Highlight of Madrid SAPPHIRENOW 2011 – meetings with Snabe and Sikka


I am sitting in the flight back home from Madrid, and reflecting on what were the most interesting highlights of the week I spent in Madrid. I am pretty convinced it is the meetings I had with Vishal Sikka and Jim Snabe. Parts of the meeting are under NDA, so I cannot discuss it here.  But that is not the point – despite some execution issues which SAP faces in my opinion, I think the leadership of people like Vishal and Jim is pretty critical for SAP to get their strategy to action.

Vishal is not a large company CTO type – he has the energy and passion of a start up guy. This is a guy who shuttles around the world talking to different teams at SAP, and directly engaging with Customers on a regular basis.When I met him in Madrid, he said he is there only for 20 hours or so. And then in a couple of days, he had to go to China for Teched keynote. And once he started talking – he was like the “energizer bunny”.  I truly wish I had that kind of energy, and I don’t know how his team deals with that 🙂

He does not hold back – he is candid to a fault, and it has been a big learning opportunity for me whenever I get to meet and talk with him. I do not agree with some of his ideas, and I do agree with some. But irrespective of my POV, I always admire the honesty in his position. There is no sugar coating – what you see is what you get.  But then again, it is not just his personality alone that makes him successful – he hired some really good people to work for him, especially on HANA.  Where I think he could do better is to get SAP’s development army to keep pace with him.

I also had the good fortune to meet Jim Snabe twice – once for dinner (here is a photo http://img.ly/afEe ) with few other bloggers, and once again the next day with fellow SAP mentors.  I was quite impressed with how much he listens to feedback, and then builds up on those ideas.  He is one of the most balanced C level executives that I have ever met, although I am forming my opinion after knowing  him only for a short period. Jim does not challenge people per se – he challenges ideas with open ended questions.  And when he explains the rationale – it is very structured, and you can immediately make out that he did not just make something up on the fly. He can also relate to the history of SAP better than most other SAP leaders , which is a unique characteristic which is quite valuable.  And he acknowledges and thanks people when something comes from the other side of the table, that he has not thought through himself.  Last but not least – If I were in Jim’s shoes, I doubt if I would have gone out for dinner with a bunch of bloggers the night before SAPPHIRE keynote 🙂

Unlike Vishal, Jim grew up in SAP. But despite the difference in their backgrounds, I was quite pleased with how they could both explain SAP’s value proposition and future clearly, albeit in 2 rather different ways.  Same destination – just two different roads.  Having also watched Bill McDermott in action, it is kind of interesting that the three top leaders at SAP all bring unique, but complimentary value to the table.

I am looking forward to meeting both these gentlemen in future, and continuing the great conversation.

Redbull migrates BW to HANA – I am suitably impressed


SAP allowed some of us bloggers to interact with Christian Stoxreiter of Redbull. They just finished migrating their BW system to HANA. We will see him during Vishal’s keynote tomorrow I think explaining in more detail. I am a big fan of Christian now after he made the comment “We want to be dynamic and flexible, but we are NOT stupid. I know the difference between marketing slides and actual technology limitations”.

 

There is a lot that impressed me with this .

 

Redbull has been an SAP customer for 11 years. They have ECC, CRM and BW. The BW system which is 1.5 TB in size was moved to HANA platform and now the data size is 300 GB. What is even more impressive is that 200 GB out of this is in row model, which means once the data models are rationalized – it will get even smaller.

 

It took just 10 days to migrate BW to HANA. Of course this included working night shifts and all, and had the best of SAP techies on the job. The relationship between SAP and Redbull has been at board level from SAP, with Vishal Sikka being involved directly.  But even then, that is quite a short period to pull this off.

 

Redbull did not see a big improvement in query performance because they were already using BWA.  Moreover, they found that HANA does not have all the features that BWA gave them. But they think this is ok, because SAP is commited to working with them to put in features in future revisions of HANA. However, ETL performance improved in some cases from 50 minutes to 2 minutes.  This is a big value add for them since their total ETL time to get global data from 39 countries to a single BW instance was 32 hours or so.

 

Redbull thinks HANA is a great investment for them. They are not doing HANA for just BW alone. They want to influence SAP on Trade Promotions Management on HANA. They also have key areas in ECC where they want SAP to make things better. Redbull thinks they can influence SAP due to the first mover advantage. I think they are thinking smart here – sounds like a good strategy to me too.

 

Redbull’s BW on HANA is running in parallel to their disk based BW system now, and there is no clear answer yet from SAP on when they can put BW on HANA as stand alone without running parallel. But apparently that decision will be taken by next Monday on the time frame. Redbull is fully aware of limitations in HA/DR etc, and made an educated investment and they believe that it will pay off in spades down the line. I think this is pretty smart of them since it is a product that is gaining rapid market share ac, and will face an information explosion. My making an investment now, they will be well placed to concentrate on business without worrying about handling all the data that comes in future, including unstructured data, social media feeds etc.

 

Redbull has a clear vision for ECC running on HANA in future, with no aggregate tables etc. Again – smart in my opinion, since this is key to get SAP to create cutting edge new innovations on the core.

 

I have been fairly critical of SAP on several aspects of HANA. But this one is different – and I am glad to say SAP did an excellent job, as did Redbull. Good luck, and I am eager to see how BW on HANA will evolve. Maybe we will get more in keynote tomorrow.

 

 

SAP SAPPHIRE and Teched 2011 Madrid, Tuesday – HANA, BI 4.x, Netweaver et al


My day started with informal discussions on future of BI products. Mobile BI is of course a no brainer next big thing.  Question is how is SAP going to tackle this? Webi is by far the most commonly touted mobile BI client. Xcelsius has the flash limitation on iOS, and even on Android – not all controls of Xcelsius work that well. Some time next year, when an Analysis client for mobile goes into ramp – there is an option to generate HTML5 layouts. If SAP does a good job on this, I would bet that this will start Xcelsius on its death march. Xcelsius is a great tool – but popular opinion is that it is not scalable for thousands of users. I have seen few hundreds use it, but not thousands. So I personally don’t know, and am willing to stand corrected. I will ask around more while I am here.

Next up is a question of how to best make dashboards etc out of ECC.  The big limiting factor in my opinion is that universes do not work on top of ABAP data dictionary. And if you go directly against the tables at SQL table – you will lose out on security, semantics and most probably will violate licensing agreements with SAP and the DB vendor.  The smart thing for SAP to do will be to allow universes to be built on ABAP data dictionary. This could single-handedly give an explosion to licenses sales for BOBJ. Any one listening  at SAP from sales side? To check out – I spoke with Adam Binnie, the GVP for BI. Many thanks to Andrea Kaufmann for finding some time for me with Adam.

There is no solution now or on roadmap to solve the flash compatibility issue. Adam said SAP team is checking on this in a research mode. It is not an easy problem to solve – there is a huge userbase for whom a disruptive solution might be painful to the extreme. Plus SAP has a limited option on a problem between Adobe and Apple. Nevertheless, SAP owes the world a solution for this somehow.

Although I feel SAP has not given Xcelsius the love it needs in near past, Adam thought otherwise. I think the disconnect essentially is that whatever is driving the product roadmap, probably is not very well integrated with the ecosystem. Adam said he will look into it, and that by end of the year he plans to put some concrete actions in place.

On the universe on top of ABAP data dictionary issue, it did not look like a priority for SAP. Adam thought this might be because multiple semantic layers (as in ABAP DDIC, and Common Semantic Layer from BOBJ both) might be against SAP’s design principles. Again, he agreed to check with his team and give me an update.

Of course no day passes in SAP land for me sans a thought on HANA.  if we fast forward to future – the big big thing is ECC running on HANA.  Is this the final frontier?  I am not too sure .  Over the last decade or two, SAP has made a lot of DML optimization already. Standard Business Suite behavior is to select once from database, hold it in memory – and then do all kinds of business logic in ABAP. So you could select a million records, filter it to hundred thousand with logic – then take it through Authorization checks to find what will pass, and end up with 10 records. If this logic is not rewritten completely – how much of benefit will SAP get by simply putting the tables in memory?  And think of the re-write – can you replace the ABAP logic with a bunch of database stored procedures ? Can you find a clever way of passing authorizations to hana at database level and not let ABAP do it? Will this mean HANA gets an ABAP interpreter? Too many complex issues to be solved to make it work efficiently.  So I raised this with SAP’s Deputy CTO Sethu Meenakshisundaram and a member of his team, Frank Samuel. Here is what they had to say.

SAP has a vision on how this would work going forward. The key to that is building a good foundational meta model in HANA that can represent the business objects in ABAP. Once DDIC, Security etc are modelled, then a standard API set can be used by ABAP and non-ABAP systems to do complex processing with HANA. But given the sheer amount of work, this will take some time to complete.  A consistent set of user friendly APIs is a tall ask for SAP in my opinion, based on what I have seen in past. Maybe they will do better this time.

Jon Reed brought up the question on multi-tenancy in the meeting. And I had posted this question on my blog earlier. I was quite pleased that Sethu had read my blog before hand. So according to Sethu, HANA is built as a multitenant model, except it is not used as such. Apparently, this is a simple thing for SAP to flip the switch. This is very different from what I have heard before, and I mentioned it to Sethu. He agrees that communication on HANA needs to improve from SAP’s side to minimize confusion. In any case, SAP not only needs to flip that switch, it should also build apps on HANA that are multi-tenant. And Vishal should mention it in his keynote to make sure the world is not confused, unlike what happened with ORACLE. BI OnDemand is a good start in this direction, and I expect more such things to come up in next few years

SAP has a grand vision on how the in-memory platform will help business. And i truly like what I heard. Sethu thinks Supply Chain is an area where SAP can do wonders with this, and I agree.  S&OP for example is an area where I have heard many customers request more of SAP. However, vision and execution needs to match.  SAP’s execution on HANA is not exactly stellar so far in my opinion, but I guess they will get there soon enough.

Next up was a meeting with Bjoern Goerke who is the Corporate Officer in charge of Technology and Innovation Platform at SAP. As always – a terrific meeting. I asked the same question on HANA multi-tenancy to him. His answer was more tentative than the one I got from Sethu – “not now, but we are working on it, and will get there soon”. While he agreed on the need for a good meta model on HANA and a framework for all the aspects like security, user provisioning etc – he could not give out any time frame for it. “One step at a time” was his answer. I respect that, although I think these are all things SAP should get out to the ecosystem as soon as they can. Technology should not be a huge limiting factor here – ABAP DDIC itself is stored in tables, and parts of this concept is already in use by other parts of SAP like BW replication etc.  SAP should do all they can to improve speed to get these things out of labs to the ecosystem. I asked Bjoern if BOBJ universes will be built on top of ABAP DDIC, and did not get a clear answer.

I did provide some feedback that HANA studio is not exactly a fine artwork, and got some assurance that it will improve constantly. SAP is moving all the developer studios to eclipse, which is the right thing to do. ABAP on eclipse is already available to see in the booth here. Apparently 7.3 Netweaver is doing great, and has 300+ live customers.  A lot more info on neo and ByD etc were discussed, and between Jon Reed and Dick Hirsch – I bet they will post their views after the meeting.

I would be terribly remiss if I did not mention this – Stacey Fish and Andrea Kaufmann from Mike Prosceno’s team deserve big time kudos. They are not only super helpful, they also try their best to give us as much information as possible so that we can form a more educated opinion before we blog. If they worked in my team, I would be writing performance bonus recommendations for them now. I cannot thank them enough