My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.
In this chapter, I covered the third category in the four customer types in the book - Risk-takers, Modernizers, Diversifiers and Bystanders. Diversifier customers. In the first volume of SAP Nation, we had described the early wave of Diversifiers. They were “ring-fencing” SAP with cloud solutions, trying out two-tier models, TPM and private-cloud infrastructure. This group continues to expand and experiment. The big difference we noticed this time around was in some cases they are diversifying back to SAP products.
Here are excerpts from 4 of the 12 case studies in the chapter
'In the hypercompetitive software vendor world, Unilever could be construed as giving up on SAP. Actually, like many CIOs, Moran is merely diversifying her portfolio. Moran told CIO UK, “Working with SAP, they helped us put together the internal business case to move forward with S4/HANA. We’ve found that having HANA on our databases has increased performance five to 10 times when we have HANA sidecars.”47 In that article, she also talked about her other strategic partners: Microsoft, AWS and increasingly Google. Unilever also has a Foundry that, since its launch in 2014, has facilitated 100 pilots between start-ups and Unilever brands — stimulating and facilitating experimentation across the global footprint. It’s all part of diversifying the portfolio, and SAP continues as a key component.'
Andre Blumberg at CLP Group in Asia Pacific.
'The more interesting project which is our focus now, is to look at global disruption, industry changes and technological innovation. When you look at the Apple iTunes store, the Google Play store, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. you see how the platform business model has disrupted many industries. We’ve been looking at what a platform business model could look like for our sector — so what is the “energy internet”? What is the Amazon equivalent for a utility company? We are working on that now and how we can bring ecosystem players together to provide added value for our customers. How can we establish that on a modern public cloud PaaS platform so that any third-party ecosystem player or start-up companies can join our platform and work with us? That way, we don’t limit ourselves when it comes to innovation. That’s a much more exciting discussion and we’re working primarily with proven public cloud companies, particularly Amazon Web Services. It will be interesting to see how the global public cloud providers play out in the Asia-Pacific region over the next two to three years.'
Bryan Bee at EBSCO
'We had a healthy skepticism when we started the process. It took us a while to get our head wrapped around the service provided, the risks, and interoperability issues. As we went through that journey, we became comfortable and we concluded going with Rimini was an acceptable risk. Once we did our initial due diligence, we engaged both our business stakeholders and our developers. We did multiple reference calls and each time it was like, man, this is too good to be true.'
Paul Wright at Accuride
'Functionally, there’s no doubt in my mind that with SAP, we’d be compliant anywhere we wanted to go in the world. In today’s world, that’s important. We had a choice when we were going to Russia. I had a choice. I could have said, ‘Let’s figure out how to do with this with Plex and Workday. Or, let’s do this inside SAP.’ I mean, at some point, unfortunately, the government regulations are going to drive what you can and cannot do as a business, and it was just too risky to do something else in Russia, even if we wanted to, so we stayed with SAP.'
