CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

In conversation with Zia Yusuf - SAP TechEd 09

Yesterday we had a great conversation with Zia Yusuf. Zia  is the Executive Vice President, responsible for Global Ecosystem & Partner Group at SAP AG. It was an interesting conversation touching upon various dimensions of community, partners, SI's and social media. Zia & his team have a really tough job moving forward trying to change the perception and or reality of SAP in many areas like

1. the lack of trained quality consultants,
2. of being seen as a "innovation" laggard,
3. changes required in the services partners to deliver to the SME and deliver around solutions like BBD.
4. it being "white elephant" to implement & support,
5. ....etc

What was promising to see was that they seem to be moving slowly but steadily in that direction but they have a lot of work in front of them and they are open to collaborating and discussing on ways to achieve these results. Below are the key / interesting points or thoughts from the discussion that came up during this conversation:

• The community initiatives are thriving, it has reached 2 million now. And its also evident with the growing popularity of the SAP mentors and the initiatives they seem to be taking. The "Blue Jerseys" are great guys.
• The inclusion of SI (System integrators) into the Eco hub. This is a big move. . I think there seems to be a broad set of initiatives that SAP is taking to make the system integrators play nice. They seem to be taking small but progressive steps towards reducing that 1:7 (license cost :implementation cost) ratio, without ruffling too many feathers at the SI's end. Strangely I think a lot of enabling of this will be dependent on the customers and how much they are willing to adopt these changes & enforce some of these things with their SI's & service providers. On the question of SAP Ecohub or SDN becoming a services market place its an interesting discussion for sometime in the future.
• Enabling the Smaller partners - As a part of the ecosystem organization , there seem to be a set of Partner service advisor's that are looking at enabling partners particularly the small / mid sized ones by providing them access to the SAP product technology road map etc etc. This seems to be the only side of the SAP organization that has grown in headcount.
• Factoid - There seems to be a total of 400k SAP consultants globally with 250K of them being in large or in the organized sector the other 150k are typically independent contractors.
• Zia's thoughts on characteristics of great SAP SI firms:
  • Deeply involved with the evolution of the SAP Roadmap
  • Training & certification,
  • Dynamic in models offered,
  • customer service-value driven,
  • Ability to have a longer term relationship.
• A chance to collaborate - Zia is asking for "Use cases" that we can think of where "Social Media" will connect or interact with "Core business processes" that are a part of the Enterprise business processes. Specifically around crowdsourcing etc - Which will change the way business is done! Ideas welcome
• Community contribution into the product, the SDN / communities framework that was created for communities (SDN/BPX) is now a product called Collaborative Workspace and now has 1400 installations.
• SAP Safegaurding - Recently it has been communicated to all the SI's that they need to include / push safegaurding as a part of their implementations etc
• Job board has now been included in SAP Communities / SDN. First couple of days 180 jobs posted on it

Zia is now on twitter and you can follow him @ZiaYusuf

Tags: communities - sap - sapteched09 - zia+yusuf - sdn - bpx - partner

Prashanth Rai

Update: Looks like this would be the last event for Zia with SAP, All the very best to him for all his future ventures.

Disclosure: SAP paid T&E to TechEd.

IDC’s New IT Cloud Services Forecast: 2009-2013

New Cloud Services Forecast Publised by IDC - The new forecast, segmented by offering category, for 2009 and 2013:

Excerpts:

1. The five year growth outlook remains strong, with a five-year annual growth rate of 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT offerings.
2. The revised figures are still in the same ballpark as last year’s forecast, although they reflect about a six month revenue knock back from what would have been expected from last year’s forecast, due largely to the global recession and, to a lesser degree, to better market tracking and tightened definitions.
3. This year, cloud services will total only about 5% of IT revenue. Even with a compound annual growth rate of 26% – over six times that of traditional IT – they will account for just 10% in 2013. Some might look at this, and conclude that cloud services are not very important – after all, in 2013, 90% of IT will NOT be from public clouds.
4. IT cloud services for the industry - $17B in 2009 and $44B in 2013
5. Of the $27 billion in net new IT revenue in 2013, 27% will come from IT cloud services. Given the 6X growth advantage of cloud services offerings over traditional ones, that percentage will grow very quickly in subsequent years – meaning that suppliers who don’t position themselves as IT cloud services leaders over the next several years, will forfeit larger and larger portions of the highest-growth markets.

Source: IDC

Henning Kaggerman to join Wipro's Board

Dr. Henning Kaggerman is joining Wipro's board as of Oct 27th. I think this is great news for Wipro. It was always a great experience meeting with him at the SAP events. Henning is a big believer / proponent of the consulting or value added approach to IT services & in reducing the implementation / services costs in SAP / Packaged implementations i.e. reducing the ratio between the licenses to services fees. Will be interesting to see how his thinking influences Wipro. Some comments / excerpts:

Commenting on his appointment, Dr. Kagermann said, "I have for long admired Wipro as a company as much for its innovative approach to business as for its strong commitment to values. I am excited at the prospect of guiding the company as it prepares for its next phase of growth"

Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Limited said, "We are delighted to welcome Dr Kagermann to our Board. He brings in a unique combination of academic perspective, technical expertise and leadership experience. I am sure that Wipro will benefit from his rich knowledge, insights and wisdom."

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai

TCS - Change of Guard

TCS change of the guard , Check out an interview of Ramdurai & N Chandrasekaran at Moneycontrol. Ramdurai took over 13 years back at 160 million / 6000 people and now Chandrasekaran takes over at 6 Billion / 140k. These will be interesting times.

Video Interview

Some Global Mobile Stats - Nielsen Company

Some interesting excerpts / statistics from a post by Nielsen Company:

Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009 according to The Nielsen Company.

Year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile Web audience, with a youth increase of 45 percent and seniors surging upwards 67 percent in July.

While men continue to make up a larger portion of mobile Web users versus women, comprising 53 percent of the audience in July, the growth of female visitors outpaced the growth of male visitors during the month, with women increasing 43 percent YOY as compared to a 26 percent growth among men.

Source: Nielsen Company

India's Mobile Market

Some interesting stat's / excerpts from a Knoledge@Wharton interview of Rajesh Jain:

Interesting Statistics:

1. 400 million-plus mobile users
2. Internet has been more stagnant in the last year or year and a half at about 45 million to 50 million.
3. The Internet-ad spend in India is about $140 million, which is about 3% of the overall media spend in India
4. Mobile on the other hand, the value-added-services part, where if you look at non-voice and non-P2P SMS, that’s about a billion dollars

Excerpts:

I was talking to one of the telecom providers recently and they have these USB modems, which are basically wireless modems on USB. Typically they’ve been used with laptops – people on the move, enterprise users. Interestingly, when I talked with them they said, “Look, the biggest demand we are getting for these USB modems – because they are high-speed, they are 3G speeds – is from consumers to connect their home PC, the fixed PCs, to the Internet.” Because in many places it is hard to get connectivity.

in India, SMS subscriptions and voice orders are $350 million to $400 million. That’s money being spent by consumers where the actual content providers and service providers are getting less than 20% of their money.

everyone’s focus has been on smartphones and the apps. But what everyone forgets is that in markets like India, 95% of the market doesn’t use such phones. Even in the U.S., 70% of the market does not use it.

Source: Emergic

Prashanth Rai

Webcast to check out - Eli Lilly + Amazon AWS

Saw this note on the AWS site,

Learn how Eli Lilly uses AWSto deliver cloud services to scientists in this WebCast hosted by InformationWeekEditor John Foley

Tags: aws - amazon - eli+lilly - webcast - cloud

Prashanth Rai

Some interesting reading...

Notes from blog posts read today:

• Ratios of new license to maintenance revenues shift from 1:2 to 1:4 and in some cases 1:5.  Enterprise software vendors now in a better position to convert perpetual business models to subscription business models.  Do they have the guts and board approval?
• Indian System Integrators competiting for market share in Europe, Middle East, and Africa as they shift away from the North American market.
• Japanese CIO’s finally realizing that they need to break free from their existing ERP software vendor relationships.  SaaS options now in consideration.  Recent advancements by NTT to host Zoho, Siemens’ 420K employee move to Success Factors, and Flextronics 240k employee deal with Workday have shifted perception that SaaS can’t solve large enterprise requirements.
• Cloud computing - Broad acceptance that enterprises are interested - There's absolutely no question that cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of enterprise technology. Everyone from Microsoft to Accenture to HP to IBM to SAP admitted as much. With the worsening economic conditions and the maturation of cloud computing services, enterprises are actively investigating cloud computing. The main differences of opinion between the legacy vendors and companies like Salesforce and Amazon lie in how quickly and broadly companies will adopt cloud computing.
• Too much discussion of clouds at the infrastructure rather than platform layers - The entire cloud conversation at Structure was very focused on infrastructure. As Daryl Plummer of Gartner has noted, Cloud computing is not about infrastructure. It's about a new delivery and consumption model for IT services that are elastic, metered and abstract away the SW stack. The conference was mostly focused on the lowest layer of the stack and didn't really talk about how the cloud enables transformation at the business process level.

Source: 1, 2

Tags: cloud - saas - maintenance - cio - maintenance+revenue

Prashanth Rai

Telecommuting a way of life

 
Photo Credit David Gartner Photography | www.versusgoliath.com

Cisco recently published the results of their Telecommuting survey, it had some interesting pieces of information, below are excerpts from the same. This is an important trend to track from a productivity, sustainability & technology points of view. Companies specifically in the ICT industry (IT Services companies)should take the lead in this particularly given the nature of work, industry model etc.

Results from the survey:

Productivity and Collaboration

• Approximately 69 percent of the employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working remote, and 75 percent of those surveyed said the timeliness of their work improved.
• By telecommuting, 83 percent of employees said their ability to communicate and collaborate with co-workers was the same as, if not better than, it was when working on-site.
• 67 percent of survey respondents said their overall work quality improved when telecommuting.
• An improved quality of life through telecommuting was cited by 80 percent of survey respondents.
• Telecommuting can also lead to a higher employee retention rate, as more than 91 percent of respondents say telecommuting is somewhat or very important to their overall satisfaction.

Going Green

• In 2008, Cisco teleworkers prevented approximately 47,320 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from being released into the environment due to avoided travel.
• The average distance for round-trip commutes varied among global regions: employees in U.S. and Canada reported on average a 30-mile round-trip commute; Asia Pacific employees cited a distance of about 14 miles; Japanese employees cited a 26-mile commute; employees in emerging markets commute an average of 16 miles; and European employees reported a 46-mile commute.
• Cisco employees report a fuel cost savings of $10.3 million per year due to telecommuting.

Cisco Workforce

• Cisco employees spend about 63 percent of their time communicating and collaborating.
• 40 percent of Cisco employees say they are not located in the same city as their manager.
• The average Cisco employee now telecommutes 2.0 days per week.
• 60 percent of the time saved by telecommuting is spent working and 40 percent is spent on personal time.

Source:1

Tags: Cisco - telecommuting - ict - sustainability - productivity

Prashanth Rai

State of the Economy

A few interesting charts about the current economic state or state of the recession :)

Global trade collapsed in the fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009 in a way never seen in the postwar era.

The Institute for Supply Management survey offers a forward-looking indicator of industrial production.A number above 50 in the ISM survey implies manufacturing growth whereas a number below 50 implies contraction.

Link to full report

Hat Tip: Imagining India

Prashanth Rai