Cardboard Spaceship

SAP and Deutsche Bank

I work for SAP, but I am always limited in what I can talk about because I work in sales, as solution consultant and architect, so I know about all the forthcoming deals.  Trouble is, because of stock market and other regulations, not to mention simple business confidentiality, I can only rarely talk about it.

Today I see that we have stated in the press release that goes along with the Q4 results, that the following statement is included.

"In December, Deutsche Bank and SAP signed a letter of intent to start a multi-year initiative in 2010 to replace individual software solutions in its home market by a new core banking system based on SAP for Banking solutions. The SAP implementation underpins the bank’s strategy to push for a high degree of industrialization and standardization of processes."

I'll leave that statement to speak for itself.  The team did a great job, and I am pleased to have made some small contribution to the overall effort.

Meh, I Guess No-one is Immune

Post here from the usually well-informed and realistic Denis Howlett, about the state of Enterprise Software. 

To sum it up, IBM seems to be about to can 16,000 employees, Microsoft, the margin machine of the business, 5,000 people, and it would seem that SAP has announced that Sapphire, the public conference event for SAP will be scaled back to a series of smaller local events.   Denis also has some interesting demand statistics on SAP resources, which indicates a shakeout in some areas. 

I know how tough the world is out there, I read and write about it, perhaps more than I should. 

We'll see how this scans out.  No need to add that this is worrying news, coming as it does closer to home. 

Compliance, and the Programmers World

Another pleasant surprise today at Sapphire.  Thomas Otter, who has recently left BureauDisney to take up a director of HCM research position with Gartner research, came up to have a gossip.  Thomas is starting to look at another subject he holds dear to his heart, which is the influence on law and compliance to the law on IT.  His point, made before, is that even the smartest brightest new web app, and equally, the hardest core ERP or banking system has to comply with the relevant laws. 

How many people in IT even know the law?  How many, supposing they know it, know how to interpret it and make it real to the process that it influences? 

I would be interested to see how his thoughts on this matter gel.  It certainly is a big issue in the new banking world, with the Data Protection laws for Europe, Financial Services Directive in the UK, SOx in the US, and numerous others like Swiss and other banking laws, etc. 

Thomas seemed to think that the GRC space was getting too much of the mind-share, and that other issues can be just as potentially damaging.  I agree, but the GRC stuff has the kind of "I´m married to the man in the prison with the most cigarettes" kind of scariness for the CFO and friends.  Fear makes money fly. 

On a personal level, Thomas was looking dapper as ever, and life away from SAP seems to be suiting him fine. 

Live from Sapphire in Berlin

Here at Sapphire in Berlin, sitting at booth FFS1.4, if you happen to be here.  Seen quite a few people that I have not seen for a while, catching up on the industry gossip, of which there is no shortage, as usual.

Saw Sig, who was in the company of Dennis Howlett, first time that I had met him in real life(TM) and I had a go at selling them the benefits of SAP Bank Analytics and accounting.  Talk about the original Tough Crowd.  Sig believes that all accounting should be abolished, and Dennis is a natural born sceptic.  Did it more for fun than profit, but it was interesting conversation nonetheless, and nice to see them both.   

Sounds like SAP is getting into the whole communication and collaboration network idea, and not just from a technology perspective, but also, from what Sig and Dennis were saying, a lot of time and attention being given to the blogosphere.  (One on ones, dinner last night, etc.) 

The push from SAP is for what is being called "generation now," i.e. continuous real time collaboration, but based on a hardcore of ERP and other enterprise back bone services, which strikes me as being a good approach. 

In that vein, SAP has been instrumental in the creation of the BIAN "Banking Industry Architecture Network", which focusses on the definition of standard business networks, processes and definitions for the broader banking industry, and is a not for profit organisation set up between banks like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Standard Bank of South Africa, ING, etc. and service providers, like Steria, Axon, IFB, etc, and software providers like SAP, Sungard, Tememos and Microsoft.  Also, and this is a great addition to this kind of standardisation push, SWIFT is an active participant. 

Grokking networks here in Berlin, more later when the bandwidth is free again. 

Sapphire in Berlin

After a bit of last minute re-arrangement of my diary, I will be going to Sapphire in Berlin after all.  If you are an adherent of the cult of SAP, then feel free to come and see me, where I will be manning the booth on SAP ERP for Banking, FS1.4. 

Should be a right rivetting three days I would say, and I hope to see you all there. 

MicroSAP Rides Again

Interesting editorial in the NY Times about the idea that Microsoft acquiring Yahoo is a Bad Idea, and that they should buy SAP instead.  As it says in the article, it was discussed before, and it sure would make more sense to me than the Yahoo deal.  Not that that means that anything is being discussed.  (Not that I would know anyway...)

Good Numbers from SAP

Well, given that I have a dog in the hunt, now being a permanent employee with SAP, I am glad to announce that we got a good Quarter Four in general.  (We did good too on our team in banking, although I cannot talk about specifics due to the closed season.)

Solid advances, and if the dollar and pound would stop wobbling about, it would have been even better. 

Otter Slips the Net

Thomas Otter is leaving SAP.  That's a loss for SAP especially for the HR and related teams.  Going to Gartner, and writing pieces about HR and related subjects. 

Makes me wonder about the research business model.  Been thinking about this in different contexts recently, as essentially the research model suggests that you need artificially scarcity of information, or at least information access,  to make it work, because otherwise there is no revenue model. 

Take HR research as a starting point, supposing that I am going to be leading a change of HR systems, clearly, I would like to do some kind of assessment of my own requirements, and the suitability of what is in the market.  To do this I would seem to have a number of choices:

I could get in the management consultants, and do the whole thing on a bespoke basis, with them doing a requirements analysis, issuing RFPs, and studying the responses, doing the demos and so on.  Alternatively, I could just go the three companies that look like me and ask them what they did.  If I think that the HR system is a commodity sell, and does not offer competitive advantage, then why not just follow the herd, but check it what it feels like to people who have done it before.

In the first case, there is a lot of specialised information being handled on a one-off basis, but you cannot be sure that the people you are working with have not overlooked something, and so need yet another sanity check.   In the second case you are not bothering to investigate what makes you different, but just finding out what might be a fit, and worry about it later, on the basis that the 80-20 rule will turn to be true this time as well.

The first case gets you expensive accuracy, but not necessarily precision, whereas the second approach may get you precision, but not accuracy.  What is needed is something in between that allow you to calibrate either that the high detail approach is not looking up the wrong leg of the trousers, and in the second case that the ball-park investigation is not missing some reasonably obvious show stopper.  To my mind this is market research, which is generic descriptions of requirements (Boilerplate RFIs can usually be had from these suppliers) generic capabilities analyses, and also market information about pricing, and so on.) 

Problem I see is that information is re-usable, and therefore creating it once, especially in the electronic age, to use multiple times is that you have an issue with the information getting into the wild without being paid for.  I wonder how sustainable this model actually is, as long as the buyer is the payee, after all, the unscrupulous presumably can get the studies off other people, and save money, while getting the same information. 

What model do you move to?  A kind of SDN, where everyone is contributing for the greater good and whuffie?  Might be fun, but it ain't a business for the participants in the direct sense, although it may add to their value in the paid roles.   (SAP loves it, but they ain't selling information.)  Does the vendor pay for the research?  Might work, but trust in neutrality of information is an obvious issue.  I suppose it comes down to the usual consulting model, use this stuff as a teaser to show you have the knowledge, and then sell the real beef on a daily or hourly basis as an adviser.  Does make me wonder if you could tweak the business model though.  Set up something like Edge (e.g. invitation only ERP commentaries from a self-selecting group of people who respect each others opinions.)  for ERP and Enterprise software, leading to the question who would you trust more to give you the straight dope on ERP, Gartner or Forrester, or the grumpy sods over at Enterprise Irregulars, to the extent that they are different?

I suppose it is related to the last post I made, if you are looking for the management slicked up view, then you want a nice logo, and serious sounding men in suits, to reassure that you have a made a solid decision, but as with the recent rating agency debacles, that does not guarantee the quality of the end result. 

I guess in the end reputation is still the only measure, and Thomas has an excellent reputation, and so I am sure will surf the change with ease.  Good luck with the new job!   

 

SAP Solid, What of Acquisitions?

Well, nice to see that SAP has put in a solid quarter, even if the shares did seem to suffer a bit that there was no raising of the full year estimates.   I care about this, because now that I need them to meet the payroll, and I am not doing it myself, this is all important.

The other thing that people are saying is that SAP is going to find it harder to grow, as a consequence of more or less having saturated the ERP market.  Chances are that if you are a big corporation or entity, then you have either bought SAP or have decided to do something else, hence the midmarket push, etc, 

The other thing that is pushing this viewpoint is the potential acquisition of Business Objects, which leads people to believe that we have decided to go for non-organic acquisitive growth.  Actually, to hear Professor Kagermann tell it, it is rather simpler.  There are three boxes that we need to fill, the ERP and industry solutions, which is one huge development, then there is Business by Design, which is also a big move, and the final element is the improvement in the user experience.  Now, I have worked for SAP directly, and indirectly, usually in sales, and not once in the fourteen years I have been doing it has anyone called the SAP look and feel anything other than "industrial strength", e.g. ugly as a red-headed step child, but a hell of a lot more useful. 

So, being too busy with the resources we have doing the first two jobs, the third task was to be done by acquisition, and Business Objects fits the bill.  (It already integrates pretty seamlessly with SAP anyway, as with other applications, like JORSHIP.) Only issue with acquisitions, is that we have to find a way to get them to work with the existing applications landscape. 

I have a specific problem right now, because I am talking to a customer about financial accounting, including consolidation.  SAP has an existing application for consolidation called SEM-BCS, for Business Consolidation System.  However, SAP is making some acquisitions, and one of the areas of interest for SAP at the moment is the office of the CFO, e.g. making easier for the financial head of an organisation to get a handle on the performance of the business.  To support this we acquired a software company called Outlooksoft.  It's a good product, very strong on the front end capabilities, delivers applications around planning, balances scorecards and so on.  And Consolidation. 

We managed to determine a roadmap with the internal project management of SAP, which is clear and explains the roadmap and integration for the products.  This is OK with the customer, who then looks at the new product, which has some functions and features that they need over and above what the native SAP consolidation has, centred around the fact they have a non-standard data set, and need to do a lot of up-front correcting and manipulation to get it to work.

Then we say that we will merge with or acquire Business Objects.  Only thing is that BO had merged recently with Cartesis, one of the main existing suppliers of... consolidation software.

So, Oracle to add to is string of acquisitions had also bought a consolidation supplier, Hyperion, and that is just about all of the serious consolidation engines on the market.   

So, we cannot discuss the relationship with BO until we have actually completed the merger, as that is collusion, and so we cannot outline a roadmap , or even discuss one, and we are in the position of either owning  or being about to own three out of the four credible solutions in the market.    Tricky.

The point is that these acquisitions do cause issues around direction, and how the heck JORSHIP are coping I cannot imagine, especially as the chief architect of the Fusion project to align all the Oracle acquisitions has been turfed out the door or walked, depending on what you read.

Well, I guess that with the consolidation moving at such speed we are unlikely to have any really big companies to acquire anymore.