So today was day 2 of two key enterprises software conferences - SAP's Sapphire and Netsuite's Suiteworld. Happening across the north American continent it allows bloggers 'on the fences' like your struly to follow both events, thanks to the streaming offering.
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Yesterday I started with SAP - so let's give NetSuite the start today:
And then there were four more press releases of successful customer adoption to NetSuite, impressive that they are all outside of the US, so the international expansion of NetSuite seems to be well under way. These are Rags2Riches from the Philippines a market place for women selling products and services. Guzman y Gomes from Australia, a dining chain. Hairhouse Warehouse, also from Australia a hair and beauty retailer. And lastly online game developer Zattika from the UK.
And then SAP announced that basically Hana Cloud Platform is the new unified platform for all businesses trying to leverage and extend existing investments to the cloud. This means you can use your business suite license and run it on Hana Enterprise Cloud, but you can also stay on premise and extend your Business Suite with the new (or old) cloud applications, that will or are running on Hana Cloud Platform (already). So for the cloud applications on the People side this is more global support for Employee Central, the new SuccessFactors Onboarding and Successfactors Learning. On the Customer side there was the claim that SAP has been doubling customers in this segment for the last 5 quarters - which gives another interesting aspect to the whole CRM market size controversy. Today the Money side wasn't absent - with additional country support and integration with 3rd party payment providers and banks. The Travel solution equally got extended as well as the expense solution. And even ByDesign, the product that was very quiet this Sapphire - was extended. And of course Ariba did not stood still, as didn't its Business Network.
And then there was also BusinessOne - with new functionality in version 9.0, country support and additional features for BusinessOne on Hana - remember this was the first product on Hana. Glad that SAP mentioned in the first lines of the press release, that this is a product on the Microsoft technology stack, running Microsoft SQL server.
The most significant release of real news was actually around SAP Fiori (Italian for Flowers). Its a set of mobile / tablet designed apps, delivered in HTML5 using SAPUI5 (just GA this weekend), SAP Gateway and add-ons to the Business Suite. Another attempt to address the combination of self service and mobile needs - much improved. Checkout the nice launch website here and Bjoern Gerke's blog.
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But a lot of time was burnt with the lecture on darwinism and then a lengthy but entertaining interview with the CEO of McLaren (sponsored by SAP). The oddity on Hana continued with Hagemann-Snabe asking, Dennis, what Hana meant for him... and sadly he even said at the end - here you hear it. I really would have liked to hear from Hagemann-Snabe what his view and vision is for Hana. And ok it came later... it's the one platform SAP plans to reinvent themselves on. Sadly with McLaren there was also only the only software demo of the whole keynote (!), nicely done by Fred Sansom, but the Hana UI's just look subpar to me. With 6.5B data pieces from a McLaren car during a race, I expect a much richer, interactive UI than a checklist... Glad to see an attempt to predictive was made:
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Then the keynote went on to reveal that most of Business Suite and Verticals are now on Hana, with 100 beta customers - but why not see a demo and why not speak to any of them? Hagemann-Snabe made clear that Hana is the Innovation platform for SAP going forward, but again where were the customers? An impressive statement was made in regards of SAP reducing TCO by 30% by moving its CRM instance to Hana... I very much look forward to learn more about this.
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And then we had a customer panel with Pepsi, Timken and Nestle - all choosing cloud solutions - with the former using Successfactors and the latter the Customer (former Sales on demand) products. Hagemann-Snabe then went over last weeks Hana Enterprise Cloud deployment options and rounded it up with yesterdays MDM cloud offering (on Amazon AWS).
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Goldberg kicked off with giving a status update back to the audience on promises he made a year ago - nice way to close the loop and create trust - key stats were NetSuite customers made 73B in total revenue, total downtime for last year was 105 minutes, almost 20% of Netsuite revenue goes into R&D, approx. 50M, 54 countries are supported for tax and local compliance, 19 languages are supported. Impressive.
He then brought the CIO of Qualcomm on stage, talking about the international roll out of NetSuite for the company, and the customer was very positive about the product.
Goldberg also made a stab in regards of Workday and their recent announcements around customization. Said he can't understand how you could wait for 7 years with that. And that NetSuite was build form the ground up to support customization.
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It was positive that Goldberg right away acknowledged the NetSuite UI challenges, starting with mobile, and there with the mandatory iPhone demo. And while the iPhone UI looked very good, I was surprised that it's only now that NetSuite users can enter data on mobile devices. And the iPhone is the start - you will have to wait - with no roadmap - for other popular platforms. Next was the intro of sticky notes - a good way to enhance collaboration with enterprise applications, as well as adding data. And I was surprised that NetSuite is now (2012!) introducing a drag and drop mechanism. And while these UI efforts are valiant, they cannot hide the fact, that the NetSuite UI has served its time and needs a redesign from ground up. I had not seen the product in years and was surprised it still looked... the same.
Next it was nice to see Goldberg demoing the NetSuite IDE, not many development leaders would be comfortable to demo that much down in the details. Breakpoints are certainly a very good addition to help troubleshoot NetSuite code.
And then it was partner time, with TribeHR showing HCM functionality, that was iFrame-like plugged into the NetSuite canvas. It worked well but mixing up the user interface of two enterprise applications does not make for the best user interaction. As part of the suite commerce product Goldberg showed capabilities acquired with LightCMS. It looked like the commerce product is on a more modern architecture than the NetSuite product.
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The demo then concluded with a skid of Goldberg buying wine in Napa from a winery running a partner product, eVinery, with follow up purchases from at home. Looked to me like a demo on Microsoft's Metro UI. Then he ordered in for more wine from at home with his wife. Not sure why she was on stage, sure a nice lady, but what does it have to do with NetSuite. And Goldberg was brainstorming out the hilarious descriptions of wine. Entertaining, high involvment (wine!) - but not even mentioned the products involved. The end of the skid was the wine delivery by a familiar UPS guy, Zach Nelson in UPS uniform.
SAP announced great things and didn't show them in the keynote, NetSuite did good things and showed them. Look forward to Day 3.
What's NetSuite News
As expected today was calmer on the press front, with 5 more signifcant releases yesterday. The big release today was about filling NetSuite's gap in the HCM area - not with one or two partnership - but 8 partnerships with HCM enterprise software vendors. Of the 8 vendors 7 have achieved built on NetSuite partner status, the new certification program for NetSuite partners. These are like a little who is who in the HCM field - Ascentis, CloudPay, NOVAtime,Silkroad and TribeHR. Only the venerable Meta4 was missing, but pretty sure they will be certified before not too long. It looks like the integration burden falls on Dell's Boomi, which was also certified for built on NetSuite. Definitively NetSuite shows some weight in the enterprise software space with getting that many vendors on board in time for SuiteWorld.And then there were four more press releases of successful customer adoption to NetSuite, impressive that they are all outside of the US, so the international expansion of NetSuite seems to be well under way. These are Rags2Riches from the Philippines a market place for women selling products and services. Guzman y Gomes from Australia, a dining chain. Hairhouse Warehouse, also from Australia a hair and beauty retailer. And lastly online game developer Zattika from the UK.
What's SAP News
The big news was the general availability of the Business Suite on Hana for the majority of core and industry extensions. No question this is a major engineering feat, for which SAP deserves credit. Unfortunately it was not totally clear what was still missing. It would be good to also understand what specifically the smarter business models are, that the press release refers to. One benefit mentioned is that with the move to the Hana Platform, applications get access to social media, namely SAP Jam. Needless to say this all runs on the new Hana Enterprise Cloud, already announced last week.And then SAP announced that basically Hana Cloud Platform is the new unified platform for all businesses trying to leverage and extend existing investments to the cloud. This means you can use your business suite license and run it on Hana Enterprise Cloud, but you can also stay on premise and extend your Business Suite with the new (or old) cloud applications, that will or are running on Hana Cloud Platform (already). So for the cloud applications on the People side this is more global support for Employee Central, the new SuccessFactors Onboarding and Successfactors Learning. On the Customer side there was the claim that SAP has been doubling customers in this segment for the last 5 quarters - which gives another interesting aspect to the whole CRM market size controversy. Today the Money side wasn't absent - with additional country support and integration with 3rd party payment providers and banks. The Travel solution equally got extended as well as the expense solution. And even ByDesign, the product that was very quiet this Sapphire - was extended. And of course Ariba did not stood still, as didn't its Business Network.
And then there was also BusinessOne - with new functionality in version 9.0, country support and additional features for BusinessOne on Hana - remember this was the first product on Hana. Glad that SAP mentioned in the first lines of the press release, that this is a product on the Microsoft technology stack, running Microsoft SQL server.
The most significant release of real news was actually around SAP Fiori (Italian for Flowers). Its a set of mobile / tablet designed apps, delivered in HTML5 using SAPUI5 (just GA this weekend), SAP Gateway and add-ons to the Business Suite. Another attempt to address the combination of self service and mobile needs - much improved. Checkout the nice launch website here and Bjoern Gerke's blog.
The Hagemann-Snabe delivery
The keynote delivery of Hagemann-Snabe was solid, a routine job well done by Jim. I felt the storytelling abilities have improved a lot - and were also challenged by the lengthy intro, talking about tigers, Darwin and IT evolution. McDermott just said - slow kills companies. Hagemann-Snabe called it in nature you are either at the table eating, or you are on the table. If you wondered on the multicultural differences between the US and Europe - here you have a prime time exhibit.
But a lot of time was burnt with the lecture on darwinism and then a lengthy but entertaining interview with the CEO of McLaren (sponsored by SAP). The oddity on Hana continued with Hagemann-Snabe asking, Dennis, what Hana meant for him... and sadly he even said at the end - here you hear it. I really would have liked to hear from Hagemann-Snabe what his view and vision is for Hana. And ok it came later... it's the one platform SAP plans to reinvent themselves on. Sadly with McLaren there was also only the only software demo of the whole keynote (!), nicely done by Fred Sansom, but the Hana UI's just look subpar to me. With 6.5B data pieces from a McLaren car during a race, I expect a much richer, interactive UI than a checklist... Glad to see an attempt to predictive was made:
Then the keynote went on to reveal that most of Business Suite and Verticals are now on Hana, with 100 beta customers - but why not see a demo and why not speak to any of them? Hagemann-Snabe made clear that Hana is the Innovation platform for SAP going forward, but again where were the customers? An impressive statement was made in regards of SAP reducing TCO by 30% by moving its CRM instance to Hana... I very much look forward to learn more about this.
And then we had a customer panel with Pepsi, Timken and Nestle - all choosing cloud solutions - with the former using Successfactors and the latter the Customer (former Sales on demand) products. Hagemann-Snabe then went over last weeks Hana Enterprise Cloud deployment options and rounded it up with yesterdays MDM cloud offering (on Amazon AWS).
The Goldberg delivery
Here we knew to expect to be in for something totally different. Form the intro sketch, were Goldberg became Suiteman who would fight off all sorts of villains, in a Batman style setting. Unfortunately it was not possible to be seen via webcast, due to copyright restrictions.
Goldberg kicked off with giving a status update back to the audience on promises he made a year ago - nice way to close the loop and create trust - key stats were NetSuite customers made 73B in total revenue, total downtime for last year was 105 minutes, almost 20% of Netsuite revenue goes into R&D, approx. 50M, 54 countries are supported for tax and local compliance, 19 languages are supported. Impressive.
He then brought the CIO of Qualcomm on stage, talking about the international roll out of NetSuite for the company, and the customer was very positive about the product.
Goldberg also made a stab in regards of Workday and their recent announcements around customization. Said he can't understand how you could wait for 7 years with that. And that NetSuite was build form the ground up to support customization.
It was positive that Goldberg right away acknowledged the NetSuite UI challenges, starting with mobile, and there with the mandatory iPhone demo. And while the iPhone UI looked very good, I was surprised that it's only now that NetSuite users can enter data on mobile devices. And the iPhone is the start - you will have to wait - with no roadmap - for other popular platforms. Next was the intro of sticky notes - a good way to enhance collaboration with enterprise applications, as well as adding data. And I was surprised that NetSuite is now (2012!) introducing a drag and drop mechanism. And while these UI efforts are valiant, they cannot hide the fact, that the NetSuite UI has served its time and needs a redesign from ground up. I had not seen the product in years and was surprised it still looked... the same.
Next it was nice to see Goldberg demoing the NetSuite IDE, not many development leaders would be comfortable to demo that much down in the details. Breakpoints are certainly a very good addition to help troubleshoot NetSuite code.
And then it was partner time, with TribeHR showing HCM functionality, that was iFrame-like plugged into the NetSuite canvas. It worked well but mixing up the user interface of two enterprise applications does not make for the best user interaction. As part of the suite commerce product Goldberg showed capabilities acquired with LightCMS. It looked like the commerce product is on a more modern architecture than the NetSuite product.
The demo then concluded with a skid of Goldberg buying wine in Napa from a winery running a partner product, eVinery, with follow up purchases from at home. Looked to me like a demo on Microsoft's Metro UI. Then he ordered in for more wine from at home with his wife. Not sure why she was on stage, sure a nice lady, but what does it have to do with NetSuite. And Goldberg was brainstorming out the hilarious descriptions of wine. Entertaining, high involvment (wine!) - but not even mentioned the products involved. The end of the skid was the wine delivery by a familiar UPS guy, Zach Nelson in UPS uniform.
2 puzzling UI questions
With both SAP and NetSuite struggling with older UIs and usability complains, I am at a loss on two keynote content decisions: Why did Goldberg only show the self service OpenAir UI at the end? He should have lead with that. And why did Hagemann-Snabe not say a word about Fiori? Why not demo the new HTML5 UI - even if it's only self service like scope? A lot of SAP and NetSuite users interact only through self service-ironic, that both vendors did not show their best UI improvement of the day loudly and proudly.The marketing battle
This day went down as a tie. Moving the Suite to Hana is more heavy lifting unveiled than what we saw from NetSuite. But Goldberg showed existing product - Hagemann-Snabe only one demo. And while Goldberg's keynote was certainly more entertaining, it was also a little bit too quirky. More demos and customer will help NetSuite next time around.MyPOV
Solid performance by SAP, but not sure why so much educational content on tigers, elephants and even dinosaurs. Would have been good if Hagemann-Snabe had shown Fiori, I am sure the audience would have loved it. Very hands on session by Goldberg, should have lead with OpenAir UI and gained much more credibility on addressing the NetSuite UI challenges.SAP announced great things and didn't show them in the keynote, NetSuite did good things and showed them. Look forward to Day 3.
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| Storify from Day 2 Keynote - you can find it here |