We had the chance to attend SAP Ariba's user conference Ariba Live in Las Vegas, together with colleagues Chris Kanaracus, Guy Courtin and Ray Wang. The conference was well attended with over 2500 people in attendance.
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Guy and me recorded a short video of our key takeaways - have a look:
No chance to watch? Read on:
You can find Guy's Supply Chain and Procurement's takeaways here. My next generation Applications takeaways are as as follows:
Open APIs - As common with many vendors these days, SAP Ariba will publish APIs, starting with five areas, hierarchies and approvals the most prominent ones. Kudos to the vendor for working from a roamap going forward so customers and prospects can plan their uptake of these APIs.
End User Enablement - We have been writing about end user enablement since a while and it is a key strategy for vendors, as it achieves a number of benefits: First it enables users with reasonable technology savviness to build their own applications. Secondly that helps enterprises to become more agile and to accelerate, critical for their future success. And lastly it protects the vendors from being disrupted from new market entrants, just using their APIs with an attractive user interface. Good to see Ariba enabling a lightweight end user PaaS, allowing to create forms and deploy them not only to the web, but also to tablets and mobile devices.
Platform Innovation - Ariba had one of the earliest internet scale, some may say cloud platforms and as such it shows its age. While there was not much happening two and more years ago on the platform side, its good to see that this has changed. SAP Ariba is actively using Hadoop, exploiting microservices and using popular frameworks like AngularJS. And of course HANA is more and getting though the product. The use case should also be interesting for the recently gone into GA HANA Vora (see below for news analysis when announced).
MyPOV
Good to see traction on the platform side at SAP Ariba. It looks like the division has found new speed and dynamics, that attending customers noticed. Procurement is a huge opportunity for SAP and its customers and it looks like there is a better grasp at getting into a very good position in the next years to come.
On the concern side SAP Ariba needs to execute on the new vision and roadmap. Networked applications of the scale that SAP Ariba needs to build are not trivial, even with today's advances on the cloud side. Operating this on internal data centers is a valid strategy, but can / could become also of concern as capability and TCO of the popular cloud based IaaS platforms will become more and more competitive.
But overall good to see the progress at SAP Ariba - we will be watching, stay tuned.
More on SAP:
- News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors innovates in Performance Management with continuous feedback powered by 1 to 1s - read here
- Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Good Progress sprinkled with innovative ideas and challenging the status quo - read here
- News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP - read here
- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Day #1 Keynote Top 3 Takeaways - read here
- News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors introduces Next Generation of HCM software - read here
- News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire - Top 3 Positives and Concerns - read here
- First Take - Bernd Leukert and Steve Singh Day #2 Keynote - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
- In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
- First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - the next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
- Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
- First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
- First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
- SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
- Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and IBM partner for cloud success - good news - read here
- Market Move - SAP strikes again - this time it is Concur and the spend into spend management - read here
- Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors picks up speed - but there remains work to be done - read here
- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
- Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
- News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
- Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
- SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
- Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
- SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
- Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
- SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
- Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
- SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
- Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
- Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
- The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
- Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
- Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
- Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
- Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here
And more about SAP technology:
- Event Prieview - SAP TechEd 2015 - read here
- News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP read here
- HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
- News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
- News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
- Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
- Event Report - BI 2014 and HANA 2014 takeaways - it is all about HANA and Lumira - but is that enough? Read here.
- News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
- SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
- My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
- SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
- Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
- SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
- HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here.