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The Analyst Cam: SAP Industry Cloud

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

SAP hosted for analysts a Industry Cloud briefing last week. I have excerpted below about 15 minutes from an hour long session.

Peter Maier, President Industries and Customer Advisory kicks it off and I liked that he gave several examples of new industry functionality. SAP (and in fairness other large vendors) often talk about industry qualifications in generalities and about past efforts ignoring that every industry turned upside down last year.

I had interviewed him last May and you can definitely see progress. 

At 6.50, Peter and Kai Finck, who heads Industry Cloud Program respond to a question about industries where SAP has seen most momentum in the last year.

At 9.15, Svend Wittern, who heads Industry Strategy and Peter explain that business networks where SAP plays a big role with horizontal functionality from Ariba, Concur and others are increasingly moving to industry versions.

At 12.18 Ralph Stemler, who heads Industry Ecosystems mentions that strategy firms like McKinsey may be partnering with SAP and getting into the IP business with their industry knowledge

At 13.30 Steffen Schad, Product Manger, SAP Business Technology Platform talks about how partners and customers are starting to use the platform (including recent acquisitions of Signavio and AppGyer) to build industry functionality

Overall, I liked the momentum Peter showcased, but I still don't think SAP is thinking small enough. It has missed the boat on so much demand we saw for vertical edge apps like telemedicine, distance learning in higher ed, warehouse automation, last mile delivery in retail and food service, virtual open houses in real estate in the last year. It is still focused on big "intelligent enterprise" type positioning which will take years to flesh out.

Also, in the next briefing, it would be nice to hear much more specifically about how strategy firms (and the traditional SI partners) and low code tools are helping develop specific industry functionality. Similar about how RISE with SAP is being verticalized. 

Look forward to more of these periodic briefings. 

Burning Platform: More on RISE with SAP

In the 29th episode of the Burning Platform series is Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG (Americas' SAP User Group). He provides perspective on RISE by SAP - the recently announced SAP initiative. See Analyst Cam post about it here. Dennis Howlett of Diginomica had provided his feedback here. 

Geoff and ASUG had worked with SAP in envisioning RISE and he provides that nuanced perspective and that of his membership. We have a friendly debate on the topic - we keep it light hearted weaving in the Super Bowl and the iPhone 12.

I make the point that RISE is a complex bundle. In his keynote, Christian took at swipe at the term "simplification". That's been SAP's mantra for the last decade or so. Key execs like Christian, Juergen Mueller  and Thomas Saueressig are articulate about RISE. I told him I was reminded of Thomas Kurian's encyclopedic knowledge when he was at Oracle. We discuss if that level of intimate product knowledge can carry over further down the organization, in the field and in the partner ecosystem. Geoff rightfully points out SAP deals with complex, global customers - anything like RISE cannot be simple.

SAP has historically not done a great job managing its SI partners, so how would RISE improve that? The pandemic has shocked the SI ecosystem with WFH and travel restrictions and pressure on them to automate operations. It would be nice for RISE to build on that not just continue to pass along poor SI performance. Geoff  points out he would also like SAP to deliver more tooling to automate implementations.

During the pandemic we have seen customers move to bite-size, industry specific projects. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, others have accordingly made some adjustments. We discuss why RISE with S/4 looming large does not come across as bite-sized, or verticalized enough. Geoff provides the perspective that he is seeing growing interest in S/4 in his membership. Throughout March ASUG is running a series of S/4 Best Practice sessions and they are seeing huge interest - register here 

We also discuss the BPI imitative, SAP's hyperscaler partners and much more. I think Geoff does a nice job explaining which SAP customers should care about RISE and why.

Burning Platform: Exciting world of Citizen IT

In the 28th episode of the Burning Platform series is Amit Zavery of Google Cloud. We discuss the exciting growth in no-code, Citizen Development.

Amit and I discuss how the pandemic has revealed several problems in on-prem systems and also that most cloud application packages were mostly horizontal in reach. Boutique vendors had to step up in many industry areas like ecommerce, fulfillment, telemedicine, distance learning, digital real estate etc. It would suggest we are at a tipping point where customers will need to build more rather than wait to buy functionality from their traditional vendors for agility in the changed world.

Yet, IT has it hands full with new issues around WFH, previous dev backlogs, enhanced security focus. It would suggest more of a focus on low- and no-code development to bridge the gap. Not just dev - we have seen acceleration in democratization of analytics, integration with other enterprise apps, the ability to use voice interfaces to do so much without much IT involvement.  Amit describes how healthcare workers stepped up to build fairly sophisticated hospital applications.

The impact on small businesses has been even more dramatic. Restaurant owners have been forced to adjust to a digital world of customer interaction and last mile delivery. Small merchants have been forced to embrace e-commerce, real estate agents adjust to virtual open houses and digital mortgages. They have become tech-savvy in a hurry. It's not just DevOps - it's digital business transformation.    

We also discuss platforms of SaaS vendors like Salesforce, those of mostly on-prem vendors like IBM and Oracle, and those of hyperscalers like Google.

In the past, citizen IT tools have led to a lot of duplication and proliferation - millions of spreadsheets, Lotus Notes databases everywhere. We discuss how to put guard rails to avoid similar sprawl this time around and also factor security concerns which leads cynics to call this "shadow IT"

Amit has long been a cheerleader for low-code, no-code. His excitement comes through very clearly. We are definitely at a major inflection point in the industry. We have a lot more tech-savvy users and citizens than we did a year ago. That is exciting and scary at the same time. 

The Analyst Cam: Rimini Investor Day

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

I have been encouraging Rimini Street to share more info on its global reach and operational "secret sauce" like they did in this episode where they described how they deliver tax and regulatory updates as part of their support earlier than the much bigger software publishers.

So, I was really pleased to see that in their virtual investor day last week, they focused on customer case studies, addressable market shares and operational details. In fact, the CFO, Michael Perica waited his turn till the last session of the event, just before the analyst q&a.

I have excerpted about 15% of the 2 hour, 45 minute session, and in some sessions a number of the speaker's slides. You can watch the whole webcast by registering here. 

Leading off  after the Forward Looking caveat is Seth Ravin, CEO and Chairman who provides a historical perspective since the company was founded in 2005, and the expanded focus starting in 2015 to include application management services.

At 5.27, Sebastian Grady, President shares case studies across 8 industries and geographies.

At 8.46, David Rowe, CMO discusses addressable markets. I love that he actually describes components of his marketing technology stack. Didn't I mention they were serious about discussing operational details?

At 12.10, Gerard Brossard, COO discusses how the field is being reshaped to reflect a much more global Rimini customer base and for a sales force with many more products in their bags.

At 17.09, Brian Slepko, EVP Global Service Delivery discusses root cause analysis at Rimini, the continuous improvement culture and their TLR (Tax, Legal and Regulatory) group. 

At 21.39, Daniel Winslow, Chief Legal Officer provides his perspective on the long running court battles with Oracle.

This is definitely not your Dad's Rimini Street! I first wrote about them in 2006. They have gone through many twists and bruising legal battles, and have emerged stronger and much more differentiated.  

Head over to the whole webcast on the Rimini site to hear fuller comments from each of these execs, from the CFO and also listen to the Q&A. 

Burning Platform: A review of RISE with SAP

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, Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures and Mark Smith of Ventana Research

In the 27th episode of the series is Dennis Holwett, co-founder of Diginomica. Like me, he is a long-time SAP watcher and we discuss last week's RISE with SAP event. I had written about the event in the Analyst Cam series here. 

We cover a lot of ground - it is the longest episode of Burning Platform.

RISE is a complex bundle - in fact, in his keynote Christian took at swipe at the term "simplification". That's been SAP's mantra for the last decade or so, but key execs like Christian, Juergen Mueller  and Thomas Saueressig are pretty articulate about product details. I told him I was reminded of Thomas Kurian's encyclopedic knowledge when he was at Oracle. We discuss if that level of intimate product knowledge can carry over further down the organization, in the field and in the partner ecosystem.

Dennis responds to my observation that Christian led off with his SI partners and had the hyperscalers further down in his presentation. Shades of the old SAP or signs of likely co-opetition with the hyperscalers especially at the platform layer?

During the pandemic we have seen customers move to bite-size, industry specific projects. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, others have accordingly made some adjustments. We discuss why RISE with S/4 looming large does not come across as bite-sized, or verticalized enough.

I told him I thought RISE would focus more on execution mechanics and economics. Instead they broadened the product mix with the Signavio and the MS Teams announcement and glossed over what will be hairy execution and contractual issues. SAP has historically shown little ability to manage its SI partners, can it additionally manage the hyperscalers and its own broad product portfolio and deliver coherent economics, SLAs etc?

We discuss the changing hyperscaler landscape. IBM has joined the Big 4 - AWS, Azure etc in the SAP infrastructure stack mix, but not Oracle. During the pandemic, Oracle appeared to pick up some momentum with customers like Zoom and TikTok. Oracle, at least at the database layer, is also more prevalent in the SAP customer base. We discuss how customers are likely to navigate SAP's choices.  

We do agree that SAP should never be underestimated. It has an amazing global customer base, spread across industries and is increasingly cultivating a dynamic, young executive suite.

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.

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".

Burning Platform: Cloud Wars!

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here  Last few weeks, 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 and Sandra Lo of Zoho

This has been the year of the cloud - unbelievable scaling of ecommerce, wfh etc - so nice that I can wrap up the year with an episode with Bob Evans who authors the Cloud Wars site. As you can see, both of us are basking in the sun - helps the mood at the end of this crazy year.

We cover a lot of ground - how the hyperscalers have picked up momentum as companies look at lifting and shifting on-premise, legacy apps to their clouds. Google, Oracle, Microsoft and AWS in particular get a fair amount of time during the session.

We discuss the increasing focus of both the infrastructure and application vendors on the platform layer and the likely turf wars there.

We cover recent public offerings from Snowflake, C3, Palantir and momentum of vertical players like Teladoc, Shopify, nCino and what that means for the incumbent players. 

Bob also talks about every company in every vertical becoming more of a software company and what that means to the industry as a whole. The SaaS, IaaS etc definitions of the last few years look increasingly dated. 

More episodes to come in the New Year!

The Analyst Cam: IFS Service Management Part 2

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. 

Yesterday, in Part 1, I ran a presentation by Mark Brewer of IFS on their Service Management offering for complex, asset-intensive industries and trends in those industries, especially during the pandemic.

Below is a 30 minute demo by Jonathan Hyden and Paul White which covers 4 segments:

• Workforce Forecasting (across real-time and longer time horizons)
• Appointment Booking (with chatbot assistance)
• Scheduling Optimization (constrained based, machine assisted)
• Remote Assistance (which has been especially handy during the pandemic)

Lots going on in this demo - road maps, heat maps, GANTT charts, merged reality (using a iPhone 8 cam, not an elaborate AR headset), simulations and dashboards

I have invited them back to demo some of their asset management/predictive maintenance capabilities.

The Analyst Cam: IFS Service Management Part 1

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. 

When I interviewed Darren Roos, CEO of IFS in September (see here), he provided examples from several complex, asset intensive businesses like aerospace and engineering/construction. He also pointed out how important field service is to them, and how complex that has become during the pandemic.

IFS is better known as an ERP vendor but its asset management and service capabilities are increasingly a differentiator. So, I invited them to present in this Analyst Cam series on their Service Management offering.

Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director for the Service Management product line presents below for about 15 minutes. He says Service Management accounted for over half of IFS's revenues in the first half of 2020.

He covers several industry trends including a shift in business models - he showcases Rolls Royce, Tomra and Kyocera and their outcome-based contracts in aviation, recycling (reverse vending) and copiers. He also discusses how aging field workers are being moved during the pandemic to remote, often from home, service guidance roles.  

Tomorrow I will run Part 2 with a demo of the functionality.