CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

Business Objects Release 4 “Event Insight”–The key differentiator.

Today i attended a pre-launch briefing by Steve Lucas (GM Business Analytics) of SAP regarding the Business Objects release 4 (Official Launch planned later this month). There was a lot of interesting content which will be the focus of another post. In this post i want to focus on one statement that Steve made that i thought was very interesting.

Steve indicated that Event Insight is one of the most exciting / differentiating factors in this new release of SAP.

Looks like SAP is definitely onto something here - The combination Event Insight, In Memory & mobility will be a real game changer.

It would be really interesting to see how SAP allows third party developers to develop / deploy mobile applications leveraging these 3 areas. Maybe SAP could create its own "Mobile App store" allowing third party developers could deploy a wide range of "enterprise" mobility applications leveraging the "foundations" that SAP puts in place with "Event Insight" + "In Memory" + "Mobility" platform.

What is Event Insight?

The goal of Event Insight is to provide real-time monitoring of business events:

• Detect meaningful business events and new opportunities, such as customer buying behavior, through historical and current events
• Send alerts to business users, letting them detect and react to business changes before adverse events happen
• Easily set up the agents, on multiple data sources, monitoring both structured and unstructured data, without programming

Event Insight uses technology that was first developed for high-velocity, high-transaction trades on Wall Street, but has now been extended and adapted for use in BI. The biggest difference is in the nature of the processing: compared to previous “monolithic”  CEP implementations, business intelligence typically requires more data sources, with processing shared among nodes on the network. 
    
Source: Timo Elliot

Prashanth Rai

Interesting data / statistics about SAP ....(SAP Influencer Summit)

During the last couple of days at the SAP Influencer Summit, There were a lot of interesting discussions / sessions. I will post about them over the next couple of days. To start off, I wanted to just list out some of the interesting data points / stats that I heard.

• By 2011 - 12% of world wide software market will go to cloud computing / on demand route(Merrill Lynch)
• 60-70% of the world's population have mobile devices
  • 4.1 billion phone, 35m iphone, 20+ smartpone types
• 350m FB users, 2m SCN users, ~1m blogs updated / day
• 14 Billion devices will be connected to the Internet, ~1Trillion events
• Business By Design currently has 100 customers.
• To reach a market audience of 50 Million
  • Radio - 38 years
  • TV - 13 years
  • Internet - 4 years
  • Ipod - 3 Years
  • FB - 2 years
• SAP ERP 6.0 productive systems - 18721 in Nov'09 vs 11804 in OCT'08 - Half installed base using the latest version
• Transaction On these systems:
  • 3200 car engines per day
  • 50 million bank accounts
  • Processing 2.5 billion utility bills
  • Retail outlets - $330 million worth of transaction per day
• In Memory technology - Provides 1000x+ performance gain - Extreme advantage enables brand new value creation
• SAP Summit Attended by 275 People in attendance / 20 + Customer & Partners
• SAP has 8000 people in Goto Market division & 10000 in the services organization
• Newell Rubbermaid - SAP / BCone (Sap partner) Supply chain Project executed in 90 days, Sales process took 37 days.
• Business By Design - lot of work done by R&d for the suite, factor  20 reduction in TCO for SAP
• Johnson Products implemented Business By Design in 30days (Start to finish)
• SAP EcoHub - 400 partner solution on the hub / 10000 demos off the hub - Most available online from within the hub.
• SAP has 12 centers inside sales centers
• SAP has 5400 partners (VARs, resellers etc) - 2700 are Partners & 2700 Extended Business Partners
• In 2007 SME was setup as a separate service line within SAP
• 75% of SAPS 92000 customers are SME
  • SAP Acquire >35 new SME customer per working day
  • 70500 SME Customers in total
  • 50500 SME Channel customers
  • Tripled the SME customer base in 3 years
  • SAP SME Number further broken down:
    • Upper ME = 11%
    • Lower ME = 42%
    • SE = 47%
  • SAP has 25000 B1 Customers
• Green Blue Auto SME Customer (Canada) - Implementation in 4 Weeks

Tags: sapsummit - sap - sap+sme - erp - ecohub - sap+erp

Prashanth Rai

Leo's Key Note - Takeaways - Sapphire09

Central Theme - How SAP enables clarity?

Business Suite 7 provides the solid foundation. (Integrated processes - no fragmentation , SOA - Completed roadmap in 2007 - 2800 solutions) Thanks to Henning Kaggerman

Enables to build some of your custom process - Flexibility - SAP Business process management tools - Consume innovation in cheapest, fastest way possible.

Suite Support goes on till 2015

Enabling Clarity of decision making - Clarity anticipates risk

• Business suite + Business Objects portfolio, Closed loop - Strategy to Execution.
• Not limited to the large companies only, SAP Best practices for BI - Integrated with All in One.
• How this impacts Risk Management? - Takes a dig at banks who brought together mathematicians + technology, the problem was the lack of holistic view. One survivor managed relatively better - Goldman Sachs - Risk focus / Global Risk Committee - Right information, at the right time for the right people.
• Risk is part of every industry - it is our responsibility to manage risk.

Value of SAP enterprise support services - Comprehensive support to reduce the overall TCO. 2 Weeks ago along with SUGEN will provide KPI's - KPI index - Business Continuity, Business Process process performance, Protection of Investment & TCO. Committed to a 30% improvement by 2012

Ian Kimble - Insurance Company Example - Pretty neat mobile application used.

Sustainability - Perceived unlimited resources ended, Sustainability strategy - Economic, Social, Environmental risks management. Maximize your "Triple bottom line" - Don't have to wait for Better Place. IT industry cause 2% of the Global Green house gases. Industries first ever Comprehensive sustainability Map - every relevant business process sustainable. Talks a little bit about smart grids on the utility industry site. Sustainability Performance management -reporting / benchmarking - Acquisition - CLEAR STANDARDS.

Ian Kimble - Clear Standards Demo.

Fundamental Change in Customer expectation both from a user point of view and from a buyer POV. Paradigms shifts in Technology cost & Availability - Virtualization, Cloud (Private Clouds) - Coming to us. Flexible deployment models - On premise / On demand combination of the two. Another big trend - Mobile / Miniaturization of transactions. Moving to a digital enterprise from IT enable organization. So huger amount of data - In memory DB's and Real time analytics.

Launch of SAP Business Objects Explorer Software. - With explorer, executives could get answers in milliseconds...brand profitability, customer buying patterns...this could change the way decisions are made" Steve Merry, Sara Lee CIO.

Demo by Ian Kimble - Insurance Company
Natural language search - Polestar + BIA

One Demand Offerings is a key element of the over all SAP strategy - that is a welcome change
Currently Available:

1. CRM
2. Strategic sourcing
3. BI
4. Carbon management

Soon to be launched

1. HCM
2. Expense management

SME - BBD  Business By Design - Clear rumors - Is on display on the show - Live by Design system - Well that's it.

Back to the Timeless software theme - ready for the future. Demo of Timeless software - Collaborative decision making.

Key components of SAP's Clear Strategy

1. Stable Core
2. Best foundation for intelligence platform
3. business process management
4. on premise on demand
5. web20
6. timeless software
7. sustainable ways

Tags: sapphire09 - sap - leo+apotheker - keynote - Orlando

Prashanth Rai

Enterprise Cloud Adoption

I was thinking of something appropriate to write for my first blog back, so I thought I will start with something that has been top of mind for some time now. "how will enterprises adopt cloud computing? " . And I am sure there is no simple or there isn't one correct answer to it.But I figured there are a set of factors that impact the choices / path that an enterprise ends up taking. So what are these factors? Below is an initial list of things that I could think of, I am sure there are many more, please add.

1. Maturity of IT department in the enterprise - Architecture,Structure,Process etc
2. The management's view of the IT department / CIO's place in the Management team / Political will/clout of the IT Department
3. Current state of investment in inhouse IT Resources/ infrastructure & investment payback period
4. IT Resources,Utilization levels / monitoring
5. Understanding of core / context IT systems - Standardization of systems / processes
6. IT Internal Staff Numbers/ Volume / Types of activities / roles they play
7. Existing Outsourcing / Offshoring operations/Contracts
8. Pressure to reduce cost / need to avoid capital expenditures
9. Willingness of the Management team to be innovators

These factors in varying degree's impact the decisions organizations take in adopting the "Cloud" or not. So I was wondering what could be a typical road map that organizations will adopt as they move towards the cloud, so below is a graphic with the first stab at it. In this approach I haven't factored in the private cloud option, that I will cover later.

This is only indicative, different organizations are probably going to adopt it very differently or some leading vendors will help them leapfrog further up the value chain. Please share your thoughts on this.

Tags: cloud - cloud+computing - enterprise - aws+amazon

Prashanth Rai

(Cross posted at the bti.typepad.com)

2009 - Year of SaaS

Will 2009 be the year the "On demand" software movement grows extensively in the enterprise, even amidst the "Lousy Economic Conditions" ? WSJ has an interesting comment on the same:

Overall, “there will be a lot more caution and businesses will invest [in tech] more selectively” in 2009, says Michele Pelino, an analyst at Forrester Research.

In particular, online software, which businesses access over the Internet instead of installing on tech equipment they operate themselves, is expected to gain attention since it can save money and help productivity. While some corporate tech chiefs had been reluctant to embrace the online software model, and online software accounts for less than 10% of software sales, the slumping economy now has many businesses looking at the category for the first time.

Microsoft Corp. recently launched a set of online services to capitalize on such sentiment.

And another online-software naysayer, Oracle Corp.’s Chief Executive Larry Ellison, is changing his tune. Mr. Ellison, who long argued that companies can’t make money selling online software, last week touted his company’s online offerings in a call with Wall Street analysts.

Prashanth Rai

Tags: saas - paas - on+demand - 2009

Services, The Very Critical Part of the On Demand Ecosystem - Appirio

Yesterday I had a great conversation with one of the founders of Appirio, a new age services organization founded in 2006. They are an 80-person company with an additional 20 people offshore through a partner. Their original investors include Salesforce.com along with a couple of angels. More recently Sequoia capital invested in them.

Appirio is a unique company for a couple of reasons: they are a Services & Product organization, rolled up into one and are completely focused on the On Demand space.

Their philosophy is well documented and covered in their explanation of "Services 2.0":

"This new breed of specialized firms fully embrace SaaS with complementary business and technology consulting, productized intellectual property, and support services via flexible social networks will be disruptive to traditional Global Systems Integrators (GSI)- such as Accenture, IBM, Cap Gemini, and Infosys – who are just as addicted as the ISVs themselves to revenue streams based on the on-premise install base."

This whole Services 2.0 theme is very interesting. There has been, for what now seems to be forever, a conversation among the Services 1.0 players on how to break the direct relationship between the number of bodies and their revenue numbers. The current model is steeped in the FTE / Body count business. Many of them are trying to get some IP into play particularly for aspects that are often repeated amongst client.

In this very scenario Appirio has been able to execute on the vision, creating products/solutions/IP like Connectors between Salesforce-Google, Salesforce-Facebook & Salesforce-Amazon etc. The very reasons that On Demand is great for customers makes it invaluable for IP/product developers. They only have to focus on the solution and not worry about the infrastructure / software set up... etc. - i.e. all the non value added tasks.  (A question that arises here is that though this does enable companies to build and take to market solutions/products faster, at the same time it reduces the barrier of entry for other players to come and create something similar and undercut on cost...)

The whole difference between Services 1.0 & 2.0 companies is captured well in the table they provided (via Sandhill.com):

Business Lines

Currently Appirio is focused on the services side on Salesforce.com & GAPE (Google Applications for the Enterprise). On the product side they have a vertical application developed for Professional Services organizations on the Force.com platform in addition to the connectors between Salesforce-Google, Salesforce-Facebook & Salesforce-Amazon. Another offering that they have is the "Viral enterprise" which leverages Facebook specifically for recruitment... etc.

They currently have around 1600 customers for their solutions / products business and another 120 enterprise customers on the services side.

Areas that they might look at expanding into in the future are - Amazon,Adobe, Facebook, Workday, Intact, Google App Engine...etc. Mostly solutions that meet their fundamental deicing as defined in the Services 2.0 piece.

Some Customer Success Stories:

1. Large Enterprise - Qualcomm - They implemented the Salesforce Service/Support Module.
2. Medium Enterprise - Genentech - They implemented 1500 seats of Google Calendar
3. Small Enterprise - CRC Health - Developed patient intake system on the Force.com platform

Projects

Their view of projects:

• Tied to an Outcome
• Spend more time on business process/ user adoption (Parts that are more important to the end user, hence trying to make the projects more successful)
• Lower/Less investments
• Bring best practices across different client groups - Leverage packaged IP
• Duration - Short Project Cycles , each with its own justifiable delivery / ROI, typically 4 weeks - 3months
• Work with both the IT & the business, Business alone will not be able to execute they need the support of the IT team
  

Suggestion to CIOs

Get started now! Do a portfolio analysis of your current application infrastructure & framework , identify some of the needs of the future and analyze the same to see which of these makes sense to be moved to an "On Demand" model. And move it now.

| View | Upload your own

I am a believer

I believe in both the promise of "On Demand" and the need for integrators / SI's with a completely new view to IT & Innovation. I also believe in the model of delivering results and leveraging technology to provide value to the customer. On the On Demand model, I don't think it is suited for all customer use cases and don't think all applications will be on an public on demand model. Its going to a hybrid state , with loosely connected systems and easy to use information aggregation / processing / mash up capabilities based delivery tools.

Tags: cio - smb. large+enterprise - services2.0 - appirio - saas - on+demand - paas - gape - salesforce.com - crm

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

Prashanth Rai

The eventual Demise of the OLAP Cube .....Forrester

In the Forrester blog For Information and Knowledge Workers analyst James Kobielus has an interesting post on the change of guard in the BI scenario looking at the eventual demise of OLAP.

I think the points raised by James are very relevant and does get us thinking on how we should look at the whole analytical framework / architecture that is defined in organizations.

Excerpts from the post:

No one expects the OLAP cube to vanish completely from the BI landscape, but its role in many decision-support environments has been declining over the past several years. Increasingly, vendors are emphasizing new approaches that, when examined in a broader context, appear to be loosening OLAP's lockhold on mainstream BI and data warehousing. The emerging paradigm for ad-hoc, flexible, multi-dimensional, user-driven decision support includes the following important approaches:

• Automated discovery and normalization of dispersed, heterogeneous data sets through a pervasive metadata layer
• Semantic virtualization middleware, which supports on-demand, logically integrated viewing and query of data from heterogeneous, distributed data sources without need for a data warehouse or any other centralized persistence node
• On-the-fly report, query, and dashboard creation, which relies on dynamic aggregation of data, organization of that data within relevant hierarchies, and presentation of metrics that have been customized to the user or session context
• Interactive data visualization tools, which enable user-driven exploration of the full native dimensionality of heterogeneous data sets, thereby eliminating the need for manual modeling and transformation of data to a common schema
• Guided analytics tools, which support user-driven, ad-hoc creation of sharable, extensible models containing data, visualization, and navigation models for customizable decision-support scenarios
• Inverted indexing storage engines, which support more flexible, on-the-fly assembly of structured data in response to ad-hoc queries than is possible with traditional row-based or column-based data warehousing persistence layers
• Distributed in-memory processing, which enables continuous delivery of intelligence being extracted in real-time from millions of rows of data that originates in myriad, distributed data sources

Tags: olap - Forrester - future - bi - business+intelligence - information - intelligence

Prashanth Rai

Interesting reads of the day!

Not satisfied  - Only 47% of workers are satisfied with the speed at which their businesses’ tech departments adopt new technology.The number is from a new report by the research firm Gartner and it’s an average across the medium and large companies surveyed.On average, the tech pros said that 32% of workers in their companies thought that the IT department moved too slowly. These are the people who want to use online software, collaboration tools, iPhones and other new technologies that IT often outlaws. Gartner makes the case that some dissatisfaction is good: All but the oldest technologies are still works in progress, and if no one feels disrupted then the tech department probably isn’t pushing the envelope enough. The people Gartner suggests upsetting, however, are the people who think that the tech department is moving too quickly – about 21% of workers now, according to the IT pros surveyed

Source: 1

OBIEE On IPhone - Chris Claterbos from Vlamis has picked up on the story that one of the first official iPhone apps is a front-end for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition. The App Store hasn’t gone live over here yet, but apparently one of the first applications you can download (and for free) is a viewer application for Oracle BI Answers.According to Chris, “The new applications leverage the SOA capabilities and Oracle Business Intelligence Web Services available in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Pluss (OBIEE). The new apps will be available today for FREE from the Apple appstore. These applications will run on iPhone (original), iPhone 3G (available tomorrow) and iTouch using the new version 2.0 software.”

Source: 2

Consistent Innovation - There is a fascinating article in this month’s Harvard Business Review entitled Investing in the IT That Makes A Competitive Difference that discusses how “internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition.” As processes become more digitized within enterprise IT, they can be propagated more quickly across the organization. Companies that select the right operating model to digitize, embody the processes within enterprise IT, deploy the solution consistently throughout the enterprise, and then continuously leverage the platform for further innovation and propagation will lead their industries.

You can support your company’s competitive imperative by becoming a key agent in your company’s innovation engine. You don’t need to be a technologist, but you do need to be an expert on your business processes, data, and technology systems that run your business. To do so, make sure that you:

• Understand your company’s operating model and the processes that need to be consistent across the enterprise to drive competitive success (e.g., market to sell, lead to order, quote to cash, etc.)

• Commit to relying on your enterprise systems to get what you need (rather than demanding customizations or building stand alone systems)

• Know the configuration options inherent in the enterprise systems that can be leveraged for experimentation (e.g., report writers, data extract, process scripts, screen “painters”, table driven logic)

• Champion experimentation with full transparency and discipline regarding success measurements

Alternatively, IT needs to foster the capability of “consistent innovation” by:

• Working with the business to identify the operating model and the implications regarding process, data and technology

• Ensuring that “tight but loose” decision rights are rigorously defined to ensure consistency but prescribe where innovation can occur within the defined boundaries

• Architecting and delivering technology that ensures consistency AND promotes innovation and change. It’s relatively easy to build systems to perform tasks in a prescribed manner by people in static roles. But it’s much more difficult to design and deliver systems that are configurable in terms of inputs, process, and outputs and where the authority to access and make modifications are encoded in logic that ensures compliance to enterprise decision rights (e.g., a system that allows vendors to be hired at the local level and held to common quality standards may need to support a mix of national and local vendors and market based quality measures at some time in the future.)

Source: 3

Fortune 500, Indian Industry - India is seen as an emerging economy having registered impressive growth rates for over a decade. The services sector has been doing very well and manufacturing has not performed poorly. What must come as a sobering thought to a nation of a billion people is that the latest Fortune 500 list has just 7 Indian companies. Of these, five are state owned – four in the petroleum sector that is showing high revenues thanks to oil being on the boil and one bank. Only two companies are in the private sector – Reliance Industries and Tata Steel.

Source: 4

Cloud Computings Impact on BI/DWH - How will the Cloud Computing change BI and Data Warehousing?  In theory, it should be much easier to get a system up an running.  This is the same reason why the data warehouse appliance is so compelling.  Give me a box, let me plug it in and load my data, and off I go to do the work I really need to do.  The idea of Cloud Computing is even easier.  This is the CPU power/storage that I need, where do I load my data, and off I go to do the work I really need to do.

Source: 5

Tags: saas - india - IT - innovation - future

Prashanth Rai

Transformative Technology - IDC

IDC explored which technologies companies see as most critical to transform themselves for this emerging world of flexible service delivery and consumption, citing a recent IDC survey of 236 line-of-business (LOB) executives and 268 CIOs and other IT executives.

Couple of things that I find interesting are:

• LOB believe in Webservices as the most impacting technology?
• Strange not to see SOA higher, given the marketing push that is provided by the big boys Oracle/SAP?

Source:1

Tags: transformation - Webservices - IDC - Oracle - SOA

Prashanth Rai

Leo's Key Note....SAPPHIRE BERLIN

Day 2 Keynote at SAPPHIRE 2008 - Berlin (Missed yesterdays (Hennings - last probably) as I was on my way over), Its his first keynote as after he become a co-CEO. It is the 12th Edition of European Sapphire.

Live - Blogged  (So excuse the errors)

World is getting flatter (Market Drivers)

• Connectivity
• Consumer Power
• Hyper Competition (Not just low cost arbitrage - Tata (Global player)
• New Markets (India / China - Mobile Adding Swiss every month)
• Economic Uncertainty and volatility

Labor arbitrage is the past (Labor shortage - Moving to Latin America)

Business Network Maturity

• Phase1 Business Network Collaboration (Operational efficiency - Network is strongest as its weakest link)
• Phase2 Business Model Innovation
• Phase 3 Business Network Transformation - (Leverage the network to change the business model of the company - Will move to a different value network)

John Clarke (CIO Nokia)

Rubber boots to leading cell phone manufacturer

High innovation Demand Supply Network

1995 - growth constrained by IT - Then it was about phone and Network devices (Criticized in annual report)/ Regional focus / SCM not able to meet the need.

2007 - Technology and people focused on transformation - Consumer Convergence / Global focus / Best Supply Chain

Impressive transformation

Need to transform again - Connecting you to what matters most - Time to reinvent - Increase ARPU thru services, Internet services, Phones for local preferences & Retailer visibility in India/China.

Leveraging SAP as a platform for the future

How did they do the first transformation

4000 active concurrent users (active , hence difficult to make changes)

• Right IT Architecture with SAP Solution, Global Single Instance
• Global realtime visibility for right decision making
• SAP Solution enables true cost control & quick financial closing
• Strong governance globally ensuring tight control over finance and master data
• Nokia gained competitive advantage of all processes on one instance

Future Outlook

• Dynamic Business Strategies
• SOA enabler for future growth
• high performance landscape , competitive TCO
• Master data integration with real time visibility & modularity

Leo Back

• 30 Years of best practices (Move from 3 to 5 letter acronyms)
• 10000 adoption of ERP6
• Lead in 20 out of 24 industries
• 39000 integration platform - Netweaver

Colgate

EMEA/APAC CIO - Paul Macgarey

Colgate - Global Organization/ 36000 people  / 13 Billion Sales / Sales evenly spread Across the World

Initially the basic O2C was a break through technology

99.6% of business on SAP

They have chosen an End to END SAP SAP Strategy

1. Trade promotion - foundation of business planning process
2. Integrated ERP, SCM,BI, Portal
3. Interaction center
4. Online sales - esales

SAP roll out  - maps well with the Gross Profit Improvement- Having SAP Framework in place helped delivery the success

LEO

Business Networks of different sizes with different suites will need to work together

Demo (Supply network planning)

SAP All in one - IBM / HP - Optimized  (SME Village)

Business Processes is only one side of story

• Visibility of own data / Data of network partners / external data
• Wholistic / Agonistic BI tool
• broad band
• Storage unlimited
• Computing power unlimited
• No need for statistical

SAP 's Business Network

Trusted Partner Solutions and Services

1. Software partners
2. Services Partners
3. Technology Partners
4. Channel Partners

Communities of Innovation

1. BPX
2. SDN
3. EVN
4. ES Community
5. User groups - SUGEN

RIM

Alliance Head - Jeff

Co - Innovation - Future of Enterprise Software

Start with CRM

What blackberry did for email? - Work with SAP to do the same for Business Software.

Great Demo

Enterprise Support - Support the backbone 24*7*365

Summary Slide:

 One point that struck me is - Is Leo bringing a more public focus on the SAP customer ?

Tags: leo+apotheker - sap - sapphire08 - business+network

Prashanth Rai