What do I expect to learn at SAPPHIRENOW 2011?


I am typing this from my flight to JFK from PHX. The next long trip on the cards is to MCO for SAPPHIRE NOW which is fast approaching. Having flown millions of miles, and having attended a good many SAP events – it is only apt that it is in a flight that I got to write a prequel to SAP’s mega event for 2011. What doesn’t help is the turbulence we are hitting while I am trying to type:)

Ever since the current Co-CEO’s took charge, I have heard a consistent message on SAP’s “On Premise, On Demand, On Device” story. It is a good thing too in my opinion, for a statement on strategy.

On Demand and On Device is where I see the most action now from SAP’s side. However, the big question my customers have is “What are the big innovations on existing On premises solutions, where we have already invested big $$?”. I expect SAP to give a clear answer to this at SAPPHIRE. SAP is big on design thinking and agile and all – so I am sure there is a crisp message to be delivered.

Next up – my favorite topic, HANA. I expect to see some firm dates for 1.0 GA, and 1.5 and 2.0 ramp/GA. I also want to know when HANA will support ABAP. SAP shops are generally skilled in ABAP, but less so in pure SQL. In its current form, HANA needs serious SQL skills and knowledge of tables. Having sold R/3 for ages on the message that “you don’t need to know tables and SQL”, it is a big change for customers to be thrown into other end of the spectrum. Again, I am sure there are good answers – and I hope we will hear on this from SAP. It would also be nice to know how many customers have gone live on HANA in production.

And while we are on the topic, when will HANA on cloud be available?
Hardware is growing at a terrific pace – if you blink, you will see 128 core blades are there and cheap 🙂 It is hard to keep up and extract value for most customers. Any smart solutions? And is the HANA software intellient enough to make use of the improved hardware as time progresses? Can it make use of more memory and processing power (scaling up/out etc). A follow on question will be HANA’s speed over networks – not all users sit close to a data center. So are there benchmarks available that shows performance across a realistic number of network hops?

Onwards to on-demand. I already blogged about my concern on the offline usage scenarios. Essentially, salesmen are not always wired. How will SAP support their OLTP and OLAP needs when they are offline? I also want to know how SAP will support integration between all the OD applications that they are developing. Or do they expect customers and SIs to do this?

Also, who is SAP targetting for non-ByD OD solutions as customer base? From what little I have heard – it looks to be targeted at big companies with operations in “developed” world. But for the most part, existing user base can be productive without new solutions in OD. Question is – what is SAP doing to help companies expand into new markets in Asia, Africa etc? Will it support multiple languages? How will we get information into an enterprise BI system from OD?

Finally, how is SAP addressing the problem in the market that SAP projects take too long? In past events, I have seen a lot of good talk on Agile and Design thinking as magic bullets. If that is the case, why is SAP not taking that approach to customers and partners and make them succesful? Is SAP doing agile in their consulting gigs?

I am going with an open mind, and hope to hear SAP executives answering all these questions .

SAP’s on-demand solutions – what if I am offline ?


Over the last couple of weeks, there has been an overload of news about cool stuff happening on SAP’s On-demand and mobile world, especially the sales on demand solution. From what I have read so far, SAP should be genuinely proud of every thing they are doing in these important areas. But, in all this frenzy – from SAP and from the folks who commented on it – I wonder why I don’t see anything about the offline aspects of the sales function.

A sales person is usually NOT connected to internet all the time. A good many of them actually do data entry stuff  on plane  rides etc.  And only a small fraction of planes have internet connections. So, these people  have to put information into spreadsheets etc – and then if their boss pushes them hard, they will grudgingly type it into a system of record some time.  Some of them I know will probably do it only if their commission is predicated on such data entry 🙂

Which reminds me  – does sales on demand also have a place for sales guys to do their expense reports? I seriously think it should. If not for anything else, at least it will be enough to get these people to use the on-demand solution, and then might have an interest in trying the “sales” part of it too.

On-demand solutions also need an offline feature to it to make them successful.  Otherwise, however nifty a solution is, it just won’t get used by sales people. Can sales on-demand system sync with excel sheets (or some other data store) in a drive on  a laptop and keep itself updated?

The necessity of offline capability is not just true for transactional use – it is equally true for analytical use too.  A lot of sales people use excel as a BI tool – precisely because they cannot access required info all the time when they are traveling.  Most them have a (painful) process to dump data into excel periodically into their PC – probably on weekly basis.

So question for SAP – what is your plan to address this? Does sales on demand have an offline reporting tool that keeps information offline on a device? Since these devices have a lot of memory and processing power these days, why not give a powerful offline reporting solution that can periodically sync with the on-demand system?

Finally, about bandwidth. It is a big constraint for making business work on mobile devices. Not all countries have the luxury of high bandwidth wireless connections. And I doubt if that scenario will grow at the speed memory and processing power improves. So, my question here – what are you doing to harness the power of client side machines? With HANA – SAP has a clear idea on what to do on server side. But what about the advances in mobile devices – how is SAP planning to harness that?

Since SAP is big on design thinking, I am sure they have got good answers on all of this. I am looking forward to getting better educated on this topic.

Change Management – Why haven’t we solved it yet?


It is not new news that Change Management is a big deal, and all transformation projects – probably “all” projects – need to invest in it.  We knew this decades ago – and for the most part, we still fail to do this. WHY?  I have worked in various roles on ERP and non-ERP transformations.  And I have also had the opportunity to formally and informally review projects that I did not work on directly. Here are my very biased five thoughts on this topic. They are not discrete – they are all intertwined.

1. Enterprise software is built assuming that users have to be formally trained in it

Some of the newer solutions have shown us why this is not an optimal solution. If software is built assuming that user should find it intuitive, incorporating training aids and simulations into the framework, a lot of change management challenges will go away.  From a sheer usability perspective, many established enterprise vendors have made big advances – but that is true only when you compare their new solutions to their own older versions, and not on an absolute scale.  This needs to be fixed on product development and project execution fronts – and it needs serious paradigm shifts in how we do both.

2. My best practices are not the best for you if you “blindly” copy mine

Instead of using best practices as a template, a lot of projects use them as holy grail and force fit business processes into it. ERP vendors and SIs and independent consultants are all culpable. This was the big selling point for ERP – we already have everything, just make your business run according to “our” model, and all will be well.  Even though we have seen a million times why this does not work, we still do it.  There are valid reasons to take this route – it costs less project budget spend and only needs a shorter time line, it minimizes support costs etc.  We just conveniently forget that this is akin to tail wagging the dog.

3. Business is not static – things change ALL the time.

Debits and credits still show up where they showed up before we were born, but these are a minority. They are an exception to the rule, and not the rule itself.

For example, in the world of financial planning – people who run a business might change how to do planning every so often. If you always had done operating income at product line level, and gross margin at customer level – all your allocation rules will need to be changed if you suddenly need a net margin by customer. Most ERP type solutions cannot respond to such changes in real time. Is there any wonder that spreadsheets still rule the world despite an army of vendors and consultants advising against them?

Same thing for logistics – you might have always sold in a “sales order, delivery, billing, payment” order. Now the new VP wants to change it to “Get payment first and then deliver” . Traditional ERP needs time to respond to this – config changes, code changes, testing etc. And by the time it hits production – sales clerks might not know how to do the new model for sales. These same “dumb” users can figure out 5 changes in an iPhone App after an upgrade, without any one telling them what to do. Why?

My bank has changed its website features at least 10 times in last 5 years. I never once had to call the bank to find out how to use any of them. Then why is it so hard for a company when it comes to giving a system or process for employees without making them pull out their hair?

4.  You get what you pay for. No more, no less

The primary reason, I think, is that the people who control the purse strings for a project usually think of change management as a “nice to have”.  Whether it is to train users, or to communicate changes, or to make software that is intuitive – it costs time and money. You get what you pay for. If the axe falls on change management budget, then it is also falling on the chance of success.  Sending blast emails to all users, you know – the proxy-written for a big wig type mails, is not a substitute for change management. I don’t read them, and neither does any one else I know.

5. As size of a company increases, the lesser your chance of getting a representative sample to make decisions

A senior executive from logistics is probably the wrong person to address the requirements of the shipping clerk. But often, requirements workshops are usually filled with people far removed from actual business process.  As size of a company increases, it becomes very complex to get a sample of people who can make good decisions that affect all of the company.