SAP's Sapphire conference is coming up next week and while I realize the presentations are already done, the banners printed, the give aways ordered and the marketing message fine tuned - it's still worth to think what SAP should and in my view could address next week.
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With over 20000 attendees expected - this will be another massive conference for SAP. I very much look forward to the keynotes and here is what I would like to hear from the Tuesday McDermott / Calderoni, Wednesday Hagemann-Snabe / Dalgaard and Thursday Plattner / Sikka combo presentations.
SAP will also have to address the delays for getting the Business Suite to run on Hana and why SAP won't rely an SD benchmark on Hana. The ecosystem deserves to know why the performance gold standard of the past is no longer applicable now. SAP may have good reasons, so explain and replace it with a newer, better benchmark. Fair, but do it.
SAP will also need to address impedingly high list price of the mobile applications. And: Please don't say mobile first too often - best at all - as very few will buy that.
Different story for Purchasing and HCM. Let's tackle the Purchasing side first, here the story of buying the clear category leader with Ariba is a good news for SAP customers, many have been using Ariba already. There is no confusion and uncertainty where the future automation will reside - it's with Ariba and SAP only needs to address the integration road map and technology.
What a messy situation on the HCM side in contrast - Successfactors was a leader, but not the leader in HCM in the cloud (that prize would go to Workday). To be fair - even if SAP had acquired Workday, questions would have remained, simply because even Workday is not as complete and multinational as SAP's HCM produc.
In hinsight, Oracle's acquisition of Taleo (the clear leader in recruitment) looks so much easier, similar to an Ariba-size problem. So on the HCM side SAP will need to address where the future core HCM automation will be. If EmployeeCentral remains the answer, than SAP needs a very clear roadmap and a resolution on how the cloud technology from Successfactors will morph and work along with the new Netweaver (or Hana?) Cloud platform. And while addressing this - please show the roadmap how the heterogenuous cloud archtiectures of the legacy Successfactors products will be harmonized on the architecture side, too.
Much has changed now - and SAP needs to formulate its vision for the 21st century for business automation. You do not re-invent business automaton by putting an in-memory database under it. SAP would have rightly criticized Oracle if Larry Ellison would have claimed this. In an ironic twist of marketing positions, now SAP claims that new technology can upgrade old business application code. But technology is only half the equation, imagining and working with customers on how the 21st century enterprise will operate on that technology, is the other half, the key half, the half much closer to SAP's DNA than the technology half. I would love to see SAP making strides in this direction.
I would already praise SAP if they acknowledge the challenges and don't have a compelling solution yet - honesty can go a long, long way in the business of trust that enterprise applications ultimately are. SAP has not lost the trust of the ecosystem, but it's time to but more trust coins in the bank. As I said - in a short and fast week, we will know more.
The Future
SAP has been very clear on the ambition to have one billion users in the near future (is it 2016 now?) - but has been not so clear how to get there. Given the tricks the company pulled in the past (remember the 100000 company challenge that was achieved with the Business Objects acquisition, counting small Crystal Reports customers) to achieve similar goals - it would be good to understand what SAP is really up to here. The past investments in Business Objects, Sybase, SuccessFactoris and Ariba will not get SAP to that user count. Maybe it's the micro banking app on Sybase 365? It can't be the FanApps. So it would be good to learn more - as it will direct significant development resources.The Integration Story
In contrast to Oracle (with now Fusion Middleware), SAP did not intend to do larger enterprise vendor acquisitions for a long time (till 2010?). So the focus of SAP's integration platform, NetWeaver was never really to integrate with heterogeneous products, that came in through acquisitions. Let's remember the focus was to integrate the internally created integration challenge of (my)SAPCRM, SCM, SRM, ERP etc. with MDM and XI. Unfortunately Netweaver failed pretty much at this, but that's a historic chapter for SAP. But now SAP has real integration problems at hand with SuccessFactors and Ariba. All of a sudden core automation pieces are no longer part of the monolithic suite, but running somewhere else. No easy integration, and the best practical answer has been file transfer. Let's hope that with NetWeaver PI et al we make a better story. If you look for a working integration story pitched recently, look no farer than Infor with Ion.Cloud
SAP's story at embracing the cloud has not been written so far. Surprisingly Oracle took much more criticism than SAP on the topic, so sometimes it's better to have nothing than something. It would be very good to understand, how the new NetWeaver (or is it Hana?) Cloud will work and pan out. I don't expect for SAP to physically host any cloud offering - but to work with its partners. An OpenStack support would not be too much of a surprise. I would also like to hear that the R/3 AMI support in AWS gets made available loudly and proudly. Here is a massive chance to reduce operating cost for their customers and SAP has been very slow at promoting this - I guess the business deflation for the hardware partners have been the deterrent.Hana
My hope is, that Hana will pass the hype stage and we will see much more on real uptake, usage with customers and across the application portfolio. At this point I think everybody gives SAP credit, that Hana works, what you do with it is the key question. Unfortunately SAP has been applying Hana mostly to all the well known performance problems of the past, which is a fair usage of new technology, but implies a lack of vision how a future in memory enterprise should operate. And this from the leader in business automation - quite an unfortunate pairing.SAP will also have to address the delays for getting the Business Suite to run on Hana and why SAP won't rely an SD benchmark on Hana. The ecosystem deserves to know why the performance gold standard of the past is no longer applicable now. SAP may have good reasons, so explain and replace it with a newer, better benchmark. Fair, but do it.
Mobile
Ever since SAP unleashed 100s of applications for mobile two year, it has gotten a little quiet. Quantity and quality are two different dimensions. Turns out the Sybase tools for mobile weren't as good as hoped at the time of acquisition. SAP has realized this and the new mobile capabilities of NetWeaver (or Hana?) cloud portal will be promising to address this. It will be good to see SAP go back to the traditional alleys of their famous product history - create the underling platform and then build great applications on top of it.SAP will also need to address impedingly high list price of the mobile applications. And: Please don't say mobile first too often - best at all - as very few will buy that.
Social
Though I applaud SAP to hire an outsider with Sameer Patel to run social - it's clear SAP is either not funding social (at this time) and / or doesn't understand it. There is very little to compete with Oracle on social, who is ruthlessly building social into current and future platforms and is actively investing into customer experience management.[Inserted - thanks for pointing out, how could I forget!] Big Data
SAP's relationship to Big Data has been neutral at the best. It took SAP a long time to add the external Hadoop support (Sapphire 2012), but more recently the stance has morphed at the one of a data warehouse vendor, coexistence and Hana will not go away. And that's correct, but enriching the SAP data with more social and other 3rd party system data in Hadoop is a business that SAP risks to loose if not addressed soon. The statement that Main Street will not adopt Hadoop is outright dangerous IMO. If SAP wants to remain the source for insight in enterprise data, it needs to re-work its strategy regarding Hadoop. The classic mySAP BW data warehouse business may run more on Hadoop clusters than Hana in a few years, more affordable and potentially better insights due to more available data.
Line of Business - No easy LOBs for Purchasing and HCM
All is quiet on the CRM, Finance and Manufacturing front. No disrupting acqusitions that need to be explained, roadmaps replanned etc.Different story for Purchasing and HCM. Let's tackle the Purchasing side first, here the story of buying the clear category leader with Ariba is a good news for SAP customers, many have been using Ariba already. There is no confusion and uncertainty where the future automation will reside - it's with Ariba and SAP only needs to address the integration road map and technology.
What a messy situation on the HCM side in contrast - Successfactors was a leader, but not the leader in HCM in the cloud (that prize would go to Workday). To be fair - even if SAP had acquired Workday, questions would have remained, simply because even Workday is not as complete and multinational as SAP's HCM produc.
In hinsight, Oracle's acquisition of Taleo (the clear leader in recruitment) looks so much easier, similar to an Ariba-size problem. So on the HCM side SAP will need to address where the future core HCM automation will be. If EmployeeCentral remains the answer, than SAP needs a very clear roadmap and a resolution on how the cloud technology from Successfactors will morph and work along with the new Netweaver (or Hana?) Cloud platform. And while addressing this - please show the roadmap how the heterogenuous cloud archtiectures of the legacy Successfactors products will be harmonized on the architecture side, too.
The maintenance saga
No user conference (remember - Sapphire and ASUG are taking place in parallel) without this sore subject. I would like SAP to address the value proposition of maintenance. At the HR2013 event earlier in the year SAP embarked into a very similar strategy like Oracle's Applications Unlimited. Don't worry too much customers, we will maintain what you have for a long, long, time, in the meantime stay with us as we figure out the future. Applications Unlimited has worked for Oracle customers and Oracle, so I see no reason why it should not work for SAP and SAP customers. With enough 3rd party support available for SAP, there is enough pressure to keep SAP honest on it's longer term roadmap and support commitments.Vision & Thought Leadership
In the 90ies SAP excelled at true thought leadership at Sapphire events. An integrated enterprise application as the platform to enable business re-engineering. SAP rode the wave of the management consultants to a modern client server system that encompasses all of the enterprise.Much has changed now - and SAP needs to formulate its vision for the 21st century for business automation. You do not re-invent business automaton by putting an in-memory database under it. SAP would have rightly criticized Oracle if Larry Ellison would have claimed this. In an ironic twist of marketing positions, now SAP claims that new technology can upgrade old business application code. But technology is only half the equation, imagining and working with customers on how the 21st century enterprise will operate on that technology, is the other half, the key half, the half much closer to SAP's DNA than the technology half. I would love to see SAP making strides in this direction.
MyPOV
High expectations are in store for this year's Sapphire - SAP knows the challenges it needs to address. If they will bring them on stage to Orlando - we will know in a week from now.I would already praise SAP if they acknowledge the challenges and don't have a compelling solution yet - honesty can go a long, long way in the business of trust that enterprise applications ultimately are. SAP has not lost the trust of the ecosystem, but it's time to but more trust coins in the bank. As I said - in a short and fast week, we will know more.