SAPPHIRENOW 2014 – Impressions


Before leaving for the event , I had posted my wish list here https://andvijaysays.com/2014/06/02/an-ex-sap-dudes-wish-list-for-sapphirenow-2014/

It was like a family reunion for me – meeting hundreds of friends in 2 days and hanging out with the sap mentor gang. The event was well organized and I enjoyed the design of the break areas .

Now I am on my way back, and thought I will jot down my impressions after the event

1. Simplicity

Bill’s keynote was themed on simplicity . But 90 mins was a lot of time to explain simplicity . I seriously would urge SAP to consider 30 minute keynotes in future events . That will help sharpen the message a lot. Bill is probably the best speaker at SAP today – and it is an injustice to his talent and stature to lose audience attention because of the length of a keynote .

The length issue was even worse on day 2 – with most of the room empty by the time Bernd got into the meat of his presentation . I felt bad that he didn’t get a fair shot at delivering his message on his first keynote as head of development . And for an American audience , Bernd probably was a tad too formal – but I give him kudos for being his own person, and not trying to be Vishal 2.0 .

Despite the time running long – I did enjoy the customers explaining how their business problems got solved using technology . Maybe one day SAP might try a keynote driven by customers for customers

2. Are aggregates and hierarchies evil ?

Plattner/Christensen keynote spent a lot of time talking about the advantages of lowest level data granularity helping companies and aggregates and hierarchies hurting those companies . I tend to disagree a bit on some of that thinking .

No company including SAP can be run on line item level information . Aggregated information is the only way leaders can work day to day . What Is required on top is an exception alerting framework . If something is out of whack in accounts receivable – systems should smartly highlight the cause and not expect the user to drill down extensively searching for data . Otherwise – line item data is counter productive .

Same deal with hierarchies . Absence of hierarchies is chaos . Look at SAP itself – a well run company with 3 different levels of board , 4 levels of VPs and so on . Can some of it be cut ? You bet . Can it be eliminated ? No way . What might be closer to truth is that companies need to become more project oriented for innovation work – but anything that typically needs continuity and/or scale typically needs a defined structure – and that creates hierarchies.

So – in my view – hierarchies and aggregates are not fundamentally bad . What is bad is rigid IT and org systems that can’t deal with aggregates and hierarchies flexibly.

3. Impressive hana customer numbers

It was heartening to see hana momentum continuing . Steve Lucas and team are continuing to rock it . What is needed now seems to be a doubling down on adoption to close the gap between license sales and live implementations so that the business is long term sustainable .

4. PaaS gets much needed attention

I was thrilled to see how much the Hana cloud platform message was pushed this year at sapphirenow , especially by Steve Lucas . This was a topic very close to my heart when I worked there . I know many of my former colleagues are excited too . There are two things I would urge SAP to consider –

1. First , rename HCP to something else to avoid confusion with HEC. If I were king , I would call it Neo again . But I am sure there are other names that could work too

2. Invest in app deployment from marketplace . If customers can’t deploy apps from marketplace – it won’t get adoption . And this needs commitment to change how products are designed to begin with .

5. SAP should have put its key second line of leaders on spotlight

Rob Enslin , Steve Lucas , Michael Reh, Rodolpho etc are exceptionally talented leaders that customers should hear from – at least briefly . Given SAP is betting its business on Hana – at a minimum I expected Steve to get a small spot on keynote . I would urge SAP to consider something along those lines at Dcode if they can.

6. What about BI , mobility and big data ?

Many thanks to SAP for announcing the collaboration with MongoDB . I hope this is the beginning of a long term strategic partnership http://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/elegantly-visualize-big-data-mongodb-using-sap-lumira .

BI, big data and mobility barely got any keynote love . I understand the attention on Hana and cloud – but after a few years of Hana messaging, isn’t it time now to present a balanced portfolio again ?

SAP needs to leap frog it’s BI completion by some category defining move . The BI team under Michael Reh on engineering and Christian Rodatus under PSG are strong and talented . I am betting on them coming out with something that takes SAP back to the height of their glory days

I am sure I missed many topics – they are boarding the plane , so I need to run . Ciao !

An Ex-SAP dude’s wish list for SAPPHIRENOW 2014


Sapphirenow 2014 is kicking off on Monday – and although I don’t work for SAP or an SAP partner now, I care a lot for the company and its ecosystem and thought I will jot down a short note on my thoughts on what I would love to see unfold.

1. Let the new leadership team have its own identity

Bill McDermott is a well known entity – so although he is now sole CEO with Jim Snabe moving to Supervisory board, I don’t think anyone thinks of him as a “new” leader. If anyone can chart a course for the new SAP, it is Bill. 

Then there is Bernd Leukert. He is very well known inside SAP – but probably not as well known outside SAP. With Vishal leaving SAP abruptly and Bernd moving to Executive board – I saw a lot of commentary along the lines of Bernd being the new Vishal. I think this is a rather unfair expectation to set up. Vishal was a good leader but so is Bernd. But they are very different people . I would love to see Bernd explain HIS vision of how he expects SAP to develop over the next few years. 

2. Project the bench strength

One of the few things SAP could have done better was to give visibility of its bench strength to external world. Its not that SAP doesn’t have bench strength. Rob Enslin, Steve Lucas, Michael Reh, Rodolpho Cardenuto, Bjoern Goerke ….and many others are capable leaders waiting in the wings. Its up to Bill and Bernd to shine the light on their leadership team and I am sure we will see more of it – if not at sapphire, then shortly thereafter. 

3. Embrace channel partnerships

SAP can’t do it alone. SAP became an amazing ERP company because of a significant ecosystem of partners around them. Rodolpho is now in charge of the partner organization, and he works for Bill directly. I would love to see SAP double down on channel up and down its stack . How can I not say that ? – I am a channels dude myself now at MongoDB 🙂 

4. Show product direction that matches the simplification message

Investors and analysts need a message – but partners and  customers need clear product direction. When SAP leaders talk about innovation – they should give clear examples of what is actually getting simplified. Simplification is needed not just in products – it is also needed in how developers, partners and customers do business with SAP. Easy ways to download trials, simplified licensing etc are all good things to announce.

5. Stop charging for UI/UX improvements

Hopefully we will hear about Fiori and/or Personas being free. I am not holding my breath on it – and I am generally NOT a fan of making software free indiscriminately. However in the case of UI/UX – the poor reputation historically cannot be attributed to anyone other than SAP itself. So why charge for it to maintenance paying customers? Make it free and hopefully it drives enough Hana and Suite business to compensate on revenue front. Nothing will cheer user groups more than this announcement, if we get to hear it.

6. Explain what “SAP, the cloud company powered by Hana” really means

It is a great message – but now it is time to explain how this vision is going to be realized. SAP has a very heterogeneous cloud portfolio. Personally, I don’t think it is a bright idea to replatform all the acquired solutions to Hana. Customers who buy SaaS are buying a solution with a certain SLA. They don’t care what it runs on as long as the functionality satisfies their need, and SLA is met. Parts of all these solutions could probably have benefits that Hana can give. So a replatforming effort might be worth for carefully chosen parts of the portfolio. HEC, HCP, BI, BW on Hana, Suite on Hana etc are the ones that definitely directly correlate to “powered by Hana”. SAP needs to clearly explain the roadmap on transition to a full cloud company .

That is the technology message – but being a cloud company also needs a business execution part to be nailed. This is really hard for a company that needs to balance between on premises solutions and cloud solutions. So I am very curious to hear how SAP will lay it out.  

That is it . I wish the very best to SAP – have a great SAPPHIRENOW 2014 !

Entropy and Equilibrium in organizations


My pal Dennis Howlett and I were discussing today morning about what makes a large company resist change. A lot of thoughts ran through my mind and I thought I better write it down . Strangely – my thoughts revolved around laws of physics when I looked for answers . No idea why , but this is roughly how I try to answer the question .

Entropy is a measure of disorder in a system . Generally, higher the entropy – the more energy a system needs to just remain a system . There is very little energy available to do something else . Remember the first law of thermodynamics – there is only a certain amount of energy available to a system . Organizations are like that too – given a certain resource level , there is only so much that can be done .

What a company stands for changes with time . Pre-IPO , there is a great focus on increasing the valuation of the company . Size of the company is small and most of the employees have stock options as their primary compensation (or upside ) . When that unity of purpose is there – everyone has the same goal for the most part . If I work in engineering and my buddy works in sales and all we can hire is one extra person – it is relatively straight forward to figure out which team gets the extra headcount .
Both of us know that if the company gets valued higher – we both will be sufficiently compensated to not worry about who has a bigger team and whose team earned more kudos .

Now let’s say the company went public and we still can hire only one person . Now the company has many goals – revenue , profit , employee morale , net promoter score and a hundred other KPIs . Every team is aligned to a subset of the goals – and only a small number of people (occasionally only the CEO and CFO) are measured on all KPIs . Compensation is now not primarily stock for most employees – it is MBO driven . So entropy kicks into high gear – a lot of energy gets spent in just keeping the company running – by optimizing across different goals . This leaves hardly any energy to do anything to move forward .

That is what makes larger companies resist change in my opinion . I think this is one of the biggest causes for innovator’s dilemma . Someone with low entropy and more energy to spare comes along and wins the market while you are fighting your inner devil (which you created yourself and sustained ) .

Physics – statics and dynamics – uses the concept of equilibrium a lot . Inertia is a big deal – unless an unbalanced external force doesn’t act on it, an object just continues to move like it always had , or will sit dead on its tracks . Organizations display this behavior in spades .

This is why incremental changes don’t always give much impact in many companies – those are easy to balance out . Often times – individuals try to push really hard to make a difference . But force is proportional to mass and acceleration . Individuals have less organizational mass and hence need tremendous acceleration to show impact . On the other hand – establishment has plenty of organizational force and just needs a tiny acceleration to provide the balancing force . So things come back to equilibrium pretty soon . Maybe there is an exception like Steve Jobs where the CEO is the individual forcing the change – but even then, we have seem the world doesn’t have too many who could pull off what Jobs was able to .

I should stop now – I am not even sure if this line of thought is useful . But I did promise my daughter that I will help her organize her toys ( does that count as decreasing entropy?) . So off I go 🙂