed to think SAP will just kill Xcelsius in a hurry either – they all firmly believed that if it were to go away, it will be a while later, and that they can migrate over. One CIO said – “I couldn’t care less about any given tool – all I need is good clean up to the minute information to show up for my users on their mobile devices. How a vendor makes it work is their problem, not mine”.

 

For a change, I did not have to tell any one about HANA – instead, customers have now started picking my brains on HANA.  Today, after the SAP news on 160 million euros coming from HANA came out – I had 3 calls back to back from customers who wanted to do HANA. These are all people who shied away last year – and now they think it should have matured enough to give it a try. 2012 should see some significant traction on HANA – especially with BW .  So far no one has told me they want to do a production BW on HANA, but they are willing to do POCs. That is not abnormal – most of my customers are significantly risk averse.

 

I was not surprised to hear the interest in BPC on HANA. I first hand know of customers who did not do BPC due to performance reasons. And now these folks are all happy to do POCs on BPC running on HANA the earliest they can.

 

But none of it is exactly new – more or less these just confirmed trends that I (and probably everyone else) knew and predicted. What was new – practically the first time customers actually brought it up seriously with me – is collaboration on BI.  Many of them went through budget cycles recently – and complained bitterly that despite having had BI and planning solutions for ever, they still needed a lot of excel spreadsheets and manual intervention to make it work.  And if I understood correctly – what they disliked most was the inefficient collaboration within the organization when it came to adhoc activities in planning.  As one exasperated friend told me last week at the airport  “if it is this hard to collaborate with people you see and talk to daily, is it any wonder that our vendors and customers find it painful to deal with us?”.

 

One BI manager and one controller  brought up “actionable” BI. The point was fair “SAP and SIs have all told me for years about actionable BI. But till date I have hardly seen any actions that directly originate from BI” .  Closed loop BI needs to get out of white papers and blogs and into customer sites – it is about time.

 

So I guess 2012 is starting on an optimistic note on SAP Business Analytics front – but we just need to make sure all the stuff works on iPad 🙂

 

Indian Cricket – living proof that money does not solve problems


If money solved all problems, Indian cricket team should have been unbeatable for at least the last decade.  The game is a religion in India, and brings more money to BCCI, the players, the coaches and so on. I was amazed at how many cricket academies have cropped up in India since I have lived abroad. But Indian team is far from unbeatable, despite huge amount of money available in the sport. And despite loss after loss outside India, I and billion others like me follow the game closely.

 

We do great in one day matches usually, but the real deal is Test Cricket – and there we do horribly. And it is about time to act on it with a long term vision.  We did it once and rose to the top of test rankings, but could not stay there. When West Indies and Australia ruled test cricket – there was no doubt they were going to be there for a while. With India, even a die hard fan like me did not get such a comfort feel.

 

I am just a fan – and a below par player even for club level cricket.  I have no experience in cricket administration either. But it does not take a genius to see what plagues Indian cricket. But if I were king for a day in Indian cricket administration – these will be the problems I will tackle upfront.

 

1. No investment in fast bowlers

 

For as long as I can remember, no team has won test cricket without multiple fast bowlers.  I grew up watching India struggle against the fast bowlers from West Indies (except a few like Gavaskar).  And we could not return the favor when India bowled – Haynes ,Greenidge , Lloyd, Richards etc feasted on our bowling. When we had fast bowlers, for the most part we had just one who was genuinely fast in any given team.  Every few years some new sensation would show up – and thanks to mismanagement and over exertion over too many games, they either disappeared – or they dropped 5 yards of pace.  After West Indies, Australia took over world cricket. And they had terrific fast bowlers.  What was the difference between Australia compared to India and Srilanka?  All of them had worldclass spinners in Warne, Kumble and Murali. They also had quality batsmen in all three teams. But India and Srilanka only had one or two fast bowlers at any point, where as Australia had several to choose from.  And with those fast bowlers – Aussies could bowl out the opposition twice in a test in any surface. And India and Srilanka needed a spin friendly track to bowl out anyone twice.

 

Fast bowlers need to be nurtured from school cricket. Question is – will BCCI make an investment to find talent impartially, and then nurture them for a decade ?

 

2. Too much cricket, with very little planning and preparation

 

Ever since Mark Mascarenhas won the TV rights for 1996 worldcup, cricket has not been the same. There are way too many matches played, with hardly any time spent for preparation. Most series starts with poor preparation matches. And since Modi did the T20 thing, it has gone from bad to worse.  More players are now unfit than ever before, and in a country where cricketers are worshiped on a pedestal – selectors will not dare to drop any one on basis of  fitness. With the type of money involved, no cricketer will follow the “volunteer to take rest if you feel you need it” dictum of the board. BCCI should space games, and plan series better. Remember all those empty seats for matches in home series in 2011? That is a good indication that viewership will also decrease if this does not change.

 

3. No career management and replenishment system for national team

 

Australia showed us how to manage the career of cricketers. England proved now that they can adapt that. But not India. No one ever gets shown the door in India for a drop in performance.  If Steve Waugh played for India, he would still be playing.  Look at the ageing stars like Sachin, Dravid and Laxman in Indian team. Collectively they have more runs than most other teams in the world. Yet they cannot win us series consistently abroad by themselves. And it is painfully obvious in Australia that they won’t last much longer.  After Sachin finishes his 100th 100 – what else will he aim for? He is good to go for couple more years since he has stayed away from several matches to conserve energy. The other two will probably have a year or less. But who will replace them? When will the replacements get chances? Will India play Dravid and Sachin and Laxman down the order to give newbies an opportunity to try batting higher?

 

4. Poor infrastructure to nurture the next generation of national players

 

Can we begin to compare domestic cricket in India to that in Australia or England? If we cannot match it, at least will BCCI proactively get stints for promising young players to play in England or Australia for few seasons?

 

Domestic cricket is in a horrible state in India – and it has been that way for ever. We have pathetic pitches, and terrible outfields for most of domestic cricket. A player that comes up through that system cannot be expected to know what to do when balls come at them at 140 KMPH chest high.  The good thing is they learn how to tackle spin very well – and Indian batsmen have outplayed Warne and Murali many times in past. Our young quickies will not learn how to bowl in fast wickets either. All around – we lack good infrastructure for the next generation to get relevant experience.  For a board with such hefty bank balances – why is this a problem. If not to invest in cricket, why does BCCI make money?  And with what confidence will selectors decide to pick some one based on performances in such pitches?

National Cricket Academy was a brilliant idea – but poorly executed. It has just become a rehab center for injured cricketers. That is an important function, but that is just one of the many factors.

 

There are several more things, but I just needed to get this off my chest. It has been painful watching Indian team suffer through the last several tours they made outside India.  But despite all of that, I am and will be a loyal fan 🙂

Some Reflections On Blogging


As I took  time off in December, 2011 (which probably would not have happened if I did not have an enlightening set of conversations with Dennis Howlett)  – I had an opportunity to reflect on a lot of stuff.  And one of it was on my blogging.

 

I am a sucker for numbers ( Pls don’t hold it against me – I do BI work for a living) and I started by analyzing the stats in wordpress. I started this blog in 2009 December (I think I started an SDN blog a year or two before) , and a whole 104 people read it that month.  In December 2010, I had 3423  hits and in December 2011 I had 2740  hits.  I chose December to compare because it is the slowest month with a lot of people spending a few hours each day away from their computers and mobile devices when they are awake.  I wrote about 50 posts in 2011 – which correlates nicely to the number of weeks I had to fly (I write most posts during the plane rides). The numbers satisfied me ( apparently, I am not very hard to please) on quantitative front, so I thought I should check the quality too. And I did not come away happy this time ( ok so maybe I am a wee little hard to please).

 

As I read through what I wrote over the last year, it became pretty clear that at least 20% of the blogs were lousy. That is time I will never see again, and neither will the folks who read those rants.  Another 20% does not look balanced to me any more. And in the remaining 60%, I felt comfortable that I offered something useful.

 

At this point, all kinds of “consultant like” thoughts started forming in my mind. I narrowed down from a fairly large list to the following causes

 

1. English is not my first language.  Although I had to learn English at school in India, and have been living outside India for a dozen years – I constantly feel it is very difficult for people to understand what I am trying to say.

2. I don’t have enough experience blogging. I started late compared to most people, and probably have not developed a style that works yet.

3. I don’t think through all aspects of an issue before expressing my opinion on my blog.  I do this because I am not very patient, and also because I fear my blog will look like a white paper if I over think it. Forget readers, I will just have to kick myself if I read such a blog.

4.  I don’t have enough breadth of knowledge. My primary topic has been Enterprise Software, with a specific focus on SAP. I have done a little bit of other things too but not as much as I have done SAP. So there is a good chance that I am not making valid points in several cases where I express my opinion.

5. I am making opinions based on experience with large enterprises alone. For some reason, in all my jobs so far – I have had to deal with really big companies.  While that is useful, I do not have a good grasp of the smaller companies directly. What I know about the smaller companies is second hand information I have gathered while doing project reviews, few sales proposals etc. I have not “lived” the life in the SME space.  So when I make generic statements, essentially I am not generalizing enough due to my large enterprise bias.

 

So my plan for 2012 is to do the following

1. Try to avoid blogging on impulse whenever I can. I got some valuable input from Jon Reed on this – so I am not going to totally avoid the impulses, but will give my posts a little more thought than I have so far. ( Err..Excluding this one post I am writing – allow me to slack this one time)

2. Spend some more time reading and commenting on other blogs. I did read a lot last year, but probably did not comment as much and contribute to the conversation

3. Try other media to express my opinions other than the long form blog posts

4. Gain some exposure on parts of Enterprise Software that I am not familiar with . And I will try hard to hide my lack of interest in gamification and social blah blah till it works at some customer I know of.

5.  Gain some exposure to customer segments I have not focused on so far, and continue to “live” with customers.

6. Learn from eminent analysts and bloggers and develop my style as much as I can.

 

I know me better than you know me (I think) ! So I am fairly sure I will not succeed all of these 🙂  So lets see how it works out for me.

 

Happy New Year ! and Happy Blogging !