So Thursday was the final day for both user conferences, that I have been tracking and blogging about this week. If you missed the first day and middle day updates - you can find them here and here. Usually conferences fizzle towards the 3rd day and the NetSuite conference followed this usual trend, SAP's Sapphires are a little different as of the last years as Hasso Plattner waits till the end of the conference to present - which creates all kinds of marketing challenges (see below) - but keeps the suspense up till the last day.
It's back to SAP to start (as yesterday was NetSuite's turn):
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Plattner started with addressing what SAP customers (should) expect from SAP applications. And he addressed the needs pretty correctly with a system that is adaptive to business challenges, extensible in data and functionality and gives full access from mobile devices, while being easy to use and offering a consumer grade experience. And true to form and recent communications, the cloud is now ready for (not simple) business applications, analytics, B2B networks etc. But Plattner also said that larger companies will never ever want to share systems and data center space with other companies... well.
What surprised me was that Plattner then embarked in an almost 30 minutes defense of Hana, seeking clarification on what it really is - SAP's platform of the future. The audience knew that from McDermott and Hagemann-Snabe - just in case it was missed before - but Plattner took the time to defend the little girl. Always debatable if you need to do this in a format like this, well he did - and it proved to be insightful, humorous and even generous towards the competition.
In his typical professorial delivery style Plattner debunked multitenancy first. In an interesting change in story line, classic database striped multitenancy like used for applications like SuccessFactors was still a problem for Hana last week (see here) - now it is not - as Plattner said in the press conference we will just use more cores. Something that needs a little more digging going forward.
Next was the claim, that Hana is not disruptive. The argument is that it's just a change in the database layer. But while SAP deserves credit for trying to make the move of Business Suite users as easy as possible to migrate to Hana - it still means a significant challenge... if switching databases would not be disruptive then SAP and Oracle competitors would have been much more successful with the many campaigns trying to dislodge the Oracle database under the SAP applications.
Then we were at the point that Hana cannot be successful, as it supports only RAM as storage medium. Plattner argued that only the data that is used and needed will move to Hana (and into RAM), not used data won't. And then there is compression on top. And while you certainly won't need all 500+ fields of an order line - SAP needs to explain how to identify and migrate the used columns. And how to add further ones when usage changes.
It was also clear, that Plattner sees Hana as the chance to slim down the massive R/3 DNA in the SAP applications. Forget about columns, we don't need all this functionality, we don't need long running queries... to the claim that there wasn't long running batch files when he was CEO... and while a fitness program for bloated SAP business functionality while transitioning to Hana is highly desirable - the challenge of course remains - what is the relevant functionality. SAP needs to come up with a visible process on what is fat and what is muscle it wants to keep.
And lastly Plattner shared he is deeply hurt, that Hana is perceived as for SAP applications only, stating that over 60% of the use cases are for non SAP apps. Would love to see the use cases. And it's great that Hana is open - Plattner even invited Oracle to run on Hana (!) - but SAP needs to fight the perception from his own track record. SAP inhouse developed technology (like Hana) has never been sold, positioned or stood the the test of the market as SAP independent technology. Hard to fight perception, harder if your track record supports the perception.
And Plattner busted the myth of the Sybase acquisition being all about mobile - it really was about the database expertise and related IP - patented and not. And many have said this before... including Plattner's friend Ellison who understandable sees Sybase as an inferior competitor in the database market. And Plattner also shared that Microsoft wasn't too happy with the Hana strategy - but they were professionals about it.
The start-up interest, with 431 start-ups using Hana is no doubt a tremendous success. Just from a sheer mass processing a great feat, no question. But later we learnt that the Hana Venture fund has gone up from 150M to 450M US$ - that certainly has helped. And is from my knowledge an unparalleled greasing of an eco system in 12 months.
There were two demos in the keynote - one demoed by the very talented students from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany - the other by the ubiquitous Sam Yen. All impressive demos, with the 2nd demo having a graspable direct business benefit for a CPG company.
Next up was Sikka - and true to the other board member keynotes, it was his time to use metaphors around Hana... What is the need for speed in sports for McDermott, the need for enterprise survival using Darwin for Hagemann-Snabe is Mathematics and Design for Sikka. And with the mathematical beauty in flowers we were possibly at the key announcement of the event - in terms of affecting SAP users - immediately.
So Fiori wasn't too much of a surprise anymore - given the GA of SAPUI5 over the weekend, the press release about Fiori on Wednesday - I was just wondering if it would even be shown in a keynote at all. So SAP is trying to tackle for the nth time the casual user consumption challenge, in the latest flowerful iteration with the help of HTML5 and Google Chrome. Turns out the Self Service UI dubbed the lillypads we saw in January at HR2013 was already an early release of SAPUI5. And with 25 applications Fiori covers more than HCM self service scenarios and goes beyond to general approvals and of course the area where UI counts the most - sales. But HTML 5 is fickle and the browser properties are fighting on the standards - so you best work on one browser, which SAP has done with Chrome. And following Google IO in parallel - that was a good choice. If betting on Chrome only will be an issues with customers - we will see.
Some things at SAP never chance - the licensing was not clear at release time, you need SAPUI5, Gateway and Business Suite extension licenses. SAP could have made a huge splash by saying - if you pay maintenance - there is no additional license cost for you, sorry it took us so long to get usability right.
No Hana keynote without hardware and hardware partners and H-P's Bill Veghte made a passionate statement about the new hardware coming from Project Kraken. If you thought Plattner and Sikka were excited, Veghte was on a different level, good for H-P. I want to know what he had for breakfast.
Sikka also tied together the Lumira announcement - good to see keynote presence for the former Business Objects tools - which seem to slip in the background. In contrast to Fiori - the pricing here was clarified - and is mostly free for a try & buy time - kudos for a cloud age sales strategy.
And SAP also unveiled a partnership with Adobe, who will bring the Adobe Marketing Cloud to Hana - no specific dates, but a good partnership as it helps SAP out in the weaker aspects of online marketing, something where Oracle and salesforce have invested heavily since a few years.
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And being day 3 - there was also time to work the ecosystem, with the winners of the startup challenge being announced, all run very close to (SAP) home on their automation content - two had HCM scenarios, one was in the finance area. Obviously as a startup working on Hana - it makes sense to see any exit options in regards of SAP's core business.
Lastly we were off to the healthcare aspect and while I like the philanthropic aspect - I fail to buy in the tangible business benefit. One demo was about analyzing tumors in real time - but luckily tumors don't change real time. Simulation would be a scenario I get. Let me know what I am missing here.
It was good to see how much interest and leverage NetSuite has with partners - and it was a solid day 3 keynote... but nothing more.
We didn't get an answer why SAP had the Hana Enterprise Cloud event last week, one week before Sapphire. And leaked the Lumira release. And the SAPUI5 release. And the keynote absent NetWeaver 7.4 GA (something that will affect many more attendees short term than Hana). It all came together with Sikka's part of the Day 3 keynote. But it asked a lot of questions early that were answered late - but SAP can command an attention span of over a week - so this seemed to work. But love to chat on this with Jonathan Becher - is this then new PR strategy for events ahead? Not textbook - but wonder how it compares in marketing metrics of quotes, mentions, hits etc.
For SAP it all came together. One week even changed and clarified some things around Hana - a proof how fast the company is moving its thinking and messaging around this product. Keynote strategy was certainly best for least - as only Sikka's keynote showed and presented and closed the loop on many earlier announcements of the week and previous week.
Lots to digest for both companies, a lot of details to be hashed out in the next weeks. The towering top takeaway by vendor - NetSuite has an aging UI and needs to do more about it - SAP is a technology company right now - we will see if this is a phase due to re-inventing itself on Hana - or a longer lasting change in the company DNA.
It's back to SAP to start (as yesterday was NetSuite's turn):
What's SAP news
Jonathan Becher seems to have throttled the SAP marketing machine to 4 press releases a day - so like Tuesday and Wendnesday - we got served 4 new press releases today.
Needless to say Hana dominated, with the joint press release with H-P as a trusted hardware partners and co-developers of the previously leaked Project Kraken super Hana server. And it's impressive hardware, with 16 E7 CPUs and 12 TB of memory. We will see how successful this machine will be in the more and more crowded Hana space. And next for Hana is the very overdue (in the age of BigData) capability to access Hadoop and other systems, probably all powered by former Sybase code. Given Hana's reconfirmed only RAM as medium for storage puristic strategy, such hybrid approaches are the only way for SAP to allow customers to access the Hadoop world. What this means for performance of queries etc. will be interesting to see. The new geo-coding was more overdue and is a key feature for geography enabled insights. SAP also announced the conclusion of the integration of a sleuth of former Sybase products with Hana - the interesting ones being Sybase ESP, SQL Anywhere and Sybase Replication Server.
And remember Business Objects? Well version 4.1 of Business Objects and enhancement has been released and beyond the revamped Lumira offering, there is support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive, interestingly also better access to Oracle's Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. And SAP keeps investing in Crystal Server, targeted at SMB enterprises.
And no large user conference without a reference to the ecosystem, that clearly - like the SAP itself- is invigorated by Hana. The partners on board for Hana are pretty much the whole ecosystem, services partners as well the hardware partners, obviously. The new twist is that SAP is aggressively targeting re-seller opportunities and the very thriving start-up ecosystem around Hana. Even the ISV partner program, vendors building on top of Hana is at 25 partners.
What's NetSuite news
Three press releases - all about the ecosystem, naming Hero customers and successful partners, as well as 6 partners launching new cloud practices to implement NetSuite products. Netsuite keeps commanding significant interest in the partner space, bot on the services, but also on product partner side, see the coupe from Day 1 of signing up pretty much all mid tier HCM vendors as partners.
Hasso & Vishal's Delivery
It was going to be a long keynote and contrary to old habits, Hasso even started on time.
Plattner started with addressing what SAP customers (should) expect from SAP applications. And he addressed the needs pretty correctly with a system that is adaptive to business challenges, extensible in data and functionality and gives full access from mobile devices, while being easy to use and offering a consumer grade experience. And true to form and recent communications, the cloud is now ready for (not simple) business applications, analytics, B2B networks etc. But Plattner also said that larger companies will never ever want to share systems and data center space with other companies... well.
What surprised me was that Plattner then embarked in an almost 30 minutes defense of Hana, seeking clarification on what it really is - SAP's platform of the future. The audience knew that from McDermott and Hagemann-Snabe - just in case it was missed before - but Plattner took the time to defend the little girl. Always debatable if you need to do this in a format like this, well he did - and it proved to be insightful, humorous and even generous towards the competition.
In his typical professorial delivery style Plattner debunked multitenancy first. In an interesting change in story line, classic database striped multitenancy like used for applications like SuccessFactors was still a problem for Hana last week (see here) - now it is not - as Plattner said in the press conference we will just use more cores. Something that needs a little more digging going forward.
Next was the claim, that Hana is not disruptive. The argument is that it's just a change in the database layer. But while SAP deserves credit for trying to make the move of Business Suite users as easy as possible to migrate to Hana - it still means a significant challenge... if switching databases would not be disruptive then SAP and Oracle competitors would have been much more successful with the many campaigns trying to dislodge the Oracle database under the SAP applications.
Then we were at the point that Hana cannot be successful, as it supports only RAM as storage medium. Plattner argued that only the data that is used and needed will move to Hana (and into RAM), not used data won't. And then there is compression on top. And while you certainly won't need all 500+ fields of an order line - SAP needs to explain how to identify and migrate the used columns. And how to add further ones when usage changes.
It was also clear, that Plattner sees Hana as the chance to slim down the massive R/3 DNA in the SAP applications. Forget about columns, we don't need all this functionality, we don't need long running queries... to the claim that there wasn't long running batch files when he was CEO... and while a fitness program for bloated SAP business functionality while transitioning to Hana is highly desirable - the challenge of course remains - what is the relevant functionality. SAP needs to come up with a visible process on what is fat and what is muscle it wants to keep.
And lastly Plattner shared he is deeply hurt, that Hana is perceived as for SAP applications only, stating that over 60% of the use cases are for non SAP apps. Would love to see the use cases. And it's great that Hana is open - Plattner even invited Oracle to run on Hana (!) - but SAP needs to fight the perception from his own track record. SAP inhouse developed technology (like Hana) has never been sold, positioned or stood the the test of the market as SAP independent technology. Hard to fight perception, harder if your track record supports the perception.
And Plattner busted the myth of the Sybase acquisition being all about mobile - it really was about the database expertise and related IP - patented and not. And many have said this before... including Plattner's friend Ellison who understandable sees Sybase as an inferior competitor in the database market. And Plattner also shared that Microsoft wasn't too happy with the Hana strategy - but they were professionals about it.
The start-up interest, with 431 start-ups using Hana is no doubt a tremendous success. Just from a sheer mass processing a great feat, no question. But later we learnt that the Hana Venture fund has gone up from 150M to 450M US$ - that certainly has helped. And is from my knowledge an unparalleled greasing of an eco system in 12 months.
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| The collage of startup logos working with Hana |
There were two demos in the keynote - one demoed by the very talented students from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany - the other by the ubiquitous Sam Yen. All impressive demos, with the 2nd demo having a graspable direct business benefit for a CPG company.
Next up was Sikka - and true to the other board member keynotes, it was his time to use metaphors around Hana... What is the need for speed in sports for McDermott, the need for enterprise survival using Darwin for Hagemann-Snabe is Mathematics and Design for Sikka. And with the mathematical beauty in flowers we were possibly at the key announcement of the event - in terms of affecting SAP users - immediately.
So Fiori wasn't too much of a surprise anymore - given the GA of SAPUI5 over the weekend, the press release about Fiori on Wednesday - I was just wondering if it would even be shown in a keynote at all. So SAP is trying to tackle for the nth time the casual user consumption challenge, in the latest flowerful iteration with the help of HTML5 and Google Chrome. Turns out the Self Service UI dubbed the lillypads we saw in January at HR2013 was already an early release of SAPUI5. And with 25 applications Fiori covers more than HCM self service scenarios and goes beyond to general approvals and of course the area where UI counts the most - sales. But HTML 5 is fickle and the browser properties are fighting on the standards - so you best work on one browser, which SAP has done with Chrome. And following Google IO in parallel - that was a good choice. If betting on Chrome only will be an issues with customers - we will see.
Some things at SAP never chance - the licensing was not clear at release time, you need SAPUI5, Gateway and Business Suite extension licenses. SAP could have made a huge splash by saying - if you pay maintenance - there is no additional license cost for you, sorry it took us so long to get usability right.
No Hana keynote without hardware and hardware partners and H-P's Bill Veghte made a passionate statement about the new hardware coming from Project Kraken. If you thought Plattner and Sikka were excited, Veghte was on a different level, good for H-P. I want to know what he had for breakfast.
Sikka also tied together the Lumira announcement - good to see keynote presence for the former Business Objects tools - which seem to slip in the background. In contrast to Fiori - the pricing here was clarified - and is mostly free for a try & buy time - kudos for a cloud age sales strategy.
And SAP also unveiled a partnership with Adobe, who will bring the Adobe Marketing Cloud to Hana - no specific dates, but a good partnership as it helps SAP out in the weaker aspects of online marketing, something where Oracle and salesforce have invested heavily since a few years.
And being day 3 - there was also time to work the ecosystem, with the winners of the startup challenge being announced, all run very close to (SAP) home on their automation content - two had HCM scenarios, one was in the finance area. Obviously as a startup working on Hana - it makes sense to see any exit options in regards of SAP's core business.
Lastly we were off to the healthcare aspect and while I like the philanthropic aspect - I fail to buy in the tangible business benefit. One demo was about analyzing tumors in real time - but luckily tumors don't change real time. Simulation would be a scenario I get. Let me know what I am missing here.
The McGeever delivery
Well, it was you can say almost tradition now for SuiteWorld, blacked out for attendees via webcast at the beinning. McGeever started with a James Bond skit, and presented in tuxedo. It was a solid day 3 keynote addressing services, upgrades and partners. Upgrading while you sleep is a nice marketing catch phrase - but does not really fly for worldwide customers.It was good to see how much interest and leverage NetSuite has with partners - and it was a solid day 3 keynote... but nothing more.
The marketing battle
This Day clearly went to SAP. And let's be clear - for NetSuite even to compete is a success. As a technologist it's amazing how a 600 member development team at NetSuite can even pose headaches to a company with 20x+ developers. But size does not make fast, though as this week's GoogleIO shows, Google does not slow down as Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted this week.We didn't get an answer why SAP had the Hana Enterprise Cloud event last week, one week before Sapphire. And leaked the Lumira release. And the SAPUI5 release. And the keynote absent NetWeaver 7.4 GA (something that will affect many more attendees short term than Hana). It all came together with Sikka's part of the Day 3 keynote. But it asked a lot of questions early that were answered late - but SAP can command an attention span of over a week - so this seemed to work. But love to chat on this with Jonathan Becher - is this then new PR strategy for events ahead? Not textbook - but wonder how it compares in marketing metrics of quotes, mentions, hits etc.
MyPOV
A conventional Day 3 for NetSuite,. one that as more product centric observer you would skip, as a customer certainly not.For SAP it all came together. One week even changed and clarified some things around Hana - a proof how fast the company is moving its thinking and messaging around this product. Keynote strategy was certainly best for least - as only Sikka's keynote showed and presented and closed the loop on many earlier announcements of the week and previous week.
Lots to digest for both companies, a lot of details to be hashed out in the next weeks. The towering top takeaway by vendor - NetSuite has an aging UI and needs to do more about it - SAP is a technology company right now - we will see if this is a phase due to re-inventing itself on Hana - or a longer lasting change in the company DNA.