And Vijay Says…

It would not be the first time that a friendly banter with my pal Dennis Howlett leads me to post a blog. This time it is about spreadsheets . I have a (not so) slightly difference of opinion with Den on the topic of use of spreadsheets in enterprises . The short version is Den thinks spreadsheets are evil, and I don’t 🙂 OK that is dramatizing it a bit…but here is my (strictly personal) defense of spreadsheets for whatever little it is worth

1. If past performance is indicative, spreadsheets will thrive

Spreadsheets provided continuity for business users from early 80s till now. In this time frame, a lot of BI and EPM tools came and went away. Lotus 123 faded out, but its users just moved on to MS Excel . I don’t see this changing in near future either. Today there are more BI and EPM tools than ever before – and all the more reason for FP&A types to hold excel near to their chest to resist change.

2. BI and EPM companies use excel internally – a lot !

I know – I have worked in some of those companies, and partnered closely with others. They all use excel for BI and EPM alongside their own tools. They all market their wares as “excel killers” when it suits them – but can’t seem to convince their own planners and analysts to let go of excel.

The smart vendors all integrate excel into their products. Despite marketing hype they create, they all know that the product management rationale is solid that excel won’t go away, and recreating excel functionality elsewhere is not a good use of resources.

3. Analysts and Executives use Excel all the time too !

Not naming names – but every analyst I know who cover BI and EPM have excel on their laptops, and have an assortment of files with complex versioning schemes via naming conventions. The more modern ones use google docs instead of excel – but that is not exactly too different.

Similarly I have often seen data loaded in spreadsheets used by vendor executives in their demos . They just don’t say the backend is excel ! I am not saying this is what everyone does – just that I have seen it multiple times. I don’t blame the execs either – rarely do they know what happens behind the scenes of the demos they have on their iPads 🙂

What is the most common data source used by the new generation BI tools ? Excel ! People dump data from other systems to excel , add formulas etc, and put a nice visualization on top via the slick BI tool. Just that they don’t talk about excel in the scenario explicitly.

4. Convenience trumps functionality almost always – except for legal reasons.

World changes faster than BI and EPM tools can keep up with. The ability to change formulas on the fly and and rows and columns means that analysts can keep up with the changing world without waiting for the tool vendors to catchup. The only time they stick with tools 100% is if there are legal reasons to do so – like final copies of financial documents that need to be kept in a proper system of record.

I know top reference customers of pretty much every EPM vendor I know of that do plenty of work offline in excel and just upload the final copy to the tool for safe keeping. Or, they will do high level planning in the tool and then do finer details in excel. For example – they might allocate expenses to the head of a department and then let her manage it offline as long as she does not shoot over budget. How does she do it ? she uses excel !.

Den asked me if enterprises will use manual invoice processing if they have ERP. I have implemented SAP in a lot of Fortune 500 customers – and every single one of them have had a mass upload of invoices from excel !

5. Licenses, maintenance and training favors excel 

Even if someone creates a magic tool that does everything – it is still hard to beat excel . Why ? because excel is a general purpose tool needs very little additional training , and it does not need constant network uptime for usage across the company.  The incremental cost of keeping it running over time may not “appear” to be that high. True cost might be high – but as with everything else in enterprise land – perception is reality.

6. Does that mean all is good with excel and you should not use EPM and BI tools ?

No – Excel can, and does, cause grief in a lot of companies every year. A cursory internet search will provide you several horror stories. What the internet won’t tell you is that vast majority of the time, spreadsheets are a life saver in enterprises. But then, good news has no value in press . If my house gets water damage just once in 30 years , would anyone write an article called “House has not had single issue with water damage in 29 years and 11 months” ?

The goodness of spreadsheet is only apparent by first hand observation of its users. This is the same kind of shit that happens with ERP too . How many “ERP is dead” articles have we read ? And how many companies actually took out their ERP ?

When you see customers who say “we have displaced excel” , at best it means one department for one use case has been using a new tool instead of excel . What would be great to know is if there are entire companies who have completely gotten rid of spreadsheets as a BI, EPM and ETL tool. I have not seen any in the nearly twenty years I have spent in this field.

The smart thing in my opinion is to find the best co-existence strategy for excel and all the other tools. Spreadsheets are invaluable when used reasonably – please just don’t paint it evil with broad strokes.

That is it . Defense rests, your honor !

 

India has contributed a lot to the civilized world – and Yoga is definitely in “top 10” category . In a world where everyone seems to be stressed out , celebrating a day in honor of the ancient practice of yoga makes a lot of sense to me . Plus – it is a huge honor for India. 

I am not a practitioner of yoga – but my mom, my father in law and several others in my extended family , as well as several friends and colleagues are yoga practitioners . I would resist the temptation to call them yogis , given I grew up listening to tales of yogis who have moved on to a different plane of mind . These folks I know – to the extend I know – are kind of early in that journey , and do it today mostly in lieu of daily exercise . I definitely am planning to start learning yoga asap. 

I saw some folks resisting international yoga day by attaching religious reasons for that . This makes very little sense to me, who grew up celebrating Christmas and Eid just as much as Onam and Vishu . For those folks – I hope they are tolerant enough to view it as a way to honor their country and a good way to get some exercise . Diseases of body and mind don’t descriminate between Hindu and Muslim . 

It would be naive to think there is no religious aspect to BJP government pushing for yoga day . There are many hardliners in the ruling party who think India is for Hindus , and they may look at yoga as a Hindu tradition . But that is misguided . It’s hard to correct these people – so let them be .

That is all the good stuff . Now about some things that bother me about yoga day . 

Amongst the most pressing problems that need attention , yoga is not a top ten item for India . A good number of people cannot eat three meals a day in this country . Similarly the health care situation is pretty pathetic for a large section of society . Those are all things that need a lot of time and resources to fix . A hungry man would choose food over yoga every day of the week , how much ever it is advertised . 

Then there is the issue of pollution . Between the increase in number of cars , the felling of trees , the number of houses and offices that use air conditioning and so on – air pollution is significant in pretty much every big city in India . Practioners of yoga – especially those that do it outdoors – are going to deeply inhale highly polluted air . I have to wonder if there is any point to this exercise , including the spectacle of Guinness record winning crowd in Delhi doing it in public . 

Talking of pollution – water and food are also subjected to poisonous stuff to a great degree . In the last three weeks here on vacation , I saw three separate programs on local TV showing heavy use of chemicals on fruits and vegetables . Several people I know are now growing their own vegetables because they can’t trust the stuff they buy in open markets . What exactly is the point of doing yoga and then eating and drinking such polluted food and water ?

Hopefully there will be great planning and execution by the government to make India holistically healthy , and that this yoga day is just a good first step .

Dennis Howlett penned his thoughts on open sourcing SAP Hana http://diginomica.com/2015/06/17/should-sap-open-source-hana/ that  led to a fairly good debate on Facebook , and I thought I will share some thoughts on the topic here on my blog

Hana is a great piece of software which is a full fledged database , and have some lightweight app server capabilities . While it could very well be a general purpose database – historically it’s been used mostly under SAP business suite and business warehouse , and some data mart type use cases . It’s a well crafted piece of software and of course I am a bit partial to it . So what about open sourcing it ? 

I was a big proponent of open sourcing Hana when it first came out . I no longer think it is a great idea . Here are six random reasons why 

1. By now , there are way too many open source databases optimized for many different things . No first mover advantage remains for sap 

2. These open source databases all have large community following . SAP has a very large (larger than most open source databases) and loyal community who need to be nurtured on to Hana . That is a much more pragmatic approach than getting say Hadoop developers to switch to Hana 

3. Hana is rather limited on drivers . If widespread adoption by community is needed , SAP will need to support drivers for many languages on Hana . I don’t see the need for that investment given the heavy focus on S4Hana for near future . River was not the right approach in my opinion – that is not how real life developers build apps . That is an academic view of the world . 

4. Developers need software they can play with quickly and decide if their use case is a good fit . The trial needs to be quick to install , learn and tweak . People are happy to pay for support and enterprise grade features . Don’t confuse between open source licensing and open source business model . SAP can keep Hana commercial and just focus on making Hana extremely developer friendly for unlimited trials to get to the same results

5. What is really different between an open source database company that employs all (or most) of its commiters and SAP ? In both cases the company controls product direction – with of course some input from company . This is not a valid reason for SAP to open source Hana in my opinion . Of course not all open source companies employ all their commiters – but many successful ones do exactly that . Essentially that negates the argument that no one has all answers to a problem . The better solution is in vendors working together to make interoperability work better – consistentcy in driver support , security , provisioning , HA/DR etc 

6. Hana is not the only game for SAP. For SAP business model – till cloud can pick up significantly in net new business , it makes more sense to have Hana as high ASP , lower volume as sales model . That is the opposite of typical open source subscription model by other database vendors . SAP already sells Hana as a subscription I think – but doing it at scale , at a comparable price point to say MongoDB , Cassandra etc is just too disruptive in my mind . They might get there at some point – and to do a subscription business , software doesn’t need to be open source licensed necessarily .