deal architect

The Analyst Cam: RISE with SAP

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.

I explained here  I have been trying to fit the many Analyst Cam episodes - vendor demos, analyst surveys, excerpts from vendor events - into a 20 to 30  minute format. Events have been the hardest to force -fit. It is tough to excerpt from hours of sessions into 20 minutes. Vendors need permissions from customers. Events folks are exhausted and the last thing they want to do is get me many GB of video.

Still, I persist and I requested SAP share video from their RISE with SAP session this week. They delivered the videos promptly but they deleted customer and partner sections from the CEO Christian Klein keynote (likely due to permission issues). They shared the Q&A with Christian, but I decided to let the Christian keynote dominate the 20 minute excerpt below.

Christian's fluency with the broad SAP portfolio is nothing short of brilliant. I remember seeing a Thomas Kurian presentation when he was at Oracle which was as impressive. Enjoy his mastery of the "Business Transformation-as-a-service" offering below.

In addition, I would recommend you spend some time on a few other sessions during the day, particularly the sections I highlight in them:

Thomas Saueressig of SAP talks changing business models, sustainability and many other global trends with Gabriela Azzali, Chief Transformation Officer, Orica and Ulrich Stoerk, Chairman of the Management Board, PwC Germany here

Juergen Mueller of SAP does a deep dive around the Business Technology Platform and involves Damian Bunyan, CIO, Uniperand Liz Fasciana, Global SAP Offering Leader, Deloitte Consulting here

The Business Process Intelligence section with Rouen Morato of SAP and with Gero Decker of Signavio, that SAP announced it is acquiring starts at 8.15 here

The customer sections in  Christian's keynote with Dr. Roland Busch, Deputy CEO, Siemens and with Jodi Monelle, Founder and CEO and Kees Kruythoff, Chairman and CEO of LIVEKINDLY are at 8.15 here

The section about Collaboration and integration of MS Teams with Satya Natella, CEO of Microsoft is at 31.30 here

The complexity of the offering led to a number of questions. Here is the Q&A with Christian. Disclosure - none of the questions are mine, certainly not the one which asked "aren't you a bit late to the party?" With a young baby and a demanding CEO role, I doubt he has energy left to go to many parties :)

I will be sharing my analysis from the day over the next couple of weeks and in a couple of Burning Platform sessions with other analysts. But here is a quick take:

a) I am pleased to see so much focus on the public cloud. Just about two years ago, I told Christian I was worried how many S/4 projects were on-prem and in private clouds. I told him he risked a repeat of ECC overruns. Worse, it would be difficult to apply ML concepts with data siloed across so many data centers

b) I understand why he had to highlight all his SI partners - but with the pandemic and travel restrictions they have been learning to do virtual projects and use more tooling and automation. I wish he had focused on how they have evolved. SAP and its customers cannot afford the old way of doing projects.

c) One of the biggest payback areas in justifying a move to S/4 is retirement of ECC customizations. I fear the BPI/Signavio tools and the army of SIs will get the green signal to launch another large wave of customizations, this time bloating S/4.

d) During the pandemic we have seen a move to bite-sized projects like the SAP Amplify initiative and in vertical "edge" areas - like telemedicine in healthcare, digital real estate, distance learning in higher education, automated fulfillment in retail and many others. What SAP presented was mostly horizontal processes and far from "bite-sized"

e) The contracting for RISE appears very ambitious. While that is good business for advisers like Deal Architect, no business executive enjoys months of negotiations when they are under extreme pressure to get their digital projects going.

For now enjoy the brilliance from Christian, Thomas, Juergen and others. Nobody would accuse them of being small thinkers.

The Analyst Cam: IT Central Station on B2B buying trends

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.

I have had several industry analysts join me in my Burning Platform series over the last several weeks. I invited Russell Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of IT Central Station which offers a crowdsourced knowledge platform that helps technology decision makers to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.  

I thought he would provide some insight into the many IT categories his site tracks from Firewalls to RPA tools. Instead, he did something that most analysts have smartly stayed away from in 2021 - making predictions after most went so wrong in 2020.

Russell makes 6 predictions on how enterprise tech procurement will change this year.

The Analyst Cam: Cella Technologies and shop floor optimization

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

During the last few months we have seen growing interest in bite-sized applications in various vertical sectors. I have written about edge applications like telemedicine in healthcare, eCommerce and fulfillment in retail and food, distance learning in higher ed and many others.

Jason Prater and Marty Black, both ex-Plex, presented on their startup, Cella Technologies which is focused on waste on the shop floor. Machines often wait for materials (which have often traveled thousands of miles without an issue) while handling staff drive around in forklifts with walkie talkies. They are like taxis looking for pickups when digital technologies like "ride-sharing for forklifts" could eliminate the gap. Machines are getting smarter and predictively issuing requests. In the meantime, COVID has amplified the already difficult task of hiring workers for plants, their absenteeism and reduced productivity.

They say the waste from such "downtime waiting around" often exceeds that from scrap in many facilities.

They also describe other use cases to connect MES to the supply chain.   

The Analyst Cam: C5MI and Industry 4.0

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time it is Marty Groover, Partner, C5MI. C5 in the company name comes from his background in the Navy for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Counter-intelligence. He also spent years at Caterpillar and is now a big advocate for Industry 4.0 - digital factories and the industrial Internet of Things.

With ubiquitous sensors, machines are talking a lot more, and we are learning to understand their language. Marty talks about their Live Factory concept with uses cases like WIP and critical parts tracking, and others involving predictive maintenance around industrial assets.  

He covers a lot of ground in under 15 minutes. You may also enjoy the longer interview I did with him in May here. 

Burning Platform: Business Continuity

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of months, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho, Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications and Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures

In the 26th episode of the series is Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer of Ventana Research. We discuss how Business Continuity plans performed in what I call a Black Swan(S) year. How do you plan for continuity, disaster recovery and contingencies given one crisis after another - health, financial, diversity, sustainability?

We discuss how various forms of planning performed, whether they are too siloed and whether we will revert to long term, econometric, scenario planning.

Even more than corporations, it would appear government bodies need to revisit BCP. Their guidance, especially around public health to citizens has been chaotic. Their guidance to corporations around site re-opening protocols has been conflicting. Mark comments how one positive from the chaos is increased public/private collaboration.

We discuss how technology vendors have stepped up, especially planning vendors and how vendors like Salesforce and Workday have delivered new health and diversity related offerings.

We cover a lot of ground - going forward we will need to balance the desire for continuity and predictability with the reality of continued chaos and need for agility.  As Mark says "every day is a new day - the sun rises and the sun sets - and anytime in between something can go wrong"

Burning Platform: SAP projects in Asia/Pac

Brian Sommer and I recorded the first 12 episodes in this series. Since then, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho and Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications. See the index here

Kicking off this year in the 25th episode of the series is Paul Coester of Big Blue Ventures. He has played a role in 20 SAP ECC and 12 S/4HANA projects  - most of  them in the Asia Pacific region. We discuss how 2020 played out for SAP in that region and how 2021 is likely to shape up - around S/4HANA, its cloud properties and its industry applications.

We also discuss how SIs and hyperscalers have evolved over the last couple of years. Finally, we discuss the growth in "fractional IT" - he is a prime example of that with his simultaneous hand in enterprise architecture, quality assurance and other roles on multiple projects.

I have always known Paul to call it as he sees it.  He appropriately calls himself a "SAP Whisperer"  Nice to get his perspective from "Down Under".