On my trip to the SAP Influencer summit this week, I was glad to spend time with 2 professionals that bring a different dimension to the behemoth that is SAP
Craig Cmehil, a fellow Enterprise Irregular, is one of the major evangelists of the rapidly growing SAP community, the SDN. He also organizes the equivalent of "hacker nights" at the TechEd shows SAP runs in Vegas, Berlin and Bangalore - where innovations in the SDN are showcased. He is always experimenting with development, social, community collaboration other tools - whether invented at SAP or not. The start-up geek who is not constrained by corporate focused development organization.
Korey Lind, a former colleague at PwC, who has for over 15 years been a VAR for Great Plains (now part of Microsoft) and for the last few years for SAP's BusinessOne product line. SAP identified her company, Third Wave Business Systems as one of its best partners in that channel. Korey has always been a no-nonsense, and fairly honestly described her experiences with both Microsoft and SAP and the realities of much smaller customers than she and I dealt with at PwC.
Too often I see SAP fixated on Oracle, and doing just enough to look better than Oracle. To me, they need a lot more Craigs and Koreys in their ecosystem - to move them away from not-invented-here development thinking, and the need to think in much more disruptive TCO terms.
