Below are some of the highlights from day 1 of Sapphire 2010 (SapphireNow)
CO-CEO Influencer meet
- Bill McDermott (BM), Key priorities
- On Demand
- Mobility
- In Memory technology
- Jim Hagermann Snabe (JHS) – Key priority - Reach out to the customers, the whole executive board has been reaching out customers extensively over the last couple of months.
- Bill McDermott - Focus on reducing TCO – A customer had close to 6000 applications and the IT budget was around 4% of revenue. SAP reduced the application sprawl to 1500 apps & reduced IT budget to 2% of revenue.
- Sybase acquisition Impact on relationship with RIM, JHS …relationship with RIM to continue – need to be on multiple devices, any device strategy.
- JHS - Retail vertical is focused on moving away from the custom / home grown application base to packaged / standard applications. POS analytics & mobility are key for the customer.
- Enterprise support, When offered a choice vast majority of customers went with Enterprise support.
- BBD (Business by design) to get the required financial cover to get started, the key parameter for the business will be number of customers added not profitability or revenue. Focus on building a scale business.
- This press conference was conducted virtually with JHS in Frankfurt & BM here in Orlando. SapphireNow is a great demonstration of use of social media. Some really cool stuff out there.
Meeting with Vishal Sikka
- Three primary objectives:
- Get products out the door fast (Agile methods of development)
- Scale innovation
- Plan for technology platform for the next 10-15 years.
- Sybase incredible middleware
- Innovation for the bottom of billion, An innovation center in South Africa. Enabling small trading in Africa - even for small stores with 5$ per day.
- 100 or so customers have been with SAP for the last 30 years. Not a single one lost.
- Solution manager is key for institutionalizing the relationship between the customer and SAP. Solution manager is evolving, some people who have been able to implement it are seeing phenomenal value from it.
- System design methodology – Work with real customers, read data, real systems. That's the only way to keep development honest.
Meeting with John Wookey
- Focus on building line of business on demand solutions
- Currently focused on sales , sourcing & expense on demand applications
- On demand applications need a different development mindset, CRM on demand the focus is bringing context – communication & collaboration to the CRM data.
- Creating frameworks for orchestrating on demand & on premise solutions – Master data management etc – Cure for SaaS sprawl.
- In on demand applications the customer experience is managed by SAP but hosting is taken care of by partners.
- Discussing internally if they should look at Sales & operational planning as a next on demand application set.
- On Demand – Aligned to the usage based pricing model & subscription model.
Meeting with Doug Merritt
- Doug Merritt has a new role as EVP of On Demand & Business by design.
- SAP serious about business by design goto market, the team has been given all the money / resources they need for the effort.
- Business By Design charter customer period completed, now ready for general availability
- Business by design, coming in starter packs like CRM pack, HR pack etc. The packs will be priced at a lot less. Also the minimum licenses to be purchased for BBD has been reduced to 10 from 25.
- Will look at the current 3000 partner ecosystem to create the much needed partner / reseller ecosystem for BBD. They believe the more mature sophisticated partners will be the first to adopt like iTelligence. Partner will face dislocation.
- Focus on getting partner to build app extensions for BBD.
- They recently closed a deal with “Zero touch”
- Business By design CRM – Execution 3 weeks or less – At fixed price
- Business By Design ERP / PS – Execution 6 weeks or less – At fixed price
- Biggest challenge data migration.
- Compensation model for BBD sales people different from the regular sale people at SAP.
Prashanth Rai
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