deal architect

High Road

When I started to write the book on the SAP economy I had counted on customer, market watcher and competitor input.

What’s been surprising – and actually inspiring – is how restrained competitor executives have been in their critique of SAP.

Of course they have quotes in articles in the 20 years of archives I am mining for the book. I will use them sparingly and let the customers and the analysts I have interviewed and the data I have access to, to do more of the talking.

Respect!

Shame on who?

You have heard the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. But if you get fooled 6-7-8 times, who do you blame?

As I go through every nook and crevice of the SAP economy for the book I am writing, it is staggering how every type of vendor has premium priced – over and over. Of course you get the usual validation – oh, it comes with better SLAs, responsiveness, Q0S etc etc.

a) SAP has made a habit of charging in different ways for “adjacencies” or repackaged functionality customers have previously paid for

b) Consultants brag about having done thousands of SAP projects, then expect a premium for that experience, when they should be passing along economies of scale and repetition 

c) Consultant travel continues at staggering levels even as telepresence has improved and many project phases should be done in “factories” not at client sites

d) Indian vendors who proudly delivered continuous improvements via their CMM Level 5 and Six Sigma programs on legacy and even arcane vertical apps, seem to have forgotten that in their SAP customers

e) Any one with a credit card can buy cloud storage from Amazon at 3c a gb a month. SAP hosting partners charge 10-20-30X.

f) MPLS pricing for networks into centralized SAP sites continues to be shockingly high.   Rates of $ 100 to 200 per mbps, when you and I as consumers pay $ 1-5 per month. Hey but it’s more reliable.

g) HANA hardware, being memory intensive and only certified from a handful of vendors, is off the charts compared to other server pricing.

Like I said, most customers have good validations for  the spend but looking at it from the wide set of data points I have collected, you have to wonder how many of them realized they were buying a car would need premium fuel, and yet deliver low MPG, need $ 100 oil changes and $ 1,000 tires and and …

Oracle DaaS – Data-as-a-Service

Oracle invited me to moderate a panel in their DaaS launch today. Watch the whole hour for some great perspectives on this exciting new market category, and our panel starting around 26.00.

Talking to Steve Miranda and Omar Tawakol before and after I got even more excited about the concept

a) There is a new generation of data asset entrepreneurs like Omar (whose company, BlueKai Oracle acquired) who are about separating signal from noise– under NDA I have been briefed by other entrepreneurs focused on supply chain, HR and other DaaS. Scary smart folks.

b) Watching Omar talk about all the social and other marketing data feeds, Steve talking about feeds from machines and wearables, you realize we are not anymore in the Kansas of internal, structured data so many companies are still heavily invested in

c) How rapidly business and deployment models are changing. While the old model of “buy hardware, install software, load data, clean for quality – pay for all that” is not going away the speed of getting started with and the economics of DaaS are going to be compelling

d) How effortlessly Oracle with its decades of data management experience and horizontal and vertical application knowledge could play in a wide range of DaaS categories. 

“Uber Alles Paralysis”

As the World Cup winds down, it has been such a celebration of global diversity. Polite Japanese fans cleaning up after themselves. Crushed Brazilian fans applauding the German team.

And the reverse – way too many leaders blaming losses on the field on geopolitics. The need to have a campaign to stand up to racism.

My research for my book on SAP is exposing me to more  national stereotypes. 2 decades ago, I used to hear clichés about German engineering prowess. As if hardware and design excellence applied equally to enterprise software. Or the reverse in the form of German bureaucracy and works councils and the related paralysis.

Now it is the reverse about the “Americanization” of SAP. That new CEO, Bill McDermott will be SAP’s Stephen Elop. He will gut the company and sell the IP and data to non-Germans. That it is one big, bad NSA plot.

Lost in all this nonsense is the fact that SAP’s biggest threat is its runaway economy. That Bill should be aggressively taming its ecosystem which year on year adds 8 to 10X to customer burden what SAP charges them. Rather than spending time in Walldorf convincing people he is not Elop.

My daughter came back from a European trip this summer and announced “Dad, your 50 country tally is well within reach”. At her age I had been to  2 countries!

The more we globalize, the more nationalist morons of all stripes raise their ugly head. And just paralyze progress. By the time Rita gets to 50 countries on her passport I hope we have evolved more positively.

Brasil won

Kudos to Germany for that amazing victory.

But it was just a game. Brazil has been winning millions of hearts in the last month. Like that of my nephew who had a fabulous week there during the FIFA WC. And hundreds of millions who have watched Brazil  welcome all kinds of fans to its stadiums, its beaches and its forests. Watching the street art and listening to the samba  and the spine tingling anthem on ESPN reminded me its been 20 years since I have been there. Time to revisit.

I must say I was rooting for Brazil after I saw Tom Rinaldi’s heart warming story on deaf/blind Carlos who with the help of tactical field and optical communication from two very dedicated sign language instructors has enjoyed every game.

All three must be crushed tonight but hope they realize they have won many fans around the world.

Happy 10th, Deal Architect

Filing quarterly corporate taxes I came across Deal Architect’s incorporation papers. Happy (belated) birthday!

It’s a good time to thank so many for the decade:

• Many consulting clients of the company - you have trusted us with many  leading edge, strategic projects. Thank you.
• Our blog sponsors – you have funded over 9,000 posts and allowed us a wide independence berth. Thank you.
• Our case studies – over 75 across 4 books have patiently worked with us to share your experiences with others. Thank you.
• Event hosts – to so many who have invited us to speak or participate.  Has made our content and our lives so much richer. Thank you.
• Readers – of our books and blogs. Thank you for engaging,  contributing  comments and guest columns, encouraging .

So many more to thank. Sincerely appreciate the continued support!

Slow Cooked

Those who read my books know they tend to be case study heavy and dense with forward looking  details – that’s the nature of innovation genre writing.

My book on SAP is similar – heavy with customer dialog, but very different in that it has a focus on the past.

Turns out it is my 25th anniversary of “meeting” SAP. In 1989, while on assignment with Price Waterhouse in London, I led a team to set up SAP R/2 and McCormack and Dodge prototypes on our mainframe in our brand new Docklands data center.

So, the book is turning into a bit of retrospective. Archives from my Software Intelligence Group at PW which analyzed emerging client/server applications from 1993-1995. Customer notes, Walldorf visit notes and many research notes on SAP from my stint at Gartner from 1995-2000. Documents from our start-up IQ4hire from 2001-2003 where we built tools to help customers better pick systems integration services. Notes from many visits to SAP application management and hosting firms around world as part of Deal Architect consulting. Countless Sapphire trips and SAP meetings and related blogs over last decade.

It is deja vu all over again to see warnings we issued in 1994 and every couple of years since have become reality  in the countless stories of overruns and lawsuits around SAP. How wave after wave of SAP partners have taken advantage of loose controls in its ecosystem.

It is striking to read the word “simplification” over and over from SAP executives now going back 15 years. Or that Hasso Plattner actually once said ‘The more complex, the better. We Germans could never invent such a simple product as Coca Cola.”

What has been much more enjoyable has been to talk to customers about their strategies to manage SAP and players from its ecosystems and their sprawl of instances.

It has been as enjoyable to meet several “influencers”. One is a historian who explained to me using S curves the emergence and growth of the SAP economy. Fascinating. Another has followed software licensing trends for over a decade. Another has watched outsourcing trends for a while. Another has a database of 000s of articles and blogs, elaborately tagged, on the software industry. Talk about a treasure trove.

I called them “influencers” in quotes because you  don’t see them at SAP events. They are not on the SAP twitter circuit. I doubt SAP ever talks to them.

I hope they allow me to quote them by name in the book. Because customers need to get to know them better. And when they do they will realize how siloed and shallow current coverage of SAP and its ecosystem really is. 

Not surprisingly, I have been thinking quite a bit of late about the Santayana quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

More positively, I am enjoying the recall of many happy and humorous times in the last 25 years. The book, I hope, will on balance reflect that positive vibe.