What are the plans for SAP’s planning solutions portfolio?

A quick jog down memory lane, as I am flying from PHL to SNA. About 10 years ago, I went to an SAP training course in Northern CA to learn SEM-BPS . My background at that time was all ABAP, BW and some SD/FI on functional side. Till today – that BPS training by Peter Jones has been the best class I ever took for an SAP technology, and till date – BPS is the fastest I ever came up to speed on any SAP technology.

With all its technical beauty, BPS had its fair share of problems too. One such issue was the front end in Excel. It was a powerful front end, but BEx had an excel front end too. It was not an efficient process to use BPC excel for planning, and then switch to BEx for reporting. As a result, we used to replicate a lot of reporting functionality into BPC layouts to make life easier for users.  Needless to say, users were not thrilled – and this was not good for TCO.

BPS was not the slickest way to do planning in an enterprise, but it did its job within its limitations. SAP did the right thing soon after – and brought out integrated planning – popularly known as BI-IP. Now, BEx was the one client for planning and reporting. But IP could not do everything BPS could do – and there were a lot of consultants who hated it, and thought it was a step backwards compared to BPS.

 

One  issue with IP was lack of CRM integration. CRM planning could not be done with IP – it still needed to be done using BPS, due to a UI limitation. So market planning, TPM etc continued to use BPS while others moved over to IP.  Incidentally, the CRM integration to BPS is nothing to write home about – it is as un-user friendly as it gets. But it did its job at the time.

Then SAP acquired Outlooksoft. When I was a BPS consultant, I used to think that SAP will surely buy Hyperion. But Oracle bought them instead, and SAP took Outlooksoft, which is a Microsoft based product.

Outlooksoft’s strength was superior user experience. When I played with it – not in a project scenario, I think it was at an SAP booth at Teched or SAPPHIRE – I liked it, and thought it was pretty fast too. The only thing I did not like was that there was no netweaver integration. But SAP said they will come out with a netweaver version soon, and they did.

By now, SAP had at least 4 planning options – BPS, IP and 2 outlooksoft versions, which got renamed to BPC. Well, same with consolidations part of the house too – with EC-CS, BCS, BPC, Cartesis. As far as I know – everything was and is supported till date, and there is a “it depends” answer if SAP is asked what tool to choose.

So much for history – lets fast forward to the shiny new world of HANA. So the stand-alone HANA is mostly a datamart on steroids, with no generic killer app till date. SAP came up with CO-PA accelerator, which is pretty good. Then there is smart meter analytics – which I never understood why SAP did, instead of something else with more widespread appeal across the install base. And all this time – SAP, customers and partners have been asking “where is the HANA killer app?”.

So the next generation of HANA came where BW could use it as a database. The moment I heard about BW on HANA – the thought that crossed my mind was “wow – this is exactly what SAP needs. Not just for reporting, but for planning”. BPC netweaver is not exactly the fastest planning engine I have seen. In fact, I am not so sure how well it will work with big amounts of data, unless customers also buy BWA.  I am sure SAP will claim it is quite good on performance etc based on what they have seen – but based on my own limited experience, it has some ways to go.

Remember the BPS question of why do I need separate excel client for BPS when BEx already has one -  And then SAP coming up with IP that solved that issue? One would have thought that lesson was learned well by SAP – but guess not. BPC has its own excel client, while BEx, and Analysis for office also have excel clients. It beats me why analysis client couldn’t have been enhanced to cater to BPC too. There is more – remember the postable nodes in BPS that saved many a project some valuable time in implementing? Where did that disappear in the new products?

In my mind – BPC on HANA is a no brainer for SAP to prioritize. That is a killer app that SAP and Partners and Customers can all be happy to implement without the necessity for marketing  hype. Now, I do know that BPC on HANA is in the works, and will come out some day soon. I also understand from some blogs on SDN that SAP is building a planning layer in HANA that is different from BPC (but probably can be used by BPC later I suppose). The question is how many evolutions will it take before it moves all the performance hogging functionality into the HANA layer and provide true disaggregation, and lightning fast performance?

 

Since ECC on HANA is also around the corner, will it take away investment from BPC on HANA?

And will SAP converge its planning technologies? Can SAP incorporate the best of BPC’s user experience, IP/BPS’ netweaver integration, NGAP’s HANA friendliness, R’s predictive abilities , BWA’s OLAP processing speed etc into one coherent product? or- as a buddy warned me today on twitter – will it end up with BPC’s integration and BPS’ user experience if SAP went down this route?  And will SAP come up with a full fledged cloud based planning environment along the lines of tidemark ?

I am sure SAP has some smart people doing its product portfolio planning, and that everything will converge at some point. But the sooner it happens – the more their customers will appreciate it.

I am not sure if the agile development paradigm used by SAP these days will help or hurt the speed of such integration. When different scrums happen for BPC, BW, NGAP etc – the project manager in me keeps thinking they will find it harder and harder to prioritize integration dependencies. Each product might get unique benefits for sure – but customers only care about overall solutions at the end – not individual products. With a distributed development organization like SAP, I would expect this to create more silos – not less. I have seen fiefdoms develop in big globally distributed teams I have managed in my past life – but those were in implementation projects, not product development. I have heard that SAP uses scrum of scrums to address this issue – so I trust they have a grip on this. And in any case, I am out of my depth when it comes to product development – so I will leave it at that.

Random parting thoughts -

1. Now that SAP plans to put HANA as the engine on every SAP product runs, and since Vishal has announced ECC will work on HANA in Q4 – I wonder if planning will stop being a separate system, and get folded into the business suite. On first thoughts it makes sense to me for a large set of customers to do cross domain planning to pull it back into business suite, and then let HANA deal with OLTP/OLAP planning loads efficiently. Planning is one of the most collaborative aspects in an enterprise – so I think streamwork integration is also a no brainer in this situation.I have no idea what are SAP’s thoughts on this – but I am very curious on what is the strategy for planning in the nirvana state.

2. A more technical question – if HANA is the database for BW going forward, will it make sense to convert most cubes to an account modelling structure to make use of columnar storage? Has any one tried to compare this with a traditional key figure model in BW on HANA to check performance?  If my instinct is right – and account model does help – it is definitely a plus for BPC, since it only supports account model now.

Only time will tell – or may be one of the EPM leaders at SAP can explain that to me at some point, ideally as a comment here, so that everyone can read it.

Innovation – the price to pay

Everyone and his brother is out there on social media lamenting on lack of disruptive innovation.  While I don’t pretend to be a big innovator, there is a portion of my work that can be termed as “innovation” , or even “disruptive innovation”.  And after a few years of doing this, I can say with confidence that it comes at a high price, and it is not for everybody. Admittedly, I have come close to getting out of “innovation” a few times – but have continued to keep at it.

 

First issue is identifying what to work on. On an average, I consider 10 ideas to pick one to work on. These ideas come up as I talk with customers, colleagues, mentors, mentees and some times while watching TV or reading a book in a plane.  I will jot it down the soonest I can – and usually have an assortment of paper napkin sketches, notepad files etc where ideas are scattered.  I am not the only one who comes up with ideas – everyone in my team contributes ideas. Then I shortlist these based on only one criteria – is this something that can make my customer’s life easier in a tangible manner? If the answer is no – I ruthlessly cut it off.  This hurts egos more than one would think – especially my own. Some ideas that look brilliant as I jot it down in a plane ride look ridiculous when I think about it over a weekend.  And occasionally, it upsets my team when I kill one of their ideas. This needs to be done with some balance – if all you do is kill idea after idea, it just becomes a de-motivator.

 

Next up is recruiting a team to work on the idea. This is probably the hardest part – not everyone likes to do everything. And people have a life outside work, and value their work life balance. I have to respect that, and still make it work. And where I work, the team is spread across the globe – and typically we catchup over late evenings and weekends to work on innovations. No one pulls rank when it comes to innovation – people are free to join and drop off . My philosophy is that if people work on innovations voluntarily, it works out better than if it is forced down their throats based on official rank. So far it has worked out well – and I could not have asked for a better set of colleagues to work with.

 

It also improves teamwork and delegation abilities. I understood early on that delegation is the key to success. And I try to teach that to everyone in my team. The trick to delegating successfully is to make sure the team understands what is being delegated, and what is their authority and responsibility.  You cannot just delegate responsibility ! But once they are comfortable with taking on authority, and willing to be held responsible – the results are unbelievable. Irrespective of the result of the actual innovation project – they develop into amazing leaders, and it is the biggest gratification I get in my job. I did not invent this – my managers took this approach with me, and I am paying it forward for the next generation.  Some times, things don’t work out as planned and an inexperienced person might screw up. It is up to the manager to make sure there is sufficient support when failure happens, and no one is thrown under the bus.  Especially when it comes to disruptive innovation, this is key. If you cannot live with this – don’t start down this path.

 

And then there is the price to pay on family life, hobbies etc.  I had to sacrifice a lot, and so have many people I know. My wife supports me to a great extent, and without that I would not have taken this up. It is hard to balance – and once you are deep into an innovation project, it is extremely hard to switch off completely. This is rather unfair for the family, and has to be carefully weighed before starting, and then periodically throughout the project.  At the moment, the only way I handle this is to take breaks between innovation projects so that there is some balance on personal front. The work-life balance is a personal decision – and if you care enough about your team, you should watch out for their work-life balance too.  All of this needs to be factored in when you plan the project. Nothing ever works to plan, and you need to balance aggressive milestones with a dose of reality.  This is a learning process, and I am definitely in the first half.

 

Finally – disrupting the “life as usual” for a customer, or for your own company is a challenge. it does not matter if you spent 3 months working every waking hour on this project. If you cannot make a business case and SHOW things will get better, no one will accept your innovations. And then you have 2 problems -1. risk of wasting the blood, sweat and tears spent on current project, and 2.  getting investments for next project from management.  And you would have broken a lot of glass before the final solution is pitched – so there is a potential long term price to pay as well.

 

And one last thing – be prepared to take the least amount of credit for success, and maximum amount of criticism for failure.  It is easy to know if this is working or not – if it is not working, you will soon find that there is no one left working shoulder to shoulder with you any more.

 

So with this big price tag – will I do this ever again?  ABSOLUTELY ! I won’t change a thing – it is the most satisfying part of my job

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As HANA matures, where should SAP focus?

It is not news that SAP is betting the farm on HANA. SAP’s sales and marketing organizations have done a tremendous job in making sure the HANA message is delivered loud and clear to its customer base.  SAP sold more that 100M Euros worth of HANA last year , and will probably do much bigger numbers this year too.

 

BW on HANA is already out, and is touted as a killer app. It might very well be a killer app – but that remains to be seen. In our internal lab projects, it is not as smooth as we expected. It is a bumpy road – but it is definitely fast. DSO activation for example is super fast, but it will also fail inexplicably, and then the time you save in activation is lost in trying to research what went wrong. The good thing is that since we know it is very fast, despite the teething problems – I am sure lot of customers will buy it. And to a certain scale, software is sold in bundles any way – so nothing will stop SAP from selling HANA licenses. Customers actually using HANA in production is another story altogether.

 

Buying is just a first step – the bigger question is who will implement. As of now, mostly SAP PSO is doing the implementation. But that is not a scalable model at all. PSO cannot satisfy the market by themselves, and SAP should be aggressively pitching to SI partners to sell and implement BW on HANA. You get some benefit by just doing a database switch to HANA, but the real benefits come from simplification – which means redefining the datamodels and data flow.  And that takes time and expert industry knowledge , and not just technical skills.

 

SI partners are terrific at implementation, and building accelerators for implementation. However, what they are the best at is NOT building apps. For apps, it is the smaller developer’s world. But then, SAP HANA is not yet available for smaller developer to do something about productively.  SAP has made a good first step. A sandbox is available for them to play with. But it is not a full development environment they can create a product, license it and sell it in a store.

 

So on both sides – implementation and apps building, SAP has some ways to go. If they don’t get their act together in short time, next year – we will start hearing the HANA shelfware stories.

 

There has been some announcements meanwhile on HANA for SMEs that I saw a few days ago. I am not convinced how SAP is going to sell HANA to SME clients. SME is primarily a market for hosted systems – public or private.  Why would they care about the nuts and bolts of the database that their system is based on? They just expect it to be reasonably fast.  As I mentioned to few friends on twitter – not verbatim -  “If I hire a landscaper to mow my lawn, why would I care if he uses a Black and Decker electric machine, or a manual push mower?”. I don’t – I just pay the guy to mow the lawn, and will hire another one if the first one does not do a decent job.  If there are special apps that are HANA based that give me a positive top line impact, there is a case to pay a premium for HANA. Otherwise, I doubt this will fly.  Especially after companies like Workday have made their cloud offering in-memory based fully and not charging specifically for it, it is hard to ask a customer to pay a premium for modernizing an old system.

 

Once BW on HANA is out of the way, obviously SAP will come out with ECC on HANA.  With most of the heavy lifting in ECC done in ABAP layer, customers will not see any huge benefits buying HANA as a database. And it is a few hundred million lines of code – so SAP is not going to rewrite everything in ECC to work on HANA. This essentially means SAP needs to build more things like the CO-PA accelerator, and more specialty apps for ECC that needs HANA.  Which then needs the small developers and SIs to play a big role to scale it meaningfully.

 

So, will SAP make the effort and actually make it work for the small developers and SIs ? or will they try to do it all by themselves?  And while they are at it – I hope they try to make this work for mobility, cloud and everything else too.  one approach – is to stay the way it is now. SAP will try to create the market, with the hope that some day in future partners can scale it. Or they can make it work for partners and smaller developers right upfront, and build a larger momentum.

 

None of this is new to SAP – several people have already made the case to SAP on these matters. And to SAP’s credit, they are good listeners. Now the only question that remains is when they will act.

 

 

The Social Media Giveth, And The Social Media Taketh Away

If you ask me what has had the biggest impact in my life for the last few years, I will say without exception that it is social media. And I am only a minor league bench quality player in social media , compared to the stalwarts. But even then – it has changed how I live and work.  On the personal front – I won’t go to a restaurant or buy a book at an airport without checking out reviews, or asking on twitter for a quick opinion . Without facebook, I would never have kept up with what is happening in the world of competitive dog shows, which is my hobby.  On the work front – twitter is a life saver. I have lost count of how many times others have helped me find information quickly, or offered help when I tweet out a question.  It is also rather  funny that I usually never get a timely response from most of these sources if I tried on email or phone.  I blog when I get an idea that I think more than one person would like to hear – and nothing has taught me more in these past years than clarifying thoughts in my own head when I settle down in a plane ride, and open my computer to post something on my blog.

But for all that it gives, social media also has a terrific/terrible way of taking away.  When President Obama was candidate Obama in the last elections, I had seen many of my friends on Facebook supporting the campaign there, and helping with fund raising.  I was pretty impressed that his campaign was smart enough to use social media to raise so much money and awareness. And this year – I see many other friends effectively use Facebook to attack Obama’s policies, and help his rivals to raise money.

I have lived in US for about a dozen years now – and have watched with amusement how polarized people are when it comes to political ideology. Some of the smartest people I know – people who provide very balanced and well thought out opinions on work related matters, and who are polite at kid’s soccer games – they tend to make extremely biased statements with no restraint when it comes to politics. This is true for people in both left and right wings of the political spectrum. And in these 12 years, I have only seen the partisan nature increase – not decrease, both by career politicians, and by common man . Watching Facebook and twitter, I have a feeling this partisan nature has accelerated since the last election. Social media gives information so quickly, and without any editorial intervention – that it permeates faster than any other information delivery mechanism of our times.

While I was growing up in India, most people there had no idea of US election politics. We knew who the American President was, and that there were 2 parties, and that was pretty much it. Now my cousins,  nieces and nephews in India know as much about US politics as people who live here. It was quite amusing for me to hear how they view American politics strictly based on what they see on social media.

This is not just an isolated thing that affects politicians alone. I see this all the time with enterprise software world too – affecting vendors, influencers, customers etc. Some software vendors have totally embraced social media. I have seen many email signatures that read “social media leader for blah blah” as the designation of the sender. People actually get paid to manage social media, and I don’t even find it funny any more. Admittedly, I was shocked and found it funny when I first saw it – but not any more. I have accepted it for a fact that vendors want to control social media some how.

Question is – is social media giving them sufficient bang for the buck? Every one I have asked so far from vendor side assures me it is hugely beneficial to them. It is not a secret that vendors like to “buy” influence some how. Some do it with finesse – and give influencers enough information, and then get out-of-the-way on how it gets interpreted and analyzed. Some are more blunt, and will use social media as a pure marketing platform and blast out tweets, and blogs that praise themselves and say nasty things about competitors.  Some times different parts of the same company take diverse approaches when it comes to use of social media, which probably just results in erosion of  brand credibility .

But how many buyers make a decision based on social media? very few that I have seen. There are a few exceptions, but largely the purchasing process in enterprises have not followed the shift that has happened in consumer side.  But there is a silver lining too – although ultimate buyers don’t value social media all that much, there are influencers to that buying decision who make up their minds based on what they have seen in social media. I have been surprised personally when I give out my business card, and someone I have not met before would say ” Ah I recognize you from twitter and your blog”. It has occasionally also helped me win business. So may be it is just a matter of time before social media becomes a big criteria for enterprise purchases . But at least for now and for near future, more weight is still given to quality of the product, price, references etc.

I am yet to see a CXO who told me ” I am impressed that you guys refuted your competitors’ mean comments in your sponsored blog. I am now convinced I should buy from you, let me cut a check for perpetual licenses. Looking forward to more content like this”.  But what I have seen is CIOs and others calling me and asking ” hey, my team just pointed this flurry of activity to me from this company. Why do you think these guys are suddenly saying all this stuff about the other guys? What are they really afraid of ?  Should I be worried?”.  In my mind – it is a  perfect example of social media back firing , despite good intentions.

Social media is a fantastic opportunity to listen to your ecosystem, as long as you also follow-up with some action.  Then you can use social media to point out the actions that you took.  Of course, you can also use it mostly as a platform to shout from – but then you carry the risk of your ecosystem tuning you out quickly.  Even before social media existed, it was not possible to get a second chance create a great first impression. With social media, it is next to impossible. People form opinions really quickly based on what you do in social media. If you mess up – it will be hard to earn back the trust.  It is a hard balance to strike, but now that the pundits have social media maturity models and best practices, I suppose this is all well covered.

Analyzing Project Success – talent wins games, teamwork wins championships !

I am on cloud nine at the moment – our team successfully finished a huge big project go live in a “minimum fuss” way (THE way go-live should be) and I am getting ready to party hard with the gang.

It was a journey that started in the fall of 2009 – and the team is as intense today as they were 2 years ago. But the one thing that gives me more satisfaction than anything else is that there was no “us and them” between client team and “my” team apart from a contractual/legal perspective. I hold this as the prime reason for our success – we could have done every thing else right, but without this “joined at the hip” partnership – we would not be here today celebrating, and smiling ear to ear. Due to confidentiality reasons – I cannot disclose the client or the exact work we did, but I thought some one would benefit from my experience if I shared a few highlights from the project. If I manage to get the legal hurdles cleared, I will make a second post to complete the picture.

The client brought in an A team from their side – and the project was owned by a senior executive from business. Both business and IT leadership reported to her. Consequently, everything was done with the sole objective of making sure business got what they needed. The Program manager, technical manager, development manager, architects and project managers were all great people with great domain expertise – and they all wanted to “get the job done”. Even when they disagreed (passionately), they had the maturity and trust in each other to discuss and get to common ground.

Right from the start, we partnered at all levels of the program organization – from developers to sponsors. We had several hiccups along the way ( attrition issues, technical issues, relationship issues etc) – but since we had strong relationships, there was no difficulty in having honest conversations on what is happening , and how we are going to solve it. In a large complex program spread over multiple locations – this is critical. Nothing was ever hidden in status reports – full transparency, and joint plans to solve problems, and joint parties to celebrate successes .

A fantastic example of the partnership that I remember on top of my head was when we were finalizing scope early on. I, and another person brought up a discussion that the number of reports to be developed looked out of whack based on past experience. The leadership team took it seriously, and went back to discuss more on this – and came back with a scope that was about a third of what was originally proposed. They identified redundancies, and lower priorities and diligently worked through to save the project a lot of unnecessary work. I had made this recommendation on reducing scope, despite it meaning my team will bill significantly lower hours and there by make less $$ . The point is – $$ billed is not the biggest success factor for a consulting company. The primary goal for the consulting company is extremely high customer satisfaction leading to long term partnership, and being elevated to ” Trusted Adviser” status with the client. My mentors taught me that lesson early in my career, and I try to teach that to the next generation of PMs that come after me.

Change requests have a big bad name in project management field, especially with analyst community – and the word on the street is that SIs use it to milk a client dry. I never had any trouble in this regard – all changes were discussed in detail and agreed on, before we proceeded with any change requests. Every change had full justification and agreement, and I am very proud of the fact that not once in the whole life of the project did any one have to say “lets see what the written contract says”. That is the beauty of having a solid relationship across all parties involved, and a solid process to govern the project change control.

As I look back in time, the one thing that strikes me most is the sheer number of people who learned valuable skills and experience in the project from both client and our side. Leadership is all about empowering the team , and delegating authority and not just responsibility. While the project had a well defined escalation path, a lot of decisions were successfully taken by people closest to the issue, with appropriate heads up given to management for integration purposes. Having gone through this experience, I am sure we are all well positioned for success at whatever comes next in our careers. It gives me a lot of satisfaction that a lot of leadership talent was identified and nurtured through the program.

One thing I learned in the course of the last 2 years is that there is no one-size-fits-all way to motivate a big team. Some get motivated by money, some by getting additional responsibility and visibility, yet others by periodic change of roles within the project and so on. My project leaders and architects are exceptional – they found what made every team member tick, and acted on it, taking my help where needed. I still remember being fascinated by developers in my team pretty much competing for fun on who will find the most bugs, who will fix the most bugs and so on – over weekends and holidays, on their own time. How awesome is that? I could not be more proud of my gang – they rock. We have our fair share of disagreements – but team work and a common goal of making the project successful, ensures we get over them in the shortest time, and healthiest manner possible.

Last but not least – there is a lot I am thankful to my support staff, ,my managers and my mentors. A two plus year project of this size meant that I had to ask for help periodically. They not only gave me support and guidance behind the scenes – they also came in person and celebrated our successes. They cared – and we appreciated that a lot, and it is a lesson we will take with us as we progress in our own careers.

Most people who read this would have made an assumption that this was an SAP project – with me being an out-and-out SAP guy, and an SAP mentor and all that. Well, this was NOT an SAP project. It was my first non-SAP project too. I am an extremely hands on person when it comes to technology – but I had to learn to trust the technology experts on this gig. It was very unpleasant for me at the beginning, since I am used to providing a lot of technical input to my team in SAP projects . But I learned that there are many people with MUCH better technical talent than me – and I should just trust their judgment. That was a HUGE lesson for me, and one of the most important ones I learned. Of course I did not learn it fully (yet) and occasionally jump in and make comments based on what I think are corresponding scenarios in SAP . I must also say that this has made an impact on my view of SAP. There is a lot SAP practitioners can learn from the non-SAP world, and I am glad I now have this experience under my belt.

Success is multi-dimensional. A lot of times projects get measured along time lines and budgets alone. We surely managed by SPI, CPI etc – but that was just one of the many dimensions. We were clear on conditions of satisfaction, and both my client counterpart and I were committed all the way to make sure we kept each other in the loop on what is happening. It is a professional relationship I cherish, and I am sure it will continue past this project too.

As Michael Jordan said ” Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships” . I second that – 3 cheers to the team ! There is more work to be done for remaining phases of the program – but for now,let us Party

SAP HANA – slowly moving out of hype into actual projects

2011 was when HANA hype was on over drive – it was along the lines of “HANA will solve world hunger by feeding entire generations on perceived future business value” . Every where I mentioned HANA, customers were pushing back with raised eyebrows. That did not stop SAP from selling HANA though. SAP customers do not typically buy licenses piecemeal – they buy a basket of stuff, and apparently HANA was in a lot of baskets, especially in the last quarter. This is not unusual buying behavior – it is the norm.

And then 2011 ran out. When I came back from vacation, I was amazed with the demand for big ERP projects. And right on its heels, came demand for HANA projects. Not isolated demands – many customers, some of them VERY big names – are now sufficiently intrigued to start pilots for HANA. To say the least, it has taken me by surprise – the pleasant kind.

There is a huge amount of misinformation on HANA that has been spread knowingly or unknowingly in 2011. I think the first half of 2012 will be spent setting expectations straight.

A very common scenario I am running into these days is customers that have custom built data warehouses in Oracle or SQL Server. These have thousands of Stored procedures etc. They want to find out how to migrate this over to HANA. Or more specifically – they want to know if there is a way to semi-automate the conversion of SQL of existing solutions to HANA’s SQL. If they cannot do that – the cost of re-inventing the solution in HANA from scratch is not something they seem to have an appetite for. I have pinged SAP to ask what they think about this. If you know the answer – please post a comment.

Another common question – “so we buy HANA as a datamart, then put HANA under BW as DB, and then under ECC – will this all sit in one appliance? do we need to buy more and more licenses and hardware?”. So far I have not had to explicitly answer this question. Funny enough – they look at the expression on my face and deduce the right answer magically

Basis experts invariably ask me “hey can we virtualize HANA? Can you put it on a cloud and offer us as a service? When will SAP support non-intel processors and other OS? ” . My answer usually is to point them to existing documentation. If they persist, I show them the installation files and how it can be hacked. That is the best way to deal with techies , right?

Landscape Sizing, HA and DR are all high on CIO agenda – they just want assurances that they can safely deploy this in production. This is a lot more easier now to answer than even a few months ago, since there are more options available, and we have more experience with sizing. This is also where people start getting an idea of the real cost in putting up a HANA system – and there is always an aha moment.

The other half of the aha moment comes from clients understanding there is no one HANA consultant who makes the system stand up and work. SAP started off by saying “HANA is an appliance” – and that is partly to blame for this. An appliance is like a fridge or a wireless router – you buy from a store, bring it home and it starts working after it is powered on with very few instructions. HANA is not a true appliance in that sense- and once customers get that, they realize it is like every other project. HANA needs multiple skills to pull off successfully – data modelling, BOBJ, Admin/security, ETL etc.

BW on HANA has captured the attention of several customers. SAP is doing a good job pushing it in the field. I met several field sales people at FKOM, and was amazed to see how pumped up they are to sell HANA. But more than BW itself – a lot of customers are waiting for BPC to work on HANA. I was not very pleased with the BOBJ integration with HANA initially, but it has improved and I know more improvements are planned. It is best for SAP to nail it before customers start several projects in parallel and stress out SAP support.

Many of my customers – and me too – are waiting eagerly to see how many companies will SAP parade at SAPPHIRE as live on HANA , especially for the BW case. If SAP shows a large number of customers on the key note stage, then we should have a great HANA year in 2012. Towards middle of the year, I think many more HANA projects will start – and not just small pilots. And If SAP does come out with ECC on HANA by end of the year, it will be an excellent shot in the arm. 2012 could well ramp into a terrific 2013 for HANA.

What does Apple’s outsourcing have to do with farming and manufacturing in Kerala ?

If you chop a tree for firewood, you should plant a tree to compensate. And you should do it even if you are not into the whole green thing. Or else you will be turning in your grave constantly when your children and grand children swear ad-nauseum about the trouble you put them in . But I digress.

So Apple outsourced a LOT of manufacturing to China. You should read this excellent NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&hpRT , and feeling depressed after reading it should be expected.

Does that make them evil – probably not. They are a profit seeking entity, and they sell all over the world. They can do whatever works for them. Did China win that work because of cheap labor? yeah – they probably did. But the manufacturing did not flourish there solely because of cheap labor. It flourished because China has plenty of engineers, built an ecosystem around Apple’s manufacturing needs and then started offering that service to other companies. And then other innovative companies started investing in China to build manufacturing. The story repeats in concentric circles – and it seems to fuel itself.

Did America lose out big because Apple outsourced manufacturing? yeah – I guess it did. But Apple was not the first to do so. And neither is manufacturing the only thing that got outsourced. But did America get anything in return? yes of course. We can now walk into mega marts and buy things a lot more cheaper. We can walk to an Apple store and buy an Apple product much cheaper than if it was manufactured locally.And so on and so on.

So is this a fair trade off? hardly, in my opinion – if what is happening to farmers in Kerala is an indication.

Kerala, my home state in the southern tip of India, literally means “land of coconut palms”. And Kerala is a place where people eat rice in some form 2 or 3 times a day. When I was young – the state had a large number of vast rice fields and coconut plantations. Around the time I was in high school, this was not the case any more. Many farmers moved from growing rice and coconut to growing rubber. Rubber was a “cash crop” which fetched handsome prices from tire manufacturers etc. Fast forward to today. Keralites still eat rice and coconut based food 3 times a day, but they have to buy these (and most vegetables) from neighboring states for a huge price. And rubber values fluctuate so much that not many farmers got rich that way. As agriculture declined, the problem was compounded by lack of supply chain efficiencies in buying and storing food grains and vegetables. End result – farmer suicides started happening in an accelerated manner. Many of them lost their land and fortune and their loved ones. And prices still go up significantly most years.

While Keralites are extremely enterprising and capitalistic when they live and work outside their state, they are mostly left leaning when they live in Kerala. Manufacturing has steadily declined in the state, and it has become a consumer economy for the most part. The state has 100% literacy, and has extremely high standards for health, higher education etc compared to many other Indian states. But despite all of this – manufacturing won’t flourish there. Both parties (well, alliances of convenience is a better phrase) that typically rule Kerala are left leaning to various degrees, and both have strong trade unions which actively discourage manufacturing. Except for IT, I think everything else in Kerala that generates money has a union presence that threatens its existence. This environment is the prime reason why lots of Keralites get out of the state after their education, and live and work outside. I am one such guy too – who finished college and could not wait to get out of there. Due to many people leaving the state, there is a positive side too – these people send a lot of money back to their families that live in Kerala. So the consumer economy generally has always been excellent.

When I read the article on Apple’s outsourcing to China, the situation of Kerala is what rushed to my mind immediately. The long term implications are stark – once you let go of something you do well, you have to be prepared to pay the price. And you should be able to invest in something else to compensate for the long term repercussions. It is the price to pay when economy takes a global flavor. You cannot pick up your toys and go home arbitrarily when you don’t like the game after some time – you need to stay in the game and invest wisely for future. Globalization is not exactly a bed of roses – it is a mixed bag.

IT outsourcing is something I am very familiar with. If a company outsources some IT functions and uses the savings to invest elsewhere, it works great. If it just eats up the savings, and don’t invest elsewhere – it just won’t survive in the long term. Outsourcing might create other kinds of jobs too – like Apple being responsible for increased demand for AT&T etc and creating jobs there. Or the outsourcing companies in India creating jobs in the US when they want to get into high end consulting etc. Apple has a large consumer base in China – and makes money in that market. One day when tax laws make it attractive to bring that money to US, Apple might do that – and it will help US economy. It is pretty hard to judge – at least for me – on how much these indirect benefits will offset the long term costs. But at a minimum, it does offer some relief.

Outsourcing of manufacturing and IT and other things won’t go away – although in an election year, many might say it will. The question is how will we compensate for the long term impact ? There is no one magic bullet – it needs a lot of things to fall in to place – on both public and private sector. And sadly, it might not get much traction in US till the presidential elections are over.

SAP – ECC is catching another wind. Are we ready?

I don’t think I have seen another time after the mid to late nineties when the market was this hot for SAP.  Several companies seem to be in a hurry to do big SAP projects again . And no – they are not talking of big HANA projects, or big mobility projects or big cloud projects. Drum roll please……They are talking about the good old on premises ECC projects – FOR REALS! It is like the mainframe – it never dies, and always catches another wind.

This does not mean no one cares about HANA, Mobility etc. All these customers have plans for all the innovative stuff as part of their projects, but they are not front and center in projects unlike in the keynotes we see from SAP leadership at SAPPHIRE and Teched.  HANA and Mobility experience will probably be an additional differentiation for SIs trying to win the implementation work.  Along with ECC, some of the other business suite systems like CRM and SRM are also showing up prominently in these projects. I expected some of these companies to consider cloud solutions for ERP – SAP or otherwise. But big customers did not seem to have that kind of faith in cloud ERP as I thought. Maybe it needs a few more years to catch on.

There are probably a bunch of reasons for this surge – investment money kept away in last 2-3 years is now being spent,  increase in M&A and divestiture activities , economy is slowly recovering and so on. There are a bunch of interesting challenges that go with this too.

1. Experience of leading and working in huge global projects

Not many PMs and team leads  in today’s SAP world have the big implementation experience. People who did those in nineties have generally gone to senior leadership positions in SIs and clients, and new generation will need some mentoring.  Unless you have done it yourself before – it is not easy to plan and execute a blueprinting session when you have 120 countries in scope. and blueprinting is only the start. So far, I have not seen anyone asking for a global agile SAP implementation, but I am betting that I will hear that one day soon.

2. Quality and quantity of Business Suite experts

If what I am seeing is the beginning of a big trend that will last 2-3 years atleast, then it remains to be seen if SIs and customers can keep up with the demand for project resources – both on quality and on quantity. Education needs will surge, and I wonder if education needs can be met effectively in large scale

3. Architecture challenges

Unlike the 90s where BDC and ALE ruled, the world has changed quite a bit on technical front. ABAP has moved by leaps and bounds, and a modern day architect has many options, and many challenges. Question is – do we have enough people who can design and create big complex systems from scratch that use modern SAP technology in grand scale?  And will modern SAP technology withstand this test of scale?

SAP is pretty serious about getting number 2 position in DB market by 2015. If these big projects can be convinced to switch from ORACLE, MS and DB2 systems – that will be a great start to make this goal. Somehow, I don’t feel like holding my breath on this quite yet. But I am going to keep a close eye on this, and will start asking customers from now on whether they feel good about switching their DB .

4. Does SAP still have enough people with deep core business suite knowledge ?

When a large number of big business suite projects start, there is always a tax on SAP – the number of trouble tickets will increase. I would think SAP’s developers are now mostly focussed on HANA and other new stuff. Will SAP have enough people who can take care of a flood of messages? Even though SAP Business Suite software is way more mature than in 90s – big projects will always have big problems that need deep experience from SAP to solve.

5. What about all the innovation agenda items?

My friends from technical side will appreciate this for sure – what will happen to all the cool innovations when a large number of configuration experts (referred to by names like  SPRO jockeys ) take over a project, and push tech stuff to the wall? Will HANA and Mobility and Cloud stand a chance? or will they all become a phase 2 item? The only one where I see some light is on BI. Over time, a lot of functional folks have realized that it is probably better to give some attention to their BI colleagues.

There is a silver lining here. It gives SAP enough breathing space to make the innovative new products more robust by the time the big projects are ready for them to be used in prime time. There would not be a risk of licensing revenue loss since SAP license sales usually happen as a market basket, and not a la carte.  So HANA sales, mobility sales etc can still show a healthy upswing while projects focus on business suite.

6. Do customers still have sufficient inhouse expertise to run the big gigs ?

Best SAP projects happen when customers pair consulting firms with strong internal resources. But over time, most of these experts move into management, or move to other companies, or their jobs get outsourced etc.  So I would imagine a lot of hiring will happen in 2012 for staffing internal roles. And that typically means some solid staff from consulting companies will switch employment soon, and then these firms will have to do some firefighting.

That is just the few that rushed to my mind – and there must be a hundred more to talk about. Feel free to post your thoughts in comments. It is going to be very exciting to live through a series of big projects again.

2012 looks likely to be a good year for SAP Business Analytics, as long as it works on iPad

As always, I started the year picking my customers’ brains on what they would like to see happen in 2012 in their companies.  I also checked in with a few colleagues to make sure what I am hearing is not isolated. These are all long existing SAP shops. I will restrict this post to discussions around BI to keep it brief.

 

It is kind of funny that every one of them said BI is top priority, and that they won’t do it anymore unless it worked well on iPads ( I hope they meant tablets in general, but literally they all said iPad) .  One executive mentioned he does not care for iPad and that he needs his information on iPhone.  Ease of development and deployment are pretty high on the agenda. I pointed everyone to Steve Lucas’ blogs right after I read it. I have not checked back for reactions yet.

 

Since I know the future of Xcelsius is a hot topic for my friends on twitter, I probed a little on that topic. Surprisingly – no one seemed to care a lot about Xcelsius itself working on iPad. They know the flash issue, and they all think SAP will do something to get them mobile BI. No one seemed to think SAP will just kill Xcelsius in a hurry either – they all firmly believed that if it were to go away, it will be a while later, and that they can migrate over. One CIO said – “I couldn’t care less about any given tool – all I need is good clean up to the minute information to show up for my users on their mobile devices. How a vendor makes it work is their problem, not mine”.

 

For a change, I did not have to tell any one about HANA – instead, customers have now started picking my brains on HANA.  Today, after the SAP news on 160 million euros coming from HANA came out – I had 3 calls back to back from customers who wanted to do HANA. These are all people who shied away last year – and now they think it should have matured enough to give it a try. 2012 should see some significant traction on HANA – especially with BW .  So far no one has told me they want to do a production BW on HANA, but they are willing to do POCs. That is not abnormal – most of my customers are significantly risk averse.

 

I was not surprised to hear the interest in BPC on HANA. I first hand know of customers who did not do BPC due to performance reasons. And now these folks are all happy to do POCs on BPC running on HANA the earliest they can.

 

But none of it is exactly new – more or less these just confirmed trends that I (and probably everyone else) knew and predicted. What was new – practically the first time customers actually brought it up seriously with me – is collaboration on BI.  Many of them went through budget cycles recently – and complained bitterly that despite having had BI and planning solutions for ever, they still needed a lot of excel spreadsheets and manual intervention to make it work.  And if I understood correctly – what they disliked most was the inefficient collaboration within the organization when it came to adhoc activities in planning.  As one exasperated friend told me last week at the airport  “if it is this hard to collaborate with people you see and talk to daily, is it any wonder that our vendors and customers find it painful to deal with us?”.

 

One BI manager and one controller  brought up “actionable” BI. The point was fair “SAP and SIs have all told me for years about actionable BI. But till date I have hardly seen any actions that directly originate from BI” .  Closed loop BI needs to get out of white papers and blogs and into customer sites – it is about time.

 

So I guess 2012 is starting on an optimistic note on SAP Business Analytics front – but we just need to make sure all the stuff works on iPad

 

Indian Cricket – living proof that money does not solve problems

If money solved all problems, Indian cricket team should have been unbeatable for at least the last decade.  The game is a religion in India, and brings more money to BCCI, the players, the coaches and so on. I was amazed at how many cricket academies have cropped up in India since I have lived abroad. But Indian team is far from unbeatable, despite huge amount of money available in the sport. And despite loss after loss outside India, I and billion others like me follow the game closely.

 

We do great in one day matches usually, but the real deal is Test Cricket – and there we do horribly. And it is about time to act on it with a long term vision.  We did it once and rose to the top of test rankings, but could not stay there. When West Indies and Australia ruled test cricket – there was no doubt they were going to be there for a while. With India, even a die hard fan like me did not get such a comfort feel.

 

I am just a fan – and a below par player even for club level cricket.  I have no experience in cricket administration either. But it does not take a genius to see what plagues Indian cricket. But if I were king for a day in Indian cricket administration – these will be the problems I will tackle upfront.

 

1. No investment in fast bowlers

 

For as long as I can remember, no team has won test cricket without multiple fast bowlers.  I grew up watching India struggle against the fast bowlers from West Indies (except a few like Gavaskar).  And we could not return the favor when India bowled – Haynes ,Greenidge , Lloyd, Richards etc feasted on our bowling. When we had fast bowlers, for the most part we had just one who was genuinely fast in any given team.  Every few years some new sensation would show up – and thanks to mismanagement and over exertion over too many games, they either disappeared – or they dropped 5 yards of pace.  After West Indies, Australia took over world cricket. And they had terrific fast bowlers.  What was the difference between Australia compared to India and Srilanka?  All of them had worldclass spinners in Warne, Kumble and Murali. They also had quality batsmen in all three teams. But India and Srilanka only had one or two fast bowlers at any point, where as Australia had several to choose from.  And with those fast bowlers – Aussies could bowl out the opposition twice in a test in any surface. And India and Srilanka needed a spin friendly track to bowl out anyone twice.

 

Fast bowlers need to be nurtured from school cricket. Question is – will BCCI make an investment to find talent impartially, and then nurture them for a decade ?

 

2. Too much cricket, with very little planning and preparation

 

Ever since Mark Mascarenhas won the TV rights for 1996 worldcup, cricket has not been the same. There are way too many matches played, with hardly any time spent for preparation. Most series starts with poor preparation matches. And since Modi did the T20 thing, it has gone from bad to worse.  More players are now unfit than ever before, and in a country where cricketers are worshiped on a pedestal – selectors will not dare to drop any one on basis of  fitness. With the type of money involved, no cricketer will follow the “volunteer to take rest if you feel you need it” dictum of the board. BCCI should space games, and plan series better. Remember all those empty seats for matches in home series in 2011? That is a good indication that viewership will also decrease if this does not change.

 

3. No career management and replenishment system for national team

 

Australia showed us how to manage the career of cricketers. England proved now that they can adapt that. But not India. No one ever gets shown the door in India for a drop in performance.  If Steve Waugh played for India, he would still be playing.  Look at the ageing stars like Sachin, Dravid and Laxman in Indian team. Collectively they have more runs than most other teams in the world. Yet they cannot win us series consistently abroad by themselves. And it is painfully obvious in Australia that they won’t last much longer.  After Sachin finishes his 100th 100 – what else will he aim for? He is good to go for couple more years since he has stayed away from several matches to conserve energy. The other two will probably have a year or less. But who will replace them? When will the replacements get chances? Will India play Dravid and Sachin and Laxman down the order to give newbies an opportunity to try batting higher?

 

4. Poor infrastructure to nurture the next generation of national players

 

Can we begin to compare domestic cricket in India to that in Australia or England? If we cannot match it, at least will BCCI proactively get stints for promising young players to play in England or Australia for few seasons?

 

Domestic cricket is in a horrible state in India – and it has been that way for ever. We have pathetic pitches, and terrible outfields for most of domestic cricket. A player that comes up through that system cannot be expected to know what to do when balls come at them at 140 KMPH chest high.  The good thing is they learn how to tackle spin very well – and Indian batsmen have outplayed Warne and Murali many times in past. Our young quickies will not learn how to bowl in fast wickets either. All around – we lack good infrastructure for the next generation to get relevant experience.  For a board with such hefty bank balances – why is this a problem. If not to invest in cricket, why does BCCI make money?  And with what confidence will selectors decide to pick some one based on performances in such pitches?

National Cricket Academy was a brilliant idea – but poorly executed. It has just become a rehab center for injured cricketers. That is an important function, but that is just one of the many factors.

 

There are several more things, but I just needed to get this off my chest. It has been painful watching Indian team suffer through the last several tours they made outside India.  But despite all of that, I am and will be a loyal fan