The SAP analyst/media summit this year was at the Park Plaza, a building which dates back to 1927. When it opened it had all kinds of innovations "in-room telephones, mail & laundry chutes on each floor and the "Servidoor," a panel in each guestroom door which allowed the valet to deliver laundry without disturbing the guest."
Today, the hotel is quaint. My room was huge, but mostly wasted real estate. The electrical outlets were few and hard to reach. The room heated inconsistently - with the washroom like a sauna. The wi-fi was spotty in the large conference rooms with chandeliers and thick walls. Not very practical for today's connected business traveler.
I could not help compare it to the state of SAP today.
We touched on plenty of innovations during the session. There were demos and discussions around mobile interfaces, surface computing, in-memory, Google Wave, multi-tenancy, smart electricity girds and other sustainability topics.
But underneath it all was accounting data in the analytics, hr time sheets in the mobile interface, allocation of iTunes revenues, billing functionality in the breakout on utilities (smart grids and meters allow them to collect usage data every 15 minutes rather than on a monthly, manual basis and force them to upgrade their back office), asset management to help utilities as they get set to invest trillions in new renewable fuel sources, carbon accounting and compliance in the sustainability track.
SAP has become very good at latching on to innovation coming out of Apple, Google, cleantech and other sources and basically tacking 10-20-30 year old functionality to it, and calling it "their innovation".
Ironically, as Tom Wailgum of CIO magazine tweeted that the term ERP has been banished from the SAP vocabulary - when over and over again, once you peeled the skin of the "innovation" layer it was good-old ERP. For the talk of agile and rapid 3 month projects, in the energy industry breakout was a utility CIO describing an Accenture project of 40,000 man days to implement SAP functionality to update his customer information system. If such backoffice projects at SAP and Accenture pricing are not ROI killers and make a mockery of the energy saving innovations coming out of smart meters and smart grids, not sure what is.
But more concerning is it struggles to get even those innovations into broad release. And the long time it is taking to get mainstream adoption in customer base (ECC 6.0 is now in its 4th year, with half the customer base there - many there primarily because of earlier versions being de-supported)
Is SAP better than Oracle, Lawson and other old-guard vendors in at least experimenting with newer technologies? Absolutely.
Is it delivering value? Like the Park Plaza if you are a tourist and history buff, yes. But as a businessman, not really.
I wish SAP would dramatically retro-fit the old structure. It is being done in a number of older hotels the world over. Takes a house cleaning mentality. At Intel they call it "eating your own children"
