deal architect

SAP Nation 2.0 Excerpt: Make the problem bigger

As with previous books, I have been excerpting 10% of the contents. You can buy the book at several stores (online in paperback at CreateSpace and ebook at Amazon).

2.0 looks at the prospects of S/4HANA which SAP launched in February of this year. Here is some from Chapter 7 which discusses over 15 pages, why SAP will need to keep expanding the scope of S/4

- In some ways, however, they began with too small a “circle” The initial scope for S/4 did not include their industry solutions or any of their Business One, BYD, BusinessObjects or other products SAP already had in its portfolio.

Then they have kept on digging a bigger hole for themselves. In 2012, they had barely consummated the SuccessFactors acquisition, and since then they have acquired Ariba, Concur, hybris, Fieldglass and many other companies. SAP also keeps chasing after new industries—especially sexier ones like sports teams—thus adding to its development backlog. Its product teams had to catch up to waves of new mobile, social and other technologies. To show off those investments, SAP claims volumes of 130 million mobile users and 18 million Jam users. All these users will need migrations, as will 300,000 screens across this growing portfolio.

The acquisitions and new products were necessary to generate new revenue. Wall Street likes that as it does the positive impact the U.S. dollar’s strength has had on SAP’s results this year. The acquisition spree has, however, made the SAP development/integration job exponentially more difficult. The number of databases it has to support has grown with HANA and Sybase (acquired in 2010). The number of configurations has grown with on-premise, private, public and hybrid cloud varieties.

- This book provided some perspectives on how those and other questions may be answered. Much better answers will come over the next few years as a result of the circle that SAP re-draws around S/4 and the thousands of circles its customers are drawing.

There's nothing wrong in re-thinking and re-launching
a product. Brian Chesky, co-founder of the wildly successful
hospitality exchange Airbnb, recently tweeted:

”If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We
launched 3 times.”

We the People

I have been on civil juries. I have been an expert witness in a few pieces of technology litigation. I do not, however, go too often as an observer to many courtrooms. Finding myself in Las Vegas this week, I got a chance to do just that. I attended the morning session yesterday in Courtroom 4B of the Lloyd D. George building. Case 2:10-cv-106-LRH-PAL was in session. For enterprise software folks, that translates to the Oracle v. Rimini Street trial.

My author instincts kicked in as soon as the building security guard saw in his X-Ray machine the sharp object in my roller bag ( I was headed to the airport afterwards). On multiple recent airport TSA checks, nobody has asked about it. “It” being the spindle of my electric toothbrush. I was impressed they had me take it out for inspection. Security was a major design consideration for the building, the staff there explained, as it was one of the first Federal buildings commissioned after the Oklahoma City Courthouse bombing.

Security aside, the building aesthetics have won it several awards even in a city with all kinds of interesting architecture. The courtroom itself commanded respect. The high cherry paneled walls (the one behind the judge was in grey, what I was told, Italian marble) blended seamlessly with the benches and other furniture in the room. There was plenty of modern tech – displays everywhere with software to highlight spreadsheets and other specific sections from depositions, and near instant playback of specific sections of video testimony. Of course, no courtroom can escape paper. I noticed at least 30 Bankers Boxes filled with presumably depositions and reports from the expert witnesses.

I felt warm about the respect shown to the jury – everyone stood up when they entered and left the room. I felt, however, a twinge of sympathy for the jury. My own involvement on juries has never lasted more than a day. On far less complex topics. And in far less crowded courtrooms. This one had 9 attorneys representing Oracle, and 4 for Rimini. There were court reporters, law clerks and other support for the judge and like me, another 20 or so spectators.

The jury has had to sit through a fortnight of details on intellectual property nuances, and contracts going back a decade and longer.

The technology world has changed so much since.

As I wrote when the trial started

(Software maintenance) deserves to reflect the new world of ring fences and satellite apps that many vendors have acquired, and those customers have themselves implemented not just support for 20+ year old core software, it deserves better SLA and it deserves to be much cheaper especially for that 20+ year old core software.

That’s not the job of this courtroom, no matter how this jury  decides. It’s for all of us software customers, vendors and analysts to keep pushing for.

But I was glad I spent a few hours in the courtroom and learn about the building’s design and history. And I appreciated the grace of the Judge, Larry R. Hicks, who politely thanked the jury (as I am sure he does every day) for a trial which as he pointed out had entered October as if to say he had hoped the attorneys had moved it along quicker.   

Photo Credit

Workday Rising: Fun and Focus

Most vendors have moved to a bi-annual briefing of analysts – once at a dedicated summit, the other at their user conference. I find the latter a bit redundant – unless spaced out well from the summit. I also feel like I am intruding on what is meant to be customer time for vendor executives.

Having said that, Workday invites us for a day at their user conference and that is appropriate amount of briefing time. The opening keynote where the co-founders, Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri make fun of themselves and take gentle jabs at others is usually a treat. Takes lot of prep – the kickoff video below took several of the executives the entire day to shoot and is well worth the 4 minute watch.

 

They also work in product updates and other goofy stuff which humanizes the stuffy enterprise software space.

There is usually time to catch up with crazy smart folks like Stan Swete, Petros Dermetzis, Leighanne Levensaler and others who are constantly thinking about cloud and data architectures and the future of HCM. And I usually get a chance to spend some time with customers and prospects.

This year, a few analysts made it a bit more fun. We did our version of the scavenger hunt. Our goal was to guesstimate how much it cost the event’s two main sponsors, Deloitte and Accenture the right to be branded as “Titanium”.  We huddled in different rooms, scrounged the  show floor, bribed/cajoled and got some estimates. How much does it cost – I could tell you but then I would have to …. My bribes were in the form of a few cups of Starbucks, which at Vegas prices is not small, but well worth the fun exercise.

Donald Trump is right on one thing. We have become too politically correct. The keynote managed to offend a wide range of people with references to the Pope, Caitlyn Jenner, the German flag and other items. For good measure there was even a Donald Trump joke.

Of course, I nitpicked for different reasons. For a while now, I have been vocal about Workday needing to verticalize more aggressively beyond their Higher Education initiative. Actually, it’s not me – it’s a number of CIOs I have interviewed for the two SAP Nation books who keep asking why cloud vendors seem loathe to verticalize. The day after Rising, I was at GE’s Minds+Machines events, and that was all about verticals with sessions and booths titled Healthcare Big Data,  Digital Power Plant, Brilliant Factory and Airline Operations.  The contrast was striking.

But to the offended me and the folks above, the rational me says “Find me vendors with a string of annual 95+% customer satisfaction scores. Find me vendors about to break into the billion dollar revenue club – a rarefied space in the cloud. Find me vendors with this kind of diversity in the executive ranks (below from a q&a session for analysts – credit Diginomica).”

Workday, stay focused – and continue to keep it fun. Ignore the nitpickers -  yes that includes me.

Postmodern ERP Strategies: Next-gen infrastructure

Another in the series of postmodern ERP Strategies. While these are excerpted from SAP Nation 2.0, the concepts can be applied to many other ERP environments. 

A number of SAP customers have been changing hosting providers and moving to private clouds from providers including Virtustream, itelligence and Secure 24. Private clouds provide only a fraction of the economic benefits of public clouds, but many customers would prefer not to give up their customizations or feeling of control, and private clouds give them a level of virtualization savings compared to their prior hosting contracts.

Velocity Technology Solutions specializes in private clouds across SAP, Oracle, Infor and other ERP environments. It also provides more than just hosting services. For example, in its arrangement with BCBG, a fashion house, Velocity took over support for its JD Edwards, SAP, ACS and PkMS systems for its financials, retail management, apparel management and warehouse management, respectively. They were migrated from on-premise data centers and other hosting providers to Velocity’s Virtual Private Cloud and covered by Velocity’s Managed Application Services & Managed Disaster Recovery.

Additionally, as competitors like Infor and Unit4 leverage Amazon and Microsoft infrastructure-as-a-service, many SAP customers are also experimenting with public cloud infrastructures on their own.

Postmodern ERP Strategies: Next-Gen Application Management

Another in the series of postmodern ERP Strategies. While these are excerpted from SAP Nation 2.0, the concepts can be applied to many other ERP environments. 

One of the largest cost components in the SAP economy is application management, much of it outsourced. That segment is being challenged to automate its labor, and also transition away from the traditional headcount based business model to one as-a-service.

Former SAP CTO, Vishal Sikka now heads Infosys, a major SAP implementer and application management firm. Infosys has announced a significant commitment to automation. "The company has set a long-term internal target of up to 70% automation in

its infrastructure management business, and up to 55% automation in its business process outsourcing business. Currently, 35-40% of its BPO processes are automated."

One of the automation moves at Infosys has been acquisition of Panaya, the tools vendor described earlier in the book.

There are other potential savings from swapping application management providers. The Indian outsourcer HCL calls it "re-bid" business and "guarantees" over 30% cost reduction using its proprietary ALT ASM framework. It has done well replacing incumbents like Accenture, Deloitte, HP and other Indian providers in many SAP outsourcing deals.

More excerpts over the next few days.