Signs of Spring in Enterprise Software

The country is seeing a welcome break from the polar vortex. Temperatures remind us of Spring. Well, may not quite - winter is not done, but there is clear hope.

It's easy when you look at Wall Street's reaction to Workday or ServiceNow results to forget reality.  The reality is that there are over a million SAP, Oracle, Infor, Unit4, IFS, ADP, qad and other enterprise customers who are stuck with 15-30 year old ECC, Siebel, Lawson, Agresso, MFG/PRO and other legacy implementations.  For all the success of Salesforce, NetSuite, other SaaS vendors, and new products like S/4 and Fusion, the vast majority of the enterprise is in the tundra. There are a variety of reasons as Holger Mueller, Cindy Jutras, Frank Scavo and others explain in my upcoming book, SAP Nation 3.0. I also have a section on what I call SAP's "unforced errors". Trust me, I also show plenty of mistakes made by SAP's competitors.

However, I found signs of spring as I finished editing my book manuscript. It has 50 case studies spread over 200+ pages describing how they are  trying out different strategies.

Here is a sampling of strategies:

• Trying out Leonardo ML and IoT at Costco and GEBHARDT.
• Ring-fencing ECC with many of SAP's cloud properties, as with SuccessFactors at Terumo BCT and components of C/4 at Pregis, or Workday at Sanofi and Salesforce at Unilever.
• Two-tier deployments with SAP ByD and S/4 in their subsidiaries.
• Migration from ECC to S/4 on-premise at Johnsonville Sausage.
• New implementations in the S/4 Public Cloud like at MOD Pizza
• Trying out relatively new on-premise, but impactful, SAP functionality like IBP at Louisiana-Pacific.
• Leverage of mobile, wearable, satellite and sensory data at variety of customers    
• Developing new ISV functionality on SCP as Vertex has done with their indirect tax app.
• Next-gen data using the SAP Analytics Cloud like at the Executive Huddle at the San Francisco 49ers statdium
• Moving to new licensing and hosting models like Bombardier with IBM.

We also are seeing blends from this growing toolbox of strategies. So, CF Industries is moving to S/4 in the cloud, and at the same time has shifted to TPM from Rimini for its ECC support while it gradually migrates. GEBHARDT has been implementing a variety of SAP cloud products around its ECC on-prem implementation. Additionally, it has developed a customer portal and set of predictive maintenance services using Leonardo IoT and AIN capabilities.  

In addition, I cover burgeoning developer and startup communities around ML in China, Industrie 4.0 in Germany, in Silicon Valley, in India and open source around the world.

The case studies are spread across 30+ industries and 10 countries. I did that to show diversity and to show that we are just getting started. So many process areas around the world and in most industries are waiting to be modernized.

In fact, I present such a dizzying arraying of SAP product acronyms and industry TLAs that my editors and early reviewers all recommended a section at the front of the book which is titled "Do you speak SAPese?". I expect we will gradually start to see similar groundswell of activity around other vendors.

Secondly, my firm, Deal Architect, is gearing up for intense 2-3 day offsite sessions to help clients take a look at the changing market. That confab should cover the fit of many of the strategies above, while also evaluating internal and external talent and fit with emerging technology trends.

Of course, winter is not done. What we have seen is just a glimpse of what is to come. Time to celebrate with Camus: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

The book is expected to be out in April, in time to celebrate Spring. In the meantime, I will post periodic blogs to remind us all the enterprise is finally starting to thaw.