deal architect

The unbearable lightness of enterprise software launches

A reader of SAP Nation 2.0 commented it read like a “slow-motion train wreck”. It starts with the incredible excitement and expectations when S/4HANA was launched in February : “This is the biggest product launch in the last 23 years and perhaps the company's history,"

The book then documents the meandering, the hedging and the scope changes over the next few months with statements like “Yes, all of the [more than 900 S/4j deals are all on-premise. Our cloud piece for S/4, we’re taking it step- by-step for now. “

It ends with my predicting SAP will have to “redraw its circle” and re-think S/4 and re-launch it.

Will SAP?

Juergen Frisch of the German IS Report asked SAP executives some specific questions at the recent TechEd in Barcelona including one about industry functionality in S/4. The response (loose translation from German)

“The difference lies in the scope: technically all industry versions run on S/4HANA. But only some of them have the full coding optimized for S/4HANA. This number is to increase. Industry-oriented roadmaps shall show when which industry solution is part of S/4.”

S/4 in the cloud

“it was not intended as a vehicle to shift customers to the cloud. It brings that option, but the choice is with the customer.”

More hedging.

How can SAP be so imprecise about a product launch it called its “biggest in 23 years”? Because that is the norm in the enterprise software industry. The book looked at long launch cycles and even longer customer adoption timeframes around Oracle Fusion and next-gen products at J.D.Edwards, Infor, Microsoft and earlier at SAP.

I finished writing the book in August.

Soon after, Apple showed the world what a real product launch should look like.   On Sept 9 it announced iPhone 6s. It released it on Sep 28 -  3 weeks later. In a couple of days it had sold 13 million units! It was its most successful product launch ever – and it is no slouch when it comes to new products.

Before you dismiss that as consumer tech and toys, think of the design complexity. Just one feature in 6s – the 3D Touch – required incredible amount of planning

“Working with Corning, Apple created pliable iPhone cover glass. Swipe it, and the phone works the way it always has. But press it, and 96 sensors embedded in the backlight of the retina display measure microscopic changes in the distance between themselves and the glass.”

That was just one feature. Now think of all the planning with the contract manufacturer, Foxconn, hundreds of component suppliers, 3PLs like Fedex to get 13 million units out. 5 million in a couple of days would have qualified as a successful launch. Think the strain 13 million put on that supply chain.

But Apple keeps doing it.  So do many other companies. In contrast, enterprise software has little credibility when it hypes up new products or new releases, then takes years to deliver, and decades to get customers to migrate.

KarenAnn Terrel, CIO of Walmart, summarized that sentiment when on the main stage at SapphireNow she said

“I hope to see S4/HANA delivered in my lifetime. It’s on my bucket list.”

On my bucket list is to hear, for once, an enterprise software vendor say on a quarterly earnings call

“5% of our revenues this quarter came from our just announced product”

And I am setting the bar pretty low with 5%.

Man-Machine equilibrium

I am researching  how automation – robotics, AI, 3D printing, process bots, drones etc – is changing every job category and the results may end up in a book, several blogs. In just the beginning stages of my research, I already have twice as large audio digital files from interviews as I did for the entire SAP Nation 2.0 book.

It’s shaping up to be like my research for The New Technology Elite. That book looked at engineering efforts -  how products and services are becoming smarter with software, sensors, satellites.  When I started that project I knew for sure I would profile 10-15 industries like automobiles and medical devices which were already embedding tech in their products. In the end the book ended up cataloging over 75 industries!  In fact, I could not find a single sector which was not reshaping products and services with tech, and new design principles.

The same is likely going to be true for this book. I am finding all kinds of technologies reshaping the definition of “work” in accounting, advertising, farming, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, R&D and just about every occupation.

Some initial findings

- Not much panic ( at least in first batch of interviews) about “robots killing jobs”. Western labor having seen global competition over the last couple of decades actually sees automation as making it more competitive. Even in emerging markets there is a recognition of needing to move labor up the value chain with technology.

- Labor business models are being reshaped just as rapidly. Lots of processes getting decomposed and being serviced by contractors and entrepreneurs, not just employees. The “gig economy” is full of careers, not just short term gigs.

- Financial interests of many companies/governments actually are more threatened by automation. Many are reluctant to break down the “pyramids” of staffing they have built their margins on.  Insurance premiums and city/county speeding ticket revenues will be threatened by autonomous vehicles. More than unions and labor groups, these interests may slow down adoption of automation technologies

-  As with most technologies the traditional hype cycle is a factor.  Many automation efforts fail to deliver on their initial promises but provide side benefits like easier on-boarding, scaling, other efficiencies.

- In many industries, the resistance to automation actually comes from customers. Not every one enjoys self-service check out, mobile banking etc. Most of the world’s drivers still prefer stick shifts – will they magically warm up to more tech in autonomous vehicles? Education should be moving to more of a MOOC model but most students still want the social aspect of a campus.

So plenty of policy, education,  business model considerations even as I look at technologies reshaping every profession. 

It’s turning into a fun project – I was afraid I would hear lots of doom and gloom about “jobless futures”. It’s much more about smarter, digital workers.

Another victim of the war on terror

Freedom House monitors freedom on the web and its 2015 assessment of countries based on developments as of May was gloomy enough.

“Of the 65 countries assessed, 32 have been on a negative trajectory since June 2014. The most significant declines occurred in Libya, Ukraine, and France. Libya, tom by internal conflict experienced a troubling increase in violence against bloggers. new cases of political censorship, and rising prices for internet and mobile phone services. Ukraine, amid its own territorial conflict and propaganda war with Russia. featured more prosecutions for content that was critical of the government’s policies, as well as increased violence from pro-Russian paramilitary groups against users who posted pro-Ukraine content in the eastern regions. Franc&s standing declined primarily due to problematic policies adopted in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, such as restrictions on content that could be seen as ‘apology for terrorism,’ prosecutions & users, and significantly increased surveillance. “

With the recent incidents in Paris and the bombing of the Russian plane, things will only get worse even in the West. 

Personally, I am ok with using technology for surveillance and public security, but I know many colleagues around the world worry that leads to more Big Brother.

It behooves us all to watch for encroaching censorship, invasion of privacy, and in particular, speak out of behalf of many in places where freedom of speech has not been constitutionally protected for over two centuries.

Amazon holiday promotion for my books

Hard to believe but Amazon tells me some of you have still not read my books. Shocking

The good news is with Thanksgiving and the December holidays coming up Amazon is discounting the Kindle copies of SAP Nation and SAP Nation 2.0 by 50% starting this Sunday, November 15 – each will be priced at $ 4.99 instead of $ 9.99 for a week.

The Digital Enterprise, that I narrated for Karl-Heinz Streibich, was always priced at a very reasonable $ 3.99 on the Kindle compared to the hardback price of $ 19.99.  

I wish I had the same pricing leeway with my earlier books, The New Polymath and The New Technology Elite. The publisher John Wiley owns the rights and they have to think about their thousands of titles, not just mine.  In a way, I am flattered they think it deserves to stay at the same prices years later.

Books make great gifts. Fill your reading bag and your gift list. 

Happy reading!

He who dies with the most tweets wins?

I moderated a panel at Oracle OpenWorld. Chris Leone of Oracle introduced me to the audience as an author. My OOW registration badge said “independent analyst”. Most of my clients call me an adviser. I travel in many circles and go by many other monikers – speaker, consultant, change agent, troublemaker. 

We all produce content in various formats, for various channels. And we all like to brag – we have x thousand Twitter followers, we get so many page views, my longest presentation had x hundred slides etc.

What of that will be remembered 5, 25, 50 years from now?

I was reminded of that when I read Paul Ford’s musing in The New Republic

I am absolutely convinced that someone, someday 50 or 100 years from now, will be working at a computer near where I am seated right now, and he or she will come across the address of my office mentioned in this article—902 Broadway—and will read with amusement or wonder or puzzlement about my experiences. I greet you, and the people who follow you, and the ones after them, and I hope that I give you a moment’s satisfaction, and that you take as much pleasure from your search as I did.

I have no doubt two books I have recently read – The Martian by Andy Weir and The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobsen, will be referenced for a long time. Both have amazing amounts of research. Andy is an amateur astronaut and his work, while fictional has won admiration of several at NASA, and now with the movie adaptation, millions of other fans . Annie has doggedly researched archives going back decades in areas many would rather have left unexplored.

What would someone say about my body of work in the future? I hope they not just reference my SAP work. I hope someone asks “what made him dust off the old Greek term Polymath?” I hope someone finds useful what I have written about places like Estonia and Roosevelt Island. I hope they enjoy the blog series where hundreds of friends have written about how technology has evolved their hobbies/passions. I hope someone researching Seth Ravin of Rimini finds factoids in my writing that he likes to quote Churchill. Or that Charles Phillips of Infor designs his own shirt collars.

One of the best compliments I ever received was in an Amazon review Frank Scavo wrote

“Vinnie's way requires more work, but it's more rewarding: Do your homework, pick up the phone, talk to those at the center of the action, and learn something new.”

Thanks, Frank, but I am humbled by the breadth of Andy’s and Annie’s research. Raises the bar for my next project.

Also, it’s way too early to think about legacy. As Kenny Rogers says “…there will be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done”.

Hasso: it’s as simple as A,B,C

Dear Dr. Plattner:

I read your latest rant about Oracle and I felt vindicated in writing in SAP Nation that Oracle is Moby Dick to SAP’s Ahab. You are obsessed with that whale – in the past you would complain they would target you, now you are venting they think you are insignificant.

The best thing you can do is to ignore them and go back to basics – Applications, Budgets and Customers.

Applications – 15 years ago, you had won that battle against Oracle. Handily. Then you went off on a NetWeaver, Sybase, HANA tangent. You wanted to become a platform company like them. And while doing so amazingly you did not plan for production quality at your sophisticated customers. It’s not that HANA is not elegant or that customers particularly like legacy databases. They have systems management and talent infrastructure built for industrial level production around them. That just has not grown around HANA even after all these years. In the meantime, you have forgotten how to develop apps. BYD, now S/4 have both been amazingly poor launches from an application giant like SAP. You have spent billions acquiring cloud apps which are of mild interest to customers. T&E? Indirect materials? They expect you to attempt moonshots, not focus on tiny, edge applications. And in the meantime, for the last decade you have given Oracle a chance to reengineer their own apps for the cloud. Argue all you want but today they have a much more attractive cloud app portfolio than you do. At least for horizontal apps. You can beat them by developing the next generation of industry apps, but I see little interest from SAP in that.

Budgets – You can blame Oracle all you want but in every model I have built for SAP Nation, they cost your customers less than 10%. Actually less than 5%. Your other partners – the SIs, the hosters, the application management partners, the MPLS telcos – cause much more damage. And, boy, is the damage spectacular! The most conservative model I have shows costs in the SAP economy at $ 200 billion a year. If you add in end user costs, writeoffs and amortizations, the model balloons to $ 700 billion a year. On every benchmark  - cost of storage per gb per month, cost per MBPS in their networks, application management cost per user SAP shops look inefficient. Yet, you show little interest in managing the other vendors in your ecosystem.

Customers – I did not think this was ever possible, but SAP is these days considered even more aggressive and hostile to its customers. As one analyst called it your “indirect access assault team” and other aggressive compliance stance has pitted you against your very own customers.  In your obsession with Oracle, you have forgotten your customers. And they are responding by protecting against YOU - ring-fencing, two-tiering, going with third party maintenance, doing other summersaults to shrink the SAP core.

Hasso, I realize you are an excellent sailor and you may have a more romantic view of Ahab. But to many who have read the Herman Melville classic, he was the villain, or at best a tragic hero. He could have left the whale alone, but instead he chose to keep pursuing it. 

You can do better.  I hope you do better. I would like to write SAP Nation 3.0 in a few years, and it sure would be nice to paint a much more glowing picture of SAP.

Inviting input to my new project

Over the last few weeks, I have started work on a research project, which should turn into several blogs and may be even a book.

I am examining how automation - robotics, machine learning, wearables, drones etc - is changing every job category. I am looking at a wide range of labor pools – in public accounting, advertising, agriculture, construction, customer service, healthcare, hospitality, logistics,  outsourcing (BPO and ITO), manufacturing, software development and transportation among them. And related to that I am also looking at the policy implications for businesses, governments, labor groups and universities.

Ideally, I am looking to profile appropriate blends of man and machine which make the labor smarter - so neither a dystopian "jobless" future like in a chip fab, nor in contrast a labor intensive SAP type ecosystem

I would welcome input from readers – any technologies that have impressed you, or any companies, industries or countries which are handling the man-machine transition well. Happy to interview you and give you appropriate credit in what I write about the future of digital work.

Digital Transformation–India Visa Process

Last February, I described the nightmare applying for visas to India. In the end the trip got cancelled before my wife and I got the ten year visa on our passports.

For these holidays we were looking at a family trip to India and I applied for the kids with a sense of dread.

The good news this time. Several improvements:

• India uses a new outsourcer, Cox and Kings and as the tracking shows, the processing time was a reasonable 7 days
• The website was much more stable – though it is mostly optimized for IE
• I did not have to make a single call or send a single email to check on the status. They emailed us periodic updates.

All good stuff, but the process is still very analog. The package we sent in had 9 pages (for each) of documentation in addition to the passport, photo and money order.

We had to go to the post office to get money orders, Walgreens to get photos, UPS for the shipping documents. All those steps can be digitized. The site says you can pay online, but I could not find where. The application allows you to upload a digital photo, but also requires a printed photo, and a copy of your driver’s license.

The application asks redundant questions, and then the site has you fill out other forms which ask more redundant questions. There are other land mines – multiple signatures required, and one in particular can cause rejections if it is not in a specific block.  Also, try jamming in the space provided "countries visited in last 10 years"

The site should have a configurator which tells you what your total fee is. Instead they make you navigate this confusing schedule

The 7 day processing is a bit misleading. We shipped the application by UPS on October 12 and got it back October 30.

These days you can get a visa upon arrival in India. That's a for one time visit, but should the multi-year visa process not be similarly streamlined? For a country so adept at software development, the process should be a much more pleasant digital experience.

Oracle Cloud: If you build it, will they come?

The Coliseum loomed large for me this week at Oracle OpenWorld. I flew into Oakland and took the new people-mover from the airport to the BART station at the venue which Oracle sponsors. So much more appealing and efficient than the previous shuttle buses. The Golden State Warriors who play there were part of the OOW keynotes. But I was thinking more of the Roman structure – the one considered one of the greatest pieces of architecture ever as I heard plenty of perspectives about the massive scale and durability being designed in the Oracle cloud.

Steve Miranda, one of the nicest executives in the software industry, described with a sense of accomplishment and weariness the decade-long journey Oracle has taken to port and build new ones its broad application cloud cluster – CX, HCM, ERP, SCM, EPM and Data. Thomas Kurian, President, did a repeat performance (from the cloud summit earlier this year) of his breathtaking command of Oracle’s as a service offerings – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and DaaS. Larry Ellison, now CTO, did a masterful talk on security design principles “security shouldn’t be a matter of choice: with us, security is always on” (the entire talk is worth listening to here). In an earlier presentation, in a “we are not in Kansas anymore” moment he pointed out Oracle’s new competition is Salesforce,Workday, Amazon and Microsoft, and much less SAP and IBM.

In many ways, though I wish Larry had talked about the real fear that is holding back enterprises from aggressively moving into the cloud.  It’s the trillions they have spent on back office and IT infrastructure in the last couple of decades. Data breaches are scary enough, budget breaches at that scale are terrifying. And the bad actors have not been black hats from outlaw locations – they have been the IT vendors we know and love. The customer fear is the cloud is just a spray paint for continuing past  behavior – and they need to be secured against that.

As Mark Hurd likes to say “there is no money for IT”. He is right – there’s far better payback in technology in sensors and software in customer products, in digital channels and business models. And companies are streamlining their back office and IT infrastructure spend. In SAP Nation 2.0 I outlined 9 strategies companies are adopting. Most are ring-fencing, two-tiering, adopting third party maintenance, streamlining outsourcers rather than “ripping and replacing”.

The book also looked at how long it has taken other enterprise software vendors – JD Edwards, Microsoft, Infor – to migrate their customer bases to next-gen products. If Oracle wants to break that customer lethargy, here is what it needs to highlight next. That its partners are automating the migration to the cloud and the management there. Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys, talked about his Panaya change management tools in his keynote. They need similar automation for data conversion, testing and other systems integration steps. They need more consultant multi-tenancy, and much less travel. They need smarter application management with process bots and machine learning. They need dramatically cheaper network connectivity.  At SAP’s SapphireNow, the huge partner booths are a reminder of the massive costs of its ecosystem. At OOW, the partner booths were in a separate building, but the vibe is similar. Oracle has to aggressively manage this.

And Oracle needs to showcase its own behavior will be different going forward. Oracle and SAP are regularly mentioned by customers as “aggressive” and “hostile”. Many compare them to the CA of the 90s. This is where, as Larry says, Oracle needs to no longer be compared to SAP.

Oracle’s “cloud Coliseum” design is impressive and it is years ahead of many competitors. It also has the potential to become an enduring one like the one in Rome. But Oracle and its partners need to develop the automated “people movers” and build confidence it is safe for customers to get there.