...gone are the dark clouds that had me blind" - Johnny Nash
I drove away from the dark clouds which ruined my view of the shuttle launch yesterday to get to a meeting with Leo Apotheker. I wrote yesterday I hoped the conversation would be strategic. And Leo focused on "clarity" - and repeated the theme in his keynote this morning. Clarity through better in-memory expedited analytics - with the SAP/Business Objects Explorer. Clarity as in a play on Clear Standards - a new acquisition that helps clients measure carbon footprint data.
At one point he got up and walked across the large conference room which is his suite for the event, and dragged an easel closer to our table. He drew a bar chart with China and India occupying almost 60% of the bar. He turned to Mike Prosceno (who runs blogger relations for SAP) and me and asked us to guess when the world's GDP would reflect that. I guessed: 2025. Mike: 2018. Leo's correct answer: 1742. Look back to look ahead. More clarity...and of course, talked about how SAP is positioned in both markets. Including an application which delivers analytics via SMS in a bandwidth constrained region.
Industry futures of SaaS and clouds? On Oracle/Sun - Leo said he does not believe owning the entire stack was necessary, and walked over to bring me a copy of Business Network Transformation, a new SAP sponsored book. The future winners will be efficient "network orchestrators".
He then spent some time on clouds - private and public. BusinessByDesign is looking better and better. Multi-tenancy economics are improving. They have learned a lot about data center operations and pesky stuff like patch management in shared application platforms from the first 80 or so early adopters. They are learning about "low-touch" customer management. He cringed a bit when I asked what if your larger customers want that at those economics? But recovered - it's about customer choice. As we are coaching Wall Street we have a steady and rising base of subscription revenue.
On public clouds - hey, we internally tested R/3 on the amazon cloud. Ran fine. You will see more from us about utilizing cloud infrastructures.
At the press conference this morning though SAP prominently showcased more old-line, on premise partners - IBM, HP and Dell. In my session, he smiled when I said SAP in past had been "too generous" to his partners - not sure why SAP thinks it will be a more efficient network orchestrator in the future.
But I nitpick....it's all-clear
"...look around us, nothing but blue skies...look straight ahead, nothing but blue skies"
