SAP HANA - system of engagement?

Used Evernote for today's SAP thoughts. They still don't get it.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/0a3dce0a-0d86-45dd-8c74-aa3321006bb6/26e71076b80d00d5e4d7eb76744ece83

Big Software Perils

This Gartner analysis of the "big" software companies is fantastic. I've talked to 100+ customers over the past 5 months, and most of them are in 2 ERP camps:

• Support mode: Hey, we all need a ledger. But let's face it, you shouldn't be investing 25% in SAP or Oracle systems that not only will never innovate, don't need to. My friends at Rimini Street are building a robust business, with good reason.
• Upgrade mode: let's face it,if you are running SAP or Oracle ERP, you're always upgrading. When upgrade projects take years, by the time you've rolled it out across all instances, users, and geographies, it's time to start doing it all over again. But the "value" of the upgrades? Mostly for hardware compliance, software compliance, internationalization.

Is there an innovation mode? Not with the major ERP players. Many customers are looking for an innovation platform that allows them to build fast, with minimal IT impact. An army from IBM or Microsoft won't work for the average American business, either.

The more I read about the state of software today, the happier I am to be at Salesforce.com.

Lock-In? Please...

In the last 4 months, I've talked to over 70 companies about Platform as a Service --> PaaS. Big companies. Small companies. Companies that make stuff. Companies that service other companies. Companies that represent business in America.

As with any emerging technology, the conversations are almost always educational (both ways) and spirited. And it's a lot of fun to figure out new ways we can improve their businesses.

Of course, they have concerns. Being new to the job, one concern I expected to hear was "vendor lock-in". After all, some analysts have pointed it out as a big deal. So I listened, listened some more, and took copious notes. 70 customers later, the percentage that list "lock-in" as a problem speaks volumes:

Zero.

Instead, I'm hearing a lot of quotes like this:

• "We need to move fast and innovate"
• "Let's choose the best tool for the job"
• "I want to leverage our existing skills"
• "Everything is going mobile"
• "We need flexible business models and a vendor that thinks like a partner"

Lock-in? Just another invention of ivory-tower analysts. I'll focus on real business problems at real companies instead.

To my customers: the Force is with you. Heroku, too.

JMF

Move fast, securely

For those who haven't heard, I've recently joined Salesforce.com working on the Platform business. It's great to be in a new place, on a growing team, working on a growth market (According to Gartner, anyway).

In my few few weeks, I've talked to about a dozen customers who all spin a similar story:

• Our business systems can't keep up with our user demand (consumerization of IT trends are rampant)
• Moving fast is important, but it can't pose undue security risk. With a nod to Citibank as an example...

With an array of new technologies available to IT professionals, productivity gains are only going to increase in the coming years. Ruby was a catalyst, new languages continue to pop up, and even Java is keeping pace with new frameworks to accelerate deployment in the Enterprise. Programmers are turning into polygot programmers, which is an accurate (if not amusing) term I've learned.

Putting this new power on a secure platform gives the CIO the ability to grow the business with increased productivity, while maintaining a central governance point to enforce enterprise security.

Sounds like the best of both worlds to me...

SaaS Benchmarking

I enjoyed reading this post by Dave Kellogg on SaaS, which summarizes a really nice BVP piece. I took particular note of axiom #8:

"Leverage and monetize the data asset. You can do this by leveraging your expertise to identify the metrics and dashboards of most analytic value and further by then selling industry benchmark data on them. This, to me, is one of the more obvious SaaS opportunities, yet nevertheless to-date, in my experience, one of the most unexploited. I expect to see much more progress in this area in the coming few years."

Having spent a good amount of time over the past year working on this, I know it's a great opportunity, but it's not a simple problem to solve. If you're going to tackle it, take note:

• Build your application vision first. Make no mistake, treating this as an application (as opposed to a data feed) frees your mind from worrying about the technical challenge, which will come later. Get on a whiteboard, sketch on a napkin, gather around the campfire in order to...
• Define some good metrics. It's an analytical application at its core, which revolves around measurements, dimensions, and comparisons thereof.
• Broaden your technical horizons. To pull it off, you'll likely need several components or tools, including Database, ETL, Statistical Programming, Business Intelligence, and UI and Data Discovery Frameworks. Each adds value at each step in the data lifecycle, but also must be carefully orchestrated. Software advancements in most of these domains are scorching right now. That's great news for developers, but also requires diligent oversight to make sure everything works together. I've listed some of the important ones below, linking to IBM pages with more detail.

In most ways, these concepts aren't new. Data providers have been turning aggregated metrics into commercial assets for decades. But the explosion of SaaS combined with new technical advancements are creating new opportunities for insight into processes and metrics that, until now, were confined to the walls of individual companies.

IBM Links

Predictive Analytics

Big Data Analysis - Hadoop

Scalable, Low-Maintenance Analytic Data Warehouse Databases

In-memory Analytics

Text Analytics

Business Intelligence and End User Data Exploration