SAP Teched 2011 – Monday and Tuesday. Hana, Hana and MORE HANA


Sunday was all about innojam. Theme : gamification (is that a word???) of the enterprise. And No – it was not based on “The games people play”. There were 13 teams…well, 12 serious teams and then us – the #PUKR team. PUKR stands for Puppies, Kittens, Unicorns and Rainbows.  To follow us https://www.facebook.com/pages/PuppiesUnicornsKittensandRainbows/123156007786007 . Our idea was to gamify the framework – so that you can gamify any business process. What can we say – we were ahead of our times, and the world did not see our vision. Especially the judges .

 

Jokes apart – it was a blast. 10 SAP mentors came together to put a solution together that had everything from a spec ( 1 page of backlog, half page datamodel), facebook page, twitter comments..and other assorted things like ECC, Webservices, HANA and BI 4.0.

 

The team that won did an awesome app on gamifying the expense reporting process.  And it had HANA and 2 IBMers and an SAP guy in the team. How much more do you need for sheer awesomeness? These guys went up to compete in demojam, but lost to an even more awesome team.

 

Monday night – we had the SAP Mentor reception. Which was the first time I got to eat something in 24 hours or so.  Aslann and Mark Finnern put up a great event for Mentors as always. And we had a surprise visitor – Vishal Sikka. He gave us some thoughts on the keynote that he was planning to deliver the next day. He also acknowledged that I had given him some grief on twitter for not responding to blog comments 🙂

 

I do think that it is a wasted opportunity for Vishal in particular and for SAP in general. SCN is the place where there is an even bigger brain trust than within the SAP labs.  Blog posts are just the start of a conversation. If you do not respond to the questions and observations made there – the blog just becomes something like a press release, but with a dab of lipstick. Of course Vishal is a busy guy – so maybe some one in his team can collect these questions, and Vishal can post a blog with replies.  Or find some other solution – but leaving these comments open does not seem like a good idea to me.  Knowing the guy – I will not be surprised to see him start responding to those questions.

 

Onwards to Monday – starting with the big keynote from Vishal Sikka. I was happy with the keynote.SAP did well.

 

1. SAP did the right thing by showcasing the two Asian customers who went live on HANA.  BRILLIANT !

2. Vishal reconfirmed the 9/16/11 date for GA for BI 4.0 .  Not sure why it could not have been 9/13 right at the Keynote, but I assume there is a good reason

3. HANA goes under BW as DB 53 days from now. This is probably the most exciting news for me personally.

4. Vishal clearly articulated his vision for ongoing intellectual renewal, and I got a feeling it resonated well with the crowd.

 

There were a few things about HANA that need attention too.

 

1.  It is all about HANA for sure. Mobility and cloud got some minor mentions, but guess what – customers have real budgets for those things. Mobility today is not a hard sell – I think SAP needs to focus messaging more on these two.

 

2. During the innojam – there were 4 tables created in HANA I think. Two were from my team and one from the team that won the innojam. Someone else must have created one more. We had Vitaliy, Harald and me in the room, and 3 SAP HANA experts. There was no visible traction for HANA there. People crowded around River and Gateway, but did not seem to want to deal with HANA.  When asked in keynote to raise hands for those planning to use HANA – a very small number of people obliged. I urge the HANA team at SAP to start actively engaging on SDN and other channels to get this fixed.

 

3. HANA needs serious datamodelling. Hand written DDL has limitations to scale. SAP needs to actively enhance the Sybase power designer (which I think is the name) and teach the ecosystem how to use it.

 

4.  Not sure if I heard this correctly, but the Asian customer who implemented HANA seemed to have done it all inhouse. If this is true, it is mighty impressive. But having worked with HANA myself, I cannot visualize how they managed to do this without active participation of SAP (maybe an SI too). I need to find out more.

 

5. How far does HANA scale ?  So far I have seen the several TB of data examples. But that is not big data in 2011. Can it work with Petabytes?

 

Just as I mentioned in my SAPPHIRE blog, I fail to understand why SAP is not promoting Gateway actively. I walked around asking people on their opinion on gateway. Very very few know what it is. It is a shame – and SAP should fix it.

 

I had an opportunity to catch up more with Vishal Sikka over lunch.  Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and Stacy Fish for making that happen.  That conversation was off the record, but I can say one thing for sure. SAP will make HANA work – and SAP could not have got a more passionate guy than Vishal to lead the charge. He knows the problems along the way – and he is fixing them as efficiently as he can.

 

After lunch meeting with Vishal, we had a blogger meeting with Nicholas Brown – from the mobility side of the house. He is a terrific guy – and an absolute straight shooter. It is a high potential area for SAP and I heard they have been doing well. Nic does not think HTML 5 is the magic bullet every one thinks it will be. He articulated well that there is a class of apps that will do well – like leave requests and time sheets, that BYOD folks will use en-masse. But there will always be a set of users who need native functionality of devices to do more complex things. Plus – the key question is “what is in it for the device makers?”.

 

There are 50 plus apps in various phases of development – so I believe SAP field sales now have enough ammunition to sell mobility well. They will not have to do a multitude of POCs to get customers to buy the SUP platform probably. But here is the deal – what is the model for the sale? Will you sell the 50K or 100K deals for one app development? or will you sell a whole mobility strategy and make a few millions of sale? I guess they will do both. But each requires a different partnership with ecosystem to make it work. For the large SIs – the strategy route might be more palatable, and for smaller boutiques – the one or two apps might be the better business. But in general – I think mobility has a bright future. I just hope SAP gives it sufficient attention, given the major focus on HANA.

 

One last point – to make mobility and HANA and cloud a success – SAP cannot do it alone. SAP probably cannot do it with existing partners alone either.  For the type of scale that will move SAP from a 15B company to something bigger and more profitable, and less reliant on maintenance $$ – they need some variation of the AAPL model to get a large pool of developers into the ecosystem.  This does not go well with current way of functioning SAP is used to. But all the leaders know it, and I hope they will figure out a solution. But a problem SAP can solve in near future is to make sure existing partners and customers have access to latest greatest documentation and training on all the new stuff they are coming up with. They cannot have education lag behind innovation by a big margin.

 

Demojam was the last event of the night.  I am quite amazed by the quality of the demos – very very cool. You should watch them all, and if possible talk to the finalists.  The winning demo was the best I have seen in a few years. Watch the videos and you will like it too.

 

On that note, I am off to the Wednesday sessions. See you tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday at SAPTeched 2011 – It is all about Innojam


On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I took the first flight out of PHX to LAS to join fellow mentors and other SAP enthusiasts at SAPTeched.  I was happy to see people choosing to fly on this day – it sends a strong message to the world that Terrorism will NEVER win.

 

The day was all about Innojam , and Innojam is all about gamification this year. Mario started us with a good overview of what the concept is, and Sethu M did a good overview of SAP strategy.

 

I was part of last year’s innojam too, and its previous incarnation called process slam. SAP has listened to feedback, and there was marked improvement from previous years.  I would really like less PPT and lectures and more action in innojams, since the rest of the week is anyway PPT packed. We spent quite a bit of time this year too – although it was less than prior years. Next year, SAP should consider timing out people who make pitches that take more than 2 minutes or so. There were times when 50% of the room was just posting on twitter – including me – and not paying attention to what was going on in the room. Food looked better than last year, but some of us still ate from outside.

 

If there is one thing SAP should be shouting from rooftops – that is their Gateway offering. It is the most awesome innovation I have seen from SAP in a while, and more customers can use it than almost any other technology I can think of. I hope to see Vishal doing this in keynote, and not just talking about HANA.

 

We have more than 10 teams competing in innojam, and after the best dinner I had at Vegas – I got to be part of an innojam idea too. We are using HANA, BI 4.0, ABAP and Mobility to pull off gamification. And it has been nothing short of fun to say the least. The dinner conversation have to be left private for now – but I will definitely go out any  time with this gang. I don’t think I ever had a better night in Vegas ever. Please follow #sapteched for some fun twitter streams yestreday, and more for rest of the week.

 

There are 2 major activities for me  for Monday .

 

1. Attending Mobility deepdive

 

2. Finishing up innojam idea and presenting it at the final – thanks to a team of rockstars, this is a piece of cake.  If this team actually works on a real project together, Mike Krigsman will probably start blogging more on IT Success stories instead of failures 🙂

 

And finally – many thanks for SAP for inviting me to this event, and paying for registration and hotel.

Innovation and the Time dimension


On labor day, I was vacationing in CO, and picked up this blog post by Vinnie Mirchandani ( @dealarchitect on twitter) to read while my family was getting ready for the day’s activities. http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2011/09/ibm-we-need-more-innovators-less-integrators.html . Vinnie had earlier penned http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/40863/we-need-more-applegoogleamazon-moments-less-ibm-moments/. I picked up a lively and healthy debate with Vinnie on twitter, and then Martijn Linssen joined in.  He is @martinlinssen on twitter, and I am @vijayasankarv.

 

Vinnie is a well respected analyst in the industry, as is totally entitled to his opinion. However, I do think the thought process in this case has some flaws.  I have an equal amount of respect for Martijn, and respect his opinions as well. We had to stop the twitter debate abruptly since I had promised to take my daughter to the zoo.

 

So here is me picking up that thread. I do work for IBM since 2006, and am very proud to be an IBMer. However, these are just my opinions, and not that of IBM’s .

 

How does one define innovation? Vinnie gives his metric to define innovation here.

How much of IBM’s revenues comes from new products innovated in the last 5 years? Because that is the benchmark that Apple and Google and Amazon blow IBM away on as what I consider a legitimate claim to innovation

 

I think it is a really bad metric to judge innovation of an enterprise company.  Here are a few reasons why.

 

First off – I truly admire Apple, Google and Amazon for what they have done and what they are doing. They truly deserve the accolades Vinnie and others bestow.  I use them all as a consumer, and am happy with all of them.

 

However, Apple comes up with a new product version say every year or less – like the iPad. Since it is a brilliant product, a lot of consumers pay about $1000 give or take each year to buy the next version . That is pretty much a 100% recurring annual cost. Enterprise customers cannot even tolerate 22% maintenance fees. How many vendors can manage to get a savvy enterprise customer to fork 100% every year for the next big thing?  And unlike the consumer world, the enterprise world generally needs backward compatibility.

 

Martijn made a point that IBM thrives because of great sales skills. I questioned that asking him how many customers will stick with a vendor for long term just because the sales people were rockstars. Martijn came back with some good points – mentioning shelfware and government contracts. Even if both are true, what percentage of the $100B revenue will come from shelfware and government? I think the reason IBM survived a 100 years – most of them as a leader – is that great sales was paired with greater delivery.

 

IBM developed Sabre for American airlines many decades ago – before I was born. And it is still being used widely – and not just for airline reservations. That is innovation that has withstood the test of time. It did not need annual revisions that cost 100% more money from customer every year.  If I am an enterprise customer – which one would I like? something that changes every year, and costs me practically 100% of my initial investment every year? or something that I buy once and pay a much smaller maintenance fee annually to keep up to date for decades?

 

Apple revolutionized how we consume music with iPods. iPhone and iPad were phenomenal successes as well. And they came out in a span of few years or less of each other. Very impressive. But guess who started an entire industry around personal computers? IBM did.  And how many years did it take for the next big thing to come up? a few decades.  An investment in a PC is not something people did in a recurring fashion every year. And even with mobile devices catching up – PC is not exactly dying.  Doesn’t that count as innovative? Or is it not innovative because it was not done in last 5 years?

 

By the same token, IBM sold off its PC division to Lenovo in 2005 when they figured that the margins of that business were not going to help take IBM to the next level. Wasn’t that brilliant for the shareholders that IBM invested in high margin services and software instead of low margin PC business? And Lenovo is a very successful company too and shows good numbers to its investors.  Why is that not innovative?

 

Vinnie goes on to say

IBM prides itself as supporting and leveraging Open source but cordons it off from its own proprietary and profitable products.

 

So is it Apple that is the shining example of all things open? Apple decides what works and does not work with their products. It is not open, and it can get away with it in consumer space. IBM is way more open in its products – and supports multiple systems to integrate with its products. Sure it can be argued that it could integrate more – but the point is, it is fairly open, and has been an active proponent of open standards.

 

Vinnie makes a point of IBM as more of an integrator than an innovator.  He says

If IBM was truly innovative it would be automating and commoditizing much of that labor – its own and that of the rest of the market.

 

Here – there are 2 issues. Is it bad to be an integrator? I would categorically say NO, especially if you are the best (or one of the best) in your business. Second – IBM has very innovative service solutions. IBM does not solve services problems by just throwing warm bodies at it. They are one of the few companies that bring high-end consulting, software, assets, hardware  and research capabilities all together to solve the complex problems of its customers.  It is a large company, and hence many people have different perspectives on IBM. Some exceptional, some good and some bad and some really really bad. Bad press gets more publicity – but that does not take away anything from a company that has been an icon for a 100 years.

 

Vinnie’s blog closes of with this

What I find disconcerting is that even at the top IBM confuses its nice margins from milking old software and old data centers and old partners like SAP as “innovation”. This WSJ article I should  have written about a while ago summarizes that state of delusion.

 

Sure SAP is  a few decades old. Sure it could also be more innovative like everyone else. But one should also not forget that a good portion of Global business runs on SAP. And IBM is one of the biggest partners of SAP globally. ERP projects get a lot of bad rap for being costly to implement and maintain. But the number of successful projects definitely outnumber the unsuccessful ones, although it hardly ever gets reported on.  And OLD does not mean BAD if it still works effectively. Sockets API for Unix was unchanged for a long time since it was written. Was it BAD? Full disclosure : For most of my life, I did SAP consulting. So I probably am biased on this topic 🙂

 

If Lotus is 20 years old, what about Microsoft office?  Why do customers use something that originated more than a decade ago? Shouldn’t that be anti-innovation too?

 

Martijn said HP invests more in R&D than IBM, and so does many other companies. Not sure if that is a fact – but I do know that IBM invests quite a bit on R&D, and in terms of number of patents and number of PhDs employed, I wonder how many other companies will come close. And how many other companies have 5 Nobel prize winners?  Does that sound like sustained investing in innovation?

 

Of course IBM has had its fair share of challenges. When I did my MBA, we used to discuss endlessly how IBM nearly died, and how it strongly came back. So I am not saying it doesn’t have its problems. But irrespective of all that – I firmly believe that IBM is one of the most innovative companies in the world. In fact, it is one of the core values of IBMers

Innovation that matters- for our company and for the world.