SAP’s three-day Sapphire conference ended Wednesday with its usual fanfare (SAP’s bouquet to this year’s attendees was a concert by Sting).I attended over 20 talks and presentations in three days. I wanted to share the trove of notes I scribbled, offering my far-from-perfect view of the latest and greatest in the SAP “ecosystem” (my, they love that word!).
By way of context I attended my first Sapphire event in 1996. I’ve attended intermittently in following years and skipped it all together for at least the last four years.
And let me caveat this largely positive post by underscoring I have no bias for SAP over its worthy competitors, whether on-premise ERP like Oracle and Infor or the many emerging, exciting cloud offerings. SAP is not, and never will be, the best solution for all.
With that said my overall impression of this year’s Sapphire was overwhelmingly positive. The tone was upbeat and optimistic, similar to the Sapphire love-fests enjoyed in the late 1990’s.
The prevalent themes for the big-boys (large companies who have already spent a gazillion on SAP) were analytics, mobility, and collaboration.
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| R2D2, Meet HANA! |
SAP thumped the drum loudly for HANA, a technology that allows loads of data to remain in memory (i.e. not stored on disc) and thus analyzed and presented in a flash. According to actual users queries requiring two to three hours are now done in two to three seconds.
SAP also talked at length about mobility, allowing system access through the full range of hand-held devices (no surprise there, they spent billion$ acquiring Sybase specifically for Sybase’s mobile technologies).
I’m no expert but I think the speedy analytics combined with new mobility options could really ramp up SAP’s value to business users.
Like everyone SAP is also offering a new collaboration offering, called Streamwork, which runs on top of existing SAP instances. Streamwork is part of SAP's efforts to provide 'people-centric,' as opposed to transactional software. It seemed to me that Streamwork offers fairly standard collaboration functionality though there were some pretty neat features tucked in the framework.
Beyond the large company tech-y stuff there were some very interesting developments in the “SME” (SAP-speak for Small to Medium Enterprise) space.
When most people think of SAP they think huge multinationals, correct? Actually SAP claims 110,000 enterprises run SAP technologies worldwide, with over 80,000 organizations (>70%) classified as Small or Medium Enterprises.
SAP has always talked a big game in the SME space and I think they’re finally getting it.
Most of Sapphire’s SME chatter focused on Business By Design, SAP’s cloud offering. SAP presented a pretty mature view of the cloud world, where private clouds and public clouds play nice with traditional on-premise software. But at the same time SAP is selling hard against the pure cloud plays like Salesforce.com, Epicor, and NetSuite.
SAP positions cloud as an extension of its traditional on-premise offerings, quick to explain that SAP’s “cloud shares the same DNA as our on-premise offerings” and is the cloud that can best “talk to your business systems underneath.”
And SAP positions cloud as a very junior extension to its traditional offerings, suggesting organizations either use cloud as an extension of traditional on-premise ERP (“use it to quickly connect a small subsidiary to your core ERP system”) or as an on-ramp to traditional ERP (“bring that new office live immediately but migrate off the cloud within a year”).
It's not to say SAP is ignoring the cloud leader: SAP is offering an add-on to Business By Design, called Sales on Demand, which directly targets Salesforce.com. It will be interesting to gauge how seriously SAP takes Salesforce.com as measured by the marketing and sales muscle SAP puts behind this competitive offering.
So. . .that’s the summary of what I saw. And that’s what I think. So don’t hesitate to let me know what you think.
But I really do think in the aggregate SAP has some very promising, compelling offerings.
And it was really nice to enjoy the upbeat, hopeful environment!
