deal architect

Predict and Prepare

I am honored to be part of Bill Kutik’s 7th annual videocast about trends in enterprise software, especially around HCM and Financials. Sponsored by Workday, I will join Naomi Bloom and Brian Sommer live on December 16 at 11 am pacific from Palo Alto, CA.

If you have seen  the four of us on panels, you know we can be interesting, informative and sometimes, infuriating

This year there will be plenty of factoids and forecasts on cloud trends, Big Data opportunities and  changing implementation models.

Look forward to your participation and questions. Registration Details here

Thank you, Amazon

As I release another book, I am reminded once again how relentlessly customer-friendly Amazon is.

Amazon has a growing number of detractors – investors are unhappy with its losses, Europeans about privacy and its data locations, labor groups about the automation in its logistics. As a customer advocate, let me continue to give them a major thumbs up.

My previous books have written about their Kiva robots, their “postal injections” and other warehouse and shipping innovations. They keep innovating with drones and other supply chain efficiencies to the benefit of customers.

Their Amazon Web Services relentlessly cuts storage costs every quarter, and more recently they have been focusing on cloud networking efficiencies. Helps customers by keeping the technology supply chain honest.

As I release my book on Kindle, I am impressed that Amazon actually incents me to price the eBook reasonably. Its royalties are higher if you price to the benefit of readers . And reasonably, as in even lower prices in emerging economies like Brazil and India. And btw, the royalties on each book will be higher than my royalties my previous publisher paid me at 3X the price. Amazon has cut out the inefficient middleman.

Jeff Bezos is known to have an empty seat in management meetings to remind them of the symbolic customer who is  watching over them.  On this Black Friday, let me salute the company even as the chorus of naysayers around it keeps getting louder.

Announcing availability: SAP Nation

This weekend I emailed preview copies of my new book on the SAP economy to select media around the world. I have attached below the “front matter” for my blog readers – the table of contents and the preface.

In time for Black Friday, Amazon is taking pre-orders for the Kindle version here or via their badge on left.

Softcover and other eBook formats will follow. Hardcovers are only being planned for bulk (25+) orders – if interested in that format please contact me.

As with my previous books, I will excerpt portions of the book on this blog as a way of thanking my regular readers. I look forward to your feedback over the next few weeks. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!

“SAP Nation

From its humble beginnings in Germany, SAP skyrocketed to become a global powerhouse and the technology backbone for tens of thousands of enterprises. The economy around it grew even faster, and “SAP Nation” now approaches the GDP of Ireland in size. This book documents both trajectories, based on decades of research and interviews of hundreds of customers, market analysts and competitors.

SAP’s influence has declined in the last decade, as enterprises invest in cloud, social, analytical and mobile technologies and in custom development of “systems of advantage” in their products, channels and business models. Yet, shockingly, customer spending in SAP Nation remains stubbornly high. The model in the book estimates post-recession investment at more than one trillion dollars (yes!).

This book brings out loudly the voice of SAP customers as they cope with this runaway economy. Twenty-five case studies showcase a spectrum of strategies – some are “ring fencing” SAP with Workday, others are switching maintenance to Rimini Street, yet others are insourcing, while still others are evaluating newer SAP products like HANA and acquisitions like Concur.

Part root cause analysis and part strategy manual, this book is a must-read for anyone with interest in SAP – as customer, employee, partner, investor or competitor. It is a fast-paced look at decades of what SAP has done well, and what it could have done better.

Executives everywhere, even those in non-SAP settings, will benefit from the strategies described in the book to migrate inefficient back-office IT dollars to front-office innovation.”

Download SAP Nation Front Matter

SAP Simplification: an exciting development

It’s tough to miss a 3 page, full color spread in the Wall Street Journal. And if you miss it, it slaps you on the head a couple of days later. Dr Hasso Plattner’s conversation with Dennis Howlett provides more clues. Slowly but surely, SAP “Run Simple” is moving from marketing tagline to action.

It’s about time.

My book, SAP Nation, due out middle of December, shows its customers spent over a $ trillion since the recession. This when cloud, mobile and other trends and front office innovation opportunities would suggest a significant slowdown in back office IT investment. The book provides a detailed inventory of inefficiencies that SAP should tackle.

The even more positive development the book profiles is a number of “simplification” efforts at SAP customers. They have not waited for SAP and they are seeing 20, 40, 60% lighter IT budgets and agility and other benefits.  I profile 12 of their strategies – some are consolidating instances, some are changing outsourcers, some are “ring fencing” SAP with clouds etc. The customers I talked to are the “canaries in the coal mine”. These early-movers will inspire other SAP customers to similarly simplify.

Between what SAP does and what its customers do, we should see a nice reduction in the $ 200+ billion a year SAP Nation. That means money for all kinds of new innovation projects – HANA and much else. 

How can you not be excited with that?

Workday Rising: Speak softly and carry big, happy customers

Howard Street in San Francisco on Tuesday morning looked different. The tarmac was visible and cars were actually using it. Outside Moscone Center, a local folk rock band, Blind Willies was playing. Excellent, but nowhere near the brand recognition of say, Aerosmtih or Will.i.am. Inside Moscone, the rooms had plenty of empty seats.

Welcome to Workday Rising. It was tough to miss how low-key this event was compared to Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld over the last few weeks.

The energy was all in the customer interaction.

An executive from Equifax gushed about the bi-annual upgrade process - how painless it is and just as importantly the comfort he got from the fact that his peers were testing the same release at the same time, and how he could benefit from the wisdom of that crowd. He echoed a phrase co-founder Dave Duffield likes to use - “The Power of One” as in having a consistent release across the customer base

An executive from HP described their  HCM project which touches over 300,000 employees across the world. He described delivering that in just 14 months as the equivalent of “winning the Super Bowl”. He said he is now looking to a similar victory on a just-as-complex project as HP moves to split itself in two.

Stan Swete, CTO told analysts a few weeks ago “Customers don’t want to be bothered with the details of the infrastructure used to support their operations, but they do want the assurance that their vendor will be able to evolve and not get stuck on outdated technologies.” At Rising, Aneel Bhusri reported 99.95% uptime – deliver that and most customers will not want to be bothered with details of the infrastructure.

A customer described their relationship with Workday as “vivacious”. Have you ever heard someone describe their enterprise software vendor that way? It shows in the 97% favorable customer rating Bhusri shared with the audience.

Chapter 1 of my book on the SAP economy begins on February 23, 2008.  It says “When the history of technology is written, it will, however, honor the 54^th day in 2008 for a meeting which would change the trajectory of enterprise computing.”. My book will be out in a month and you can see what I mean but let me just say it has something to do with a large, early Workday customer. As I walked out of Moscone this week, I was thinking of a comment Dan Beck made in a one-on-one. He leads the Data Science team and presented on a series of Insight Apps (like on Retention Risk and Collection Scorecards) in the morning. He said a customer approached him afterwards  and told him what he saw got him as excited as their early experience with cloud computing at Workday.

I am fairly confident that will be more fodder for another book in a few years. Low-key conferences are just fine.