Shai Agassi – a contrarian view

Shai Agassi is leaving SAP because, in essence, the old guard didn’t want to turn over the reins to him as fast as he would have liked.* Often, this kind of departure is a bad thing (e.g., Ray Lane at Oracle). But I suspect that SAP may actually be improved by Shai’s leaving.

*His other stated reasons include two very good and highly admirable ones – working on energy technologies and improving matters in Israel.

SAP’s technical strategy has three core elements:

1. Automate business processes.
2. Provide the technical infrastructure for automating business processes.
3. Encapsulate process and data at the object/process level.

This strategy has been heavily developed and refined on Shai’s watch, with major contributions from lots of other folks. The issue isn’t vision any more. What SAP needs to do better is execute on the vision.

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Posted in Analytic technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP | 3 Comments »

Typical nonsense from SAP

Below, essentially in its entirety, is an e-mail I just received from SAP, today, January 3. (Emphasis mine.)

Thank you for attending SAPs 4th Annual Analyst Summit in Las Vegas. We hope you found the time to be valuable. To ensure that we continue meeting your informational needs, please take a few moments to complete our online survey by using the link below. We ask that you please complete the survey before December 20. We look forward to receiving your feedback.

What makes this typical piece of SAP over-organization particularly amusing is that I didn’t actually attend the event. I was planning to, but after considerable effort I think I finally made it clear to VP of Analyst Relations Don Bulmer that I was fed up with being lied to* by him and his colleagues. In connection with that, we came to a mutual agreement, as it were, that I wouldn’t go.

*and lied about

Obviously, administrative ineptitude and dishonesty are two very different matters, united only by the fact that they both are characteristics of SAP, particularly its analyst relations group. Having said that, I should hasten to add that there are plenty of people at SAP I still trust. If Peter Zencke or Lothar Schubert tells me something, I expect it to be true. And it’s not just Germans; I feel the same way about Dan Rosenberg or Andrew Cabanski-Dunning, to name just a couple non-German SAP guys.

But I have to say this — both SAP’s ethics and its internal business processes are sufficiently screwed up as to cast doubt on SAP’s qualifications to “run the world’s best-run businesses.”

Technorati Tags: SAP, ethics

Posted in Enterprise applications, SAP | 7 Comments »

Microsoft underscores its core paradigm

In a recent column called Three Views From the Top of the Software World (I generally don’t pick my titles, but that was as good as any), I opined that the big vendors had three fundamentally different paradigms from which they viewed enterprise software:

In the IBMOracle view, data — a.k.a. information — is king. IT’s job is to manage the data powerfully, reliably and (not always the top priority) cost-effectively. …

Microsoft’s vision, however, is quite different. It’s first and foremost about empowering people, at least to the extent that making them better corporate employees can be regarded as empowerment. …

While IBMOracle talks about information and Microsoft talks about people, SAP talks about business processes. …

Shortly after I wrote that, Microsoft came out with a sterling example of my claim. They told a story about composite apps. At SAP, composite apps are a business process story. At Oracle, they’re probably a business process story too. But at Microsoft? Read for yourself, in Microsoft’s own words:

The core vision behind what we are doing is Roles Based Productivity. To deliver on this vision, you have to start with “People” and really connect them up to their “work” (i.e. process). In the real world most people’s work is split across multiple applications and the “seams” show. Web Services is the foundational infrastructure that helps us get rid of the “seams”.

I don’t want to suggest I see something wrong with this. All three views are valid, and none of the vendors cited is too extreme (any more) about neglecting the other viewpoints. Still, I think this isn’t just semantics, but rather a fundamental difference in worldviews.

Posted in Enterprise applications, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP | 3 Comments »

SAP On-Demand — some key points

Here are some of my quick thoughts on SAP’s CRM On-Demand announcement:

1. One of the biggest barriers to SaaS (Software as a Service) growth in my opinion has been the question of data integration. Some of my data is at a service provider. Some is inhouse. How do I integrate it? How do I analyze it? SAP has provided a very good but still partial answer to those concerns by ensuring that its hosted and onsite versions of an app have the same APIs.

2. I say “partial” only because I’m having trouble envisioning many scenarios in which a customer would really want to have some of its data inhouse, some outsourced. It seems like the main benefit would almost always be as a transition strategy.

3. That said, sales automation can be one of the exceptions. The distributed computing problem for serving sales offices around the world may be much greater than that for the rest of one’s apps, so outsourcing that aspect of network management is not totally ridiculous.

4. Anyhow, this was obviously the way the software industry was headed. Indeed, it’s the way a lot of the industry did business until the first half of the 1980s. There were timeshared and onsite versions of the same products, in many cases. That strategy only died out completely when DBMS replaced file managers as the standard underpinnings to packaged apps, and that didn’t happen until the rise of relational DBMS in the second half of the 1980s.

5. I’m sure there will be issues with functionality, pricing, service responsiveness, and similar aspects of nimbleness. There’s no guarantee that SAP will establish and commit to a viable sales model for this service; it may always remain an afterthought. Even so, it could be enough to slow the penetration of Salesforce.com et al. into large enterprises.

6. To succeed in a big way, SAP has to establish a separate sales force, with a separate marketing budget. It also has to cross-commission between packaged product and SaaS sales. Those sound like slightly contradictory strategies, so there’s no assurance they’ll do both. Mark Benioff doesn’t have to panic quite yet.

7. The other non-trivial organizational problem SAP needs to solve is having one product development organization serve two sales force/marketing group masters. The closest thing they’ve done in the past to that is with NetWeaver, which is both a key technology for other SAP products and an important product in its own right. Their answer has been impressive fundamental engineering, but perhaps less “sizzle” on the surface of the product than it needs for maximum success. E.g., the BI products are significantly held back by their UIs, and serious attempts to fix that in my opinion just started last year — no offense intended to those hard-working people who might suspect I’m implicitly calling them “unserious” with that judgment.

Bottom line: Like most cases in which a huge and hugely successful company invades the core market of a rival, this effort will need to be judged several years and releases down the road. And the most important deciding factor will be whether or not there’s ongoing commitment to succeed in this new market, on a level comparable to the commitment with which the company pursues its much large core businesses. SAP has already shown such a commitment once this century, in NetWeaver. It’s too early to tell whether they’ll do so a second time, in SaaS.

Posted in Enterprise applications, SAP, Software as a service | No Comments »

Hear Curt Monash online – three times!

The world has hardly suffered from a lack of opportunities to hear me speak. I first appeared on radio and TV in 1973, first taught a college course in 1977, and have rarely shut up ever since. But until recently, I hadn’t gotten involved with the various forms of Web broadcasting. Well, that suddenly changed, and this month alone you have three different opportunities to hear me hold forth.

1. John Gallant put me on “The Hot Seat” at Network World’s offices, discussing a few provocative questions about the direction of the software industry. The video/audio may now be found on their site. Sadly, while I could quibble and say the camera angle was a bit unflattering, in essence that is what I really look like these days.

2. I participated in a Webinar for SAP called “Beyond Transactions: The Power of Portals.” The theme was that if you want to build or buy an app that’s mainly about data flowing back and forth between parts of the computer system, traditional technologies are fine. But if you want an app that has rich human contact with information, portals are often a superior technology.

I am told a link will be available within the week. Watch this blog for details.

3. On Wednesday, January 25, at 11 am EST, I am participating in – indeed, doing most of the talking for – a Webinar on Memory-Centric Data Management. The host is Applix. The focus will naturally be on the part they care most about (in-memory MOLAP), but it will also be the first time I speak about an area on which I’ve done a considerable amount of recent writing and research.

You can register for this Webinar here.

Posted in DBMS vendors and technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP | 1 Comment »