So Long SAP ….thanks for everything


Yesterday evening, I sent my resignation to my manager at SAP. I will be at SAP for a few more weeks to wrap things up.

It was quite an experience working at SAP – doing a little bit of a lot of things . What I am going to miss the most is the set of amazing colleagues I had here . These are the people who keep SAP software timeless ! Knowing them and connecting them to each other was quite rewarding .

I have worked in SAP technologies for almost all my career – across development, consulting , sales, architecture and so on . In fact a good portion of my time yesterday at work was spent on debugging a FICO application in ABAP on Hana 🙂 . I must say it was quite entertaining to watch the curiosity of many younger colleagues as I was working on ABAP . It was a blast.

I also was happy to announce the brand new free trial of BW 7.4 on Hana SP7 , with BI 4.1 yesterday morning . The last version of the trial was quite a success with 1400 sign ups and 150000 hours used in about 4 months . Words cannot express how well my gang executed on this project – which still doesn’t have a cool code name 🙂

I do regret however on not being able to get on to a Mentor townhall yesterday to tell my buddies of my decision to move on. The success of SAP mentor program at SAP can be summarized as “Mark Finnern” – and Maggie is fortunate to have a guy like Mark in her team . I will miss working with Maggie, Chip and their teams .

I also regret not going to be around for the Suite on Hana trial we are working on . But knowing Ingo and team – I have nothing to worry .

Talking about people – Ingo , Rohit, Rainer , Rob and everyone in extended team have always gone out of their way to help me at every turn . I am sure our paths will cross again at some point and I will go to war with you any day . You guys are the best and I am blessed to have you in my life.

Many thanks to Mary, Jessica and Brittany for keeping me organized – without your help and guidance , I would have never navigated the SAP system . Special thanks to Meike for always finding me a way to get into Abdul’s calendar . There are many talented Executive Assistants at SAP – they are the unsung Heros , keeping everything running smoothly for the people they support . I am very grateful to all of them – and I am sure all my colleagues feel that way too .

A special shout out should go to Neel and all my other mates in the Ganges team. You guys taught me there is no mountain high enough . I will be cheering you on for a long time . You are absolute role models on how to be entrepreneurs inside a large company .

Same deal for the startup team under Aiaz and Kaustav – I don’t exactly know how you pulled off the magic you did , and I am a life long fan of your team . Continue the amazing things you do – corporate world needs more folks like you .

Mike Prosceno, Stacey and Andrea have been my go to folks at SAP before I became an employee – and they continue to be my best buddies . Thanks my friends !

Marketing colleagues at SAP don’t always get the credit they deserve . Jonathan B has built a world class marketing organization and collaborating with Ingrid, Amit, Ken and other colleagues have always been a pleasure . There are many stars in that team – like Sarah Mohammadian (no one works harder than her ) – and I am sure I will get to celebrate their success even if I am not an employee of SAP.

There are way too many colleagues in engineering to call out by name – and there are many that make the products I worked with successful whom I have not met in person . I learned a lot from them – and I hope I was some help to them as well . Engineering is what differentiates SAP from others – and I hope they continue to rock on and take SAP to greater heights .

Most of my time at SAP was spent on Hana , and especially BW on Hana . Like every big company I know of – SAP also has a complex organizational structure . It is amazing how many teams came together to make BW on Hana a success . In hindsight – the biggest challenge we had was the perception in the market that when Hana came out, BW became obsolete . I hope my colleagues don’t have to deal with that issue again since Vishal has repeatedly clarified that it is not dead . The extended BW team has a lot of very passionate people – and I will cherish the opportunity I had in working with Stefan Sigg, Thomas Zurek, Klaus Nagel, Mike Eacrett, Lothar Henkes, Prakash Darji, Chris Hallenbeck , Daniel Rutschmann , Dan Kearnan, Markus Winter and the CAL team and many many other colleagues .

Similarly , I owe a lot to my peers and their teams in the CD&SP team, and folks like Mohan Balaji, Margaret Anderson, Michael Bechauf etc with whom I could talk freely on any topic.

And finally – all the leadership team from Hasso, Bill, Jim, Vishal, Rob, Steve Lucas , Jonathan, Abdul, Aiaz, Sethu and everyone else – huge thanks for all the help and coaching . I learned a lot from all of you and am grateful for that .

So why am I leaving despite all the good things I have to say about SAP ?

My experience over the years has always been with big companies . SAP is smaller than IBM – but with more than 65000 employees, it’s quite a big company in its own right . And at an abstract level – working at one big company is not all that different from working at another . And at this stage of my career, I think my incremental learning is going to be pretty minimal if I continue to do that . It also helps that most of the things I am working on is at a stage where it is easy to hand off to another colleague to take it to its next level .

A very good friend that I had dinner with a few months ago introduced me to Max Schireson over email . Max is the CEO at MongoDB. He and I spoke several times and I got introduced to his team in the process and I absolutely was thrilled at the quality of people who work there, the founders of the company and I absolutely loved the product (an obsolete programmer like me could do a hello world in less than an hour) . I also got introduced to a few other big and small company CEOs at the same time and was fortunate to get to know them and their teams . But at the end – it seemed like MongoDB is a very special place to work at , and to grow with .

So, I have decided to join MongoDB, as VP of Global Channels. I have a good feeling that it will be an interesting challenge to build and run a top performing global channel at MongoDB . Having been part of the IBM and  SAP ecosystem for a long time , I feel confident that I have a good grip on how great channels and ecosystems work . I will explain more about my new role later in another blog post .

I didn’t make this decision alone – many friends gave me thoughtful advice . You know who you are and please know that I value your counsel a lot .

That was a rather long post and I am sure I missed calling out many people and things . I won’t be a stranger to SAP and its ecosystem . Who knows, maybe there are cool things to do between SAP and MongoDB too :).

Next steps are to hand over everything I have on my plate to other colleagues, take a short break from work – and then start the new adventure. Wish me luck !

The slippery slope of predictive Analytics


I am not the biggest football fan around – I am a big fan of cricket though. And despite my day job is about making sense of data – I don’t use much of quantitative methods when it comes to sports . I think it takes away my excitement .

After the Super Bowl game finished – I saw on twitter that SAP had predicted that Denver will win over Seattle in a close match . As it turned out – Seattle won a rather one sided match with a very young side . A few friends on twitter pointed out that SAP made a bad prediction before the game , and they are not wrong .

In parallel, I decided to skip watching the India vs NewZealand cricket series thinking India will win this 5-0 and it will be boring . I was close on my gut prediction – the score was 4-0, just that India was on the losing side of that equation . On the bright side , I am happy that I didn’t have to watch the massacre and live with the nightmares .

I didn’t work on the predictive Analytics solution that made the prediction for Super Bowl and I am not authorized by SAP to provide a response . But since I am sitting at PHX waiting for my flight in the midst of many dejected Denver fans who are analyzing the result in painful detail – I wanted to share my personal views on this matter .

Predictive Analytics in general cannot be used to make absolute predictions when there are so many variables involved . In fact – I think there is no place for absolute predictions at all . And when the results are explained to the non-statistical expert user – it should not be dumbed down to the extent that it appears to be an absolute prediction .

Predictive models make assumptions – and these should be explained to the user to provide the context . And when the model spits out a result – it also comes with some boundaries (the probability of the prediction coming true , margin of error , confidence etc). When those things are not explained – predictive Analytics start to look like reading palms or tarot cards . That is a disservice to predictive Analytics .

If the chance of Denver winning is 49% and Seattle winning is 51% – it doesn’t exactly mean Seattle will win . And not all users will look at it that way unless someone tells them more details .

In business , there is hardly any absolute prediction ever . Analytics provide a framework for decision making for the business leaders . Analytics can say that if sales increases at the same historic trend , Latin America will outperform planned numbers next year compared to Asia. However , the global sales leader might know more about the nuances that the predictive model had no idea of, and hence can decide to prioritize Asia . The additional context provided by predictive Analytics enhances the manager’s insight and over time will trend to better decisions . The idea definitely is not to over rule the intuition and experience of the manager . Of course the manager should understand clearly what the model is saying and use that information as a factor in decision making .

When this balance in approach is lost – predictive Analytics gets an unnecessary bad rap.

That being said , I heard next year Super Bowl is played in Arizona . Maybe I should start following the game a bit more closely 🙂

Are you a 1 in 10 or a 1 in 10,000?


I am honored to host a guest blog by my pal Kaustav Mitra, who is a dear friend and colleague. He is the fearless leader of the SAP startup focus program. When I joined SAP last year, Kaustav was assigned as my “buddy” to show me around 🙂 

When I say fearless, I am not just saying that in the figurative sense – I mean it literally too. If you don’t believe me – look at this photo

TigerCub

I have been bugging Kaustav endlessly to start blogging and finally succeeded. At about 3.30 AM today – he sent this to me. Please enjoy – I am sure you will like his first blog just as much as I did. 

Leading a team of talented Type A personalities is a treat but comes with its own challenges. One major part of it is trying to offer the best guidance as a manager when it comes to the topic of career progression. You see both ends of the spectrum with colleagues either overestimating or underestimating their readiness for rapid progression. Being a fan of playing with numbers in general this sent my thoughts in another direction altogether. What could a basic estimation Gedankenexperiment (love that word!) tell me about talent management?

**CAVEAT. I am not claiming that any of the numbers below are remotely accurate; they just seemed more or less reasonable. If you don’t like them, feel free to use your own guesstimates instead.**

1:10

Factoring in children, gender distributions in the global workforce, unemployment and people past their active working years I’d still estimate that about 1 person out of every 10 on this planet are employed at an organization large enough to support a career track. I use this in the broadest sense – say entities larger than a few hundred people. Using a world population of 7,000,000,000 that still gives us 700 million people working in offices, factory floors, call centers, workshops and so on.

1:100

You’re already in a privileged position if you are one in a hundred. You’ve had a good education and a lot of advantages in life. Chances are that you are in a white collar job and placed solidly in the middle class. If I stop to think about though, I’d bet you still feel very much part of the 99% rather than the 1%.If you’re competitive though the bad news is that there are 70 million others like you.

1:1,000

At one in a thousand, it should be getting hard to breathe since you’re in the upper atmosphere. You’re probably well on your way on a decent growth track with your eye on management or acknowledged functional expertise. Still doesn’t feel like though, does it? You’ve got some luxuries but you’ve also got the pressures. The nice house, the good schools and the shiny car all come at a price. And by the way, there are 7 million people who are probably as good as you.

1:10,000

Bust out your air guitar, rock stardom beckons. You’re good enough at what you do to have fundamental impact wherever you are. It still feels like you have a lot of company with 700,000 others like you around but the reality is that organizations are desperate to find people like you. Even in a large corporation with 100,000 employees there are only about a hundred people with your ability (keeping in mind that you had to be one in ten even to get in in the first place) and if employers don’t work hard to keep you, it will be to their own detriment. Congrats! You’re on the fast track.

1:100,000

Great – you’re the Big Kahuna. You’re no longer working for The Man, you ARE The Man (or The Woman, as the case may be). You’re already in the C-suite and with just 70,000 people like you around, it’s a nice little club. There are probably more than 70,000 firms around (of notable size) and they really, really want you. Feels good to be wanted, doesn’t it?

1:1,000,000

Hope you have your spacesuit on because at this altitude I can guarantee you’re not sucking air. You’ve either won a Nobel or Oscar (bonus points if you can name the two people who have won both, no Googling) or Olympic gold or otherwise need a five point font for a one page resume because your achievements are overflowing. No one will see the personal sacrifices you’ve made to get where you are because we’re blinded by your dazzle.

Most of us will never get to meet one of these people and if you do shake one of them by the hand, be sure you wrap that hand in plastic in case that talent rubs off on you. And there’s STILL 7,000 of them today on this planet.

I could take this to the logical extreme, at one in ten million, you’re a regular on the global news circuits; at one in a hundred million, much of the planet knows who you are and at one in a billion, there’s a good chance people will still know who you were a hundred years from now (all hail Jimi Hendrix).

This blog is really not about the last few categories since I can guarantee that most people in those categories are not reading this. But for everyone else, this exercise should be fascinating.

I started out talking about talent management. Employers have the tough job of recognizing and rewarding the incredible talent of people in the 1 in 10,000 category.  They not only have to attract these people; they have to keep them engaged, motivated and committed. In a corporate setting, you need the right management talent to do this effectively and the odds are not in a company’s favor when the managers are likely 1 in 10,000 people themselves. This is just not something most HR departments are designed to do well. To be certain, you can’t build a company around rock stars alone but it sure is nice to have a few handy when competition comes nipping at the heels.

On the flip side, for employees, it’s incredibly difficult to make the jump from the 1 in 10 to the 1 in 10,000. Any misstep can send you tumbling down the ladder and that is assuming you started out blessed with the colossal amount of talent, appetite for consistently insane hard work and wizard-like organizational savvy (and yes, plain dumb luck) needed. Think of the numbers and realize there are a LOT of people at least as smart as you and quite possibly, a whole lot hungrier. There’s a reason the odds against you are 1 in a 1,000. Not odds to take to the races. But here’s a basic truth. You can’t stop trying – even if your efforts don’t take you where you want to go, everything you do to improve the odds works in your favor in the long term. As good a place as any to end with one of my favorite quotes from Les Brown

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”