SAP Teched 2011,Bangalore – Big stage, Big expectations


SAP Teched Bangalore has already  kicked off with the innojam on mobility theme. I am not there in person, but several friends are, and I am getting near real time updates 🙂 . I was seriously thrilled to see that SAP expects more than 10000 people to show up for the event. I am guessing that one day soon, we will see SAPPHIRE in India too.

 

First off – SAP could not have chosen a better focus than mobility for this event. Brilliant !  Every time I go to India, I am amazed by the proliferation of mobile devices there. Almost every one I know there has 2 mobile phones – and most now have a smart phone. When I visited my parents last month, the vegetable vendor from whom they buy regularly showed me his new iPhone. Without a doubt – India  now has the largest pool of SAP developers. Some of the smartest SAP mentors live and work in India. And it has a growing economy. It is an ecosystem ripe for SAP to influence big time – and mobility is the path of least resistance.

 

I know HANA is where SAP has the most focus these days – but in my opinion, it will be a lost opportunity if SAP lets HANA overshadow mobility messaging at Bangalore. However, just talking about mobility alone is obviously not what SAP needs to do – SAP needs to show how this vast ecosystem can participate in getting this strategy from philosophical levels to execution levels.

 

India might be a great HANA market too with the boom in retail, banking etc – all high volume, real time data sensitive sectors. I expect to see Vishal’s key note showing how Indian businesses can make use of HANA . But what is also required is for SAP education to step up their game and get access for developers in India to get smart on HANA very quickly.

 

Today morning on twitter, I had a brief interchange with Vishal Sikka . I tried to get Vishal to consider delivering part of his keynote at least in Hindi. Vishal said he will consider it. And it was great to find out that his mom taught Hindi. Given that the intricacies of India’s future was discussed in Hindi before millions of people by the leaders of Independence movement 60 years ago, I am confident the intricate message of SAP’s future can be expressed in Hindi before ten thousand people with sufficient impact. Now of course I know regional languages trump Hindi in most parts of India. However, I feel that Vishal delivering a part of his keynote message in Hindi  – may be with English translations in video as Dennis Howlett suggested – will be pretty powerful, and well appreciated by the audience.

 

I feel terrible that I have never been to a Teched in India, and will make every effort to attend it next year.

 

Good luck, SAP – I wish you the best in getting India all excited about your solutions.

SAP HANA vs ORACLE Exalytics – My initial thoughts


I was in Dallas this week for some training, when ORACLE announced Exalytics. Here are my initial thoughts for whatever they are worth.

1.  In terms of vision – I think SAP scores.  SAP has clearly articulated how HANA will evolve, and they have stuck to their guns. ORCL roadmap for exalytics is not exactly clear, and since they also have exadata and others exa-systems probably coming up – they need to more clearly articulate near term and mid term roadmap. And while they do that, SAP can always tell the world that it is a validation of SAP’s strategy.  However, not all my buddies agree that SAP has the right to call in-memory as “their” strategy

2. Legacy : Both SAP and ORCL have old technologies to “draw inspiration” from . ORCL had timesten/Oracle RDMBS etc to learn from, and SAP had TREX/ P*time /MaxDb/IQ to learn from.  Despite jabs at each other that it is old technology for the other guy – neither side has a great story to nail the other in my opinion. If anything, Oracle has more DB experience than SAP – but whether the RDBMS experience is useful for in-mem computing remains to be seen.

3. The talk on collapsing layers etc – I already wrote my view on this last week https://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/is-collapsing-layers-a-good-thing-help-me-understand-please/. So I am not going to rehash all of it.

4. Product introduction to market : SAP used SAPPHIRE and Teched to lay out their HANA story. OOW is a huge stage – and ORCL did well to use it to bring this out.Both companies used CEOs to do it, and I think SAP did an all around better job. From using social media to its advantage – I think SAP hands down beat ORCl to it.

5. Response to each other’s product :  Larry poked fun at Hasso when HANA came out. SAP returned in kind via tweets and Forbes advoice. Here – in my opinion, SAP did not do too well, especially in the Forbes advoice. In general, I think the usage of Forbes advoice does not do SAP any favors. Today morning I read a similar blog from Aiaz Kazi on SDN, which was much better.  The flurry of responses from SAP – tweets, advoice blogs, videos etc gave me an impression that Oracle touched a raw nerve.   ORCL barely mentioned SAP – they seemed to be targeting IBM and HP mostly, but SAP seemed to be the one who reacted the most. There was no need for such a hurried reaction – one statement from Vishal or Sanjay, and then a more thought out response from Bangalore or Madrid events would have been more effective in my opinion. But then, I am not a media or marketing expert .

6. Throwing hardware at the problem : if high performance is your big goal, then every layer should be owned by you. Otherwise, you cannot optimize equally for 5 different hardware offerings – even if all 5 are superior HW than Oracle’s boxes.  I buy into the argument that being open adds flexibility, but there is then the trade off for cost of integration and efficiency loss.  If cloud is where you want to take this to eventually – then it is all the more important that you own all layers – not just for technical reasons either.  So I won’t ding ORCL here – I think they are smart to integrate everything into a true appliance. SAP’s appliance concept is more loosely defined – software from SAP and HW from a partner.  Good thing is that I know customers on each side of the camp. So both models will sell – question is how many can you convert from the other side to yours.

7.  From a datamart perspective – I don’t see any big difference between Oracle and SAP. Either one can fit that.  So for current version of HANA, the only advantage for SAP is that they moved first. It won’t be difficult for ORCL to catchup and compete. But this is table stakes. Other than for branding and marketing reasons – I don’t think either company is betting the farm on data mart scenarios bringing in the next billion dollars.

8. Oracle has a cash cow DB market  they need to protect. HANA is going to threaten with taking away a small install base – the BW customers running ORCL RDBMS. And then SAP will go after a bigger install base – Business suite customers on ORCL. The current announcement does not protect ORCL in these areas.  Unless some release of ORCL in future can beat HANA in price and performance as a DB for BW and Business Suite – SAP can pretty much win that battle.  If SAP is smart about of execution, they can utilize a first mover advantage to get HANA under BW and Business suite faster, and not give enough time to ORCL.  But then – execution is not an easy game to excel.

9. Where are the killer apps ? I ranted last week on this topic from another angle https://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/enterprise-apps-change-the-rules-or-they-will-change-you/ . At least for now, SAP is ahead of this game. They have announced a bunch of apps, and will hopefully step up on execution and a few of them will get “killer” status.  ORCL is late to this party, and has ways to go to catchup.

I am continuing conversations with people who I respect in this space, and as i find more – I will post updates.

Enterprise Apps – Change the rules, or they will change you


Everyone and his neighbor is convinced – including me – that future of enterprise software is in apps. However that does not mean the world will change tomorrow to a happy place. Here are half a dozen things that rush to my mind, in no particular order. It is a Sunday morning, and I only had one coffee so far and I have the flu. So take this with a pound of salt.

 

1. Apps will have really short lifecycles as we go forward. 

 

So we need a foundational architecture that allows people to create apps with bare minimum effort and cost. “Create” does not mean just dev and test – the whole app life cycle management including security, device management etc needs an industrial strength foundation that is easy to use and is affordable.

 

In short-medium term – we might have 1 to 2 year useful life. But as time progresses, this might become use and throw. And that might mean users can create their own apps, instead of a developer creating for them.

 

2. Backward compatibility is a must in enterprise world

 

Consumer side has one big advantage. Facebook can add and remove as they please – ok, not exactly, but easier than say SAP or ORCL.  Enterprise side does not have that luxury. So again, a paradigm needs to evolve that balances this reality against the ease of upgrades etc.

 

3. No one vendor can develop enough apps

 

So a huge ecosystem is needed. This means, on top of an architecture that makes it easy for developers – we also need a licensing paradigm that goes with it. This is not easy for companies new to this game. My favorite poet in Malayalam, Kumaran Ashan famously sang “change the rules, or they will change you” . He was referring to the social injustices prevalent at the time though.

 

4. HTML5 might not be the answer to world hunger

 

Apps are not all about mobility probably, but mobility is probably the leading horse in this race. This whole HTML5 vs native debate will probably end in hybrid scenarios, more than any one side winning by a margin.  Device makers don’t have a lot to gain from HTML5, and consequently native functionality will keep improving at a steady pace. And of course apps will follow the trend – since it is more or less a binary world in mobility. Either app gets used or it won’t – not a lot of middle ground.

 

5. Horses for Courses – Not all parts of Enterprise are app friendly, and not all users like apps

 

Whatever is the future architecture and licensing model – we should not fool ourselves in thinking that everything needs to be an app. Some processes are best left alone – along the lines of “everything must be expressed in as simple a manner as possible, but no simpler”, and not all users need or like apps.  Users should be allowed to choose whatever makes them more productive.

 

6  Why buy/build when you can beg/borrow/steal ?

 

A lot of functionality that enterprises need are also needed for you and me as consumers – things like file sharing, collaboration and so on. What enterprise needs is added layers of security, scale etc. It might be easier to let the consumer side take a lead on these, rather than re-invent and duplicate all of this. Who knows, one day consumer side can get something back in return too.  Or as standards evolve – there might be a possibility to put a layer around consumer apps that make it enterprise grade.