CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

SAP Business Analytics 4.0

Today I attended a deep dive session on SAP business analytics 4.0, the official launch is tomorrow. SAP clearly see’s this release as a big leap for their business intelligence portfolio but I think they see it as “big leap” for the business intelligence space in general.

The four key themes for this release are:

• Big data in real-time
• Insight with confidence across business and social data
• Instant, Powerful BI in your hands - Mobile BI
• The best fit, right size, right now

Have covered some of the details of this release in an earlier post based on a briefing by Steve Lucas (GM Business Analytics ) SAP.

Some interesting bits from todays session:

1. 1 Million Person days investment made for this release
2. BI 4 – Is a new release after 3 years – Lot of customer interest.
3. Close to 30 customers in ramp-up
4. Both the co-CEO's of SAP had iPads with the SAP Business Object Explorer app which has access to the full CRM data of SAP loaded up onto the "in-memory" platform. This usage pattern has had a trickle down impact across the organization both in terms of usage of the system and user behavior.
5. In Memory – HANA - 5x faster on SAP BW
6. 13000 SAP customers have SAP BW implemented
7. Hana’s licensing is based on the size of usage - Extra small package will be available for SMEs

One of the key aspects of this release is the “In Memory” aspect, with this regard SAP has put together a 3 x 3 matrix on what is the best approach to “in memory” or “Acceleration” for customers based on their respective application environments:

Application Environment	Acceleration Technology	Business Intelligence Solution
SAP ERP (4.6c or later)	Go directly to HANA	SAP Business Object BI
SAP Netweaver BW	SAP Netweaver BW Accelerator	SAP Business Objects Explorer
Non SAP analytics / data	Sybase IQ	SAP Business Object BI

Another area that is going to be interesting to track / watch is Analytic applications , these are apps that are going to be built on the In-memory platform/HANA. Looks like the SAP BPC solution is also likely to go down this path being built / deployed on the in-memory platform (HANA).

Prashanth Rai

Image Source: 1

SaaS BI / BI On Demand ….State of Affairs–Part 1

BI On Demand / SaaS BI is a great way particularly for small and medium size companies to get the low hanging fruits of business analysis/reporting without spending a huge amount of money and IT effort. This gets companies started down the path of Business analytics within a couple of weeks.I think it is flawed to think that this model makes more sense primarily if the data sources are “SaaS” based but I think even for on premise data sources, leveraging SaaS based BI can help companies start down the path of business analytics without needing to put together a whole BI competency center, which most SME’s are not going to be in a position to do that anytime in the near future.

The tools are quite powerful and cater to many relevant use cases at companies particularly SME companies. There are quite of few solutions out there in this domain, will look through them over the next couple of days. Lets start with SAP BI On demand, Recently was trying out the solution and liked quite a few things about it. The approach to this solution seemed to be report sharing solution to external stakeholders like salesperson, customers , distributors etc. But it can be lot more than that particularly for SME’s.

The one thing I really liked about the SAP Bi On demand solution was the iPhone app – SAP Business Object explorer.It provides some nice visualizations for the data that is loaded into the on-demand warehouse right on my mobile phone.

I was able to get some data from an ERP load it up into a personal account and get the data on my iPhone in a matter of an hour (of course there are some restrictions on the size of data in these personal accounts). But I think it was pretty neat say to be able to deliver analytics / reports to a complete sales force with a couple of days efforts.

Below is a video testimonial for SAP BI on demand

SAP BI On Demand Case Study

More on SAP BI on demand to follow, Want to see when we are going to see the impact or benefits of SAP's business analytics 4 solution launch ( in the next couple of days).

But I think we are going to see a lot of innovation from the SaaS BI / BI ondemand space trickle back down into , On Premise solutions. I like what I am reading from companies like Chart.io

data visualization will still help uncover important nuances. Maybe not all, but you’ll discover lots of useful insights and be guided toward the relevant next steps for analysis.

, Excel is horrible for developing data insights. Avoid it. It’s simply not good at all for discovery. I see data visualization, instead, as being key for the first steps. So if you’re running a business and you’re not asking “Where are the data visualizations?” then you’re doing something wrong.

More to follow….

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

Cloudy Future of Cloud Computing….

Today i came across this article which talks about the need for companies to modernize their backup infrastructure, while i read this article i was rather surprised at the lack of "Cloud” based options being highlighted.

Then saw this blog post which has the survey results from the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards Ceremony (50+ CIO’s responded) which had the chart:

While about 42% of the survey participants selected “horizontal application,” just over 35% said they have no production cloud use at all.  I’s also very surprised that cloud storage is so poorly utilized.  It is simple to use, measure and its cost model is clear.  Granted, cloud storage doesn’t make as much sense for a secure production database, but there has to be more out there just in the way of backups, file storage, etc. that could justify easy re-platforming in the cloud.

And some other interesting stats from the survey are:

• Forty percent are most concerned about security, while 37% are overwhelmed by a presumed complexity.
• On the question of When will the majority of your infrastructure be in the cloud? - Fifty-nine percent of those answering said “Never.”

These stats paint a very abysmal picture of the future of Cloud computing, particularly for infrastructure as a service providers. But more i think about it, more i am inclined to think that its probably best that these CIO’s prepare themselves for some big changes in their IT landscape and in their mindset. Cloud computing is the next evolution of computing and is here to stay.

I am reminded about a conversation i had with a couple of CIO’s / IT leaders a couple of years ago, in which they found the whole concept of leveraging cloud or cloud based services funny and felt they were unlikely to use it in their respective enterprises, but over the last two years i have seen them change their opinions and have become more comfortable with the concept and are looking to leverage it more.

Will need to wait and see how / when it happens to these 50 CIO’s or if it ever will happen?

Prashanth Rai

Source: 1

mKrishi – Unwired Innovation for the “Farmer”

These days there is a lot of talk about mobile or unwired applications, iPhone App Store and Android Market have some really interesting and useful / productive apps. But only recently did i come across the mKrishi project by TCS, this initiative has the potential of being truly transformative for India in general and more specifically for the Indian farmer - Who at this time is having a very challenging time in most parts of India.

It addresses one of the key challenges of the farmers - "lack of information". Getting information to the remote corners of India to the farmer has been hard in the past with the lack of communication infrastructure and irregular electricity. Companies have been trying to do improve this for some time now with efforts by companies like ITC - eCoupal, the initiative was covered in great detail in CK Prahalad’s book Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid. But i believe that leveraging the mobile / wireless communication infrastructure is the step in the right direction.

In India mobile phones have become extremely pervasive, India has about 635 million Wireless connections at this point of time and is expected to grow at 15 million per month. the overall tele-density per 100 people is around 51% – Meaning 51 out of 100 people have either a mobile or telephone connection. The remaining population, mostly situated in rural areas, is still to be connected. Both the service providers and the phone manufacturers are working on addressing this space and have & are making good progress in this space.

 Here is a link to the presentation detailing how mKrishi works.

mKRISHI, a platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services to provide personalized advice to Indian farmers on low-end mobile phones. The mKrishi team spent two years studying farming patterns in rural India and developing methods to connect farmers to agricultural experts, with the belief that technology could jump-start some of India's seemingly ancient agricultural practices.

"It appears that there is a last-mile gap between farmers and agricultural experts," said Arun Pande, the head of TCS Innovation Labs and the leader behind mKRISHI. "In the absence of correct information and advice which is specific to him, the farmer relies on what other farmers do—or on his traditional wisdom."

TCS Mobile Agro Advisory System (mKrishi) connects farmers with an ecosystem that empowers them to make sound decisions about agriculture, drive profits, and conserve the environment.

Farmers require information on weather, soil, fertilizer and pesticide that are specific to their plot of land. They need information on the type of seeds, crops available in the market and local market prices.

TCS Mobile Agro Advisory System addresses all these issues. Farmers can receive information on microclimate, local market price and other subjects of relevance to them on a mobile phone. It also enables farmers to send queries specific to their land and crop to receive personalized replies from agricultural experts, on their phones. More details

This seems to be part of the innovation lab program within TCS, which is headed by CTO of TCS Ananth Krishnan.

Prashanth Rai

Source:1 

Image Source: 1

Trends / Facts / Stats / Thoughts about the Mobile "Data" space....

Below are a list of points / trends / Thoughts about the Mobile space from various sources that I have been reading over the last couple of days:

Forrester Outlook of 2014 - United States

• By the end of 2009, 234 million US consumers — 76% of the population — will have a mobile phone subscription, and the total number of phone subscriptions will approach 270 million, representing 88% of the country’s population
• Most subscriber growth will be prepaid. Those without a mobile phone are less likely to be able to afford a postpaid option: 37% of those without mobile service have a household income of less than $25,000.
• Laptop or netbook — these connected PCs will account for nearly 11 million subscriptions by 2013
• A dizzying array of devices from cars to home alarm systems to eReaders to navigation devices are available today with a cellular connection, and new options such as health monitors and connected cameras are on the way. This diversity of connected devices will result in a proliferation of wireless subscriptions beyond the traditional mobile phone.
• Mobile Internet usage will boom. As 2008 drew to a close, more than 34 million US mobile subscribers accessed the mobile Internet on their phones at least once a month. That number will grow at an impressive 52% rate in 2009 to 52 million, and mobile Net users will continue to exhibit double-digit growth through 2014, when 106 million users, or a full 39% of all wireless subscribers, will become regular mobile Net users.
• Operators’ shift from metered to unlimited data plans has been one of the critical drivers for mobile Internet and data adoption, but these plans have a downside in that they limit future data revenues while encouraging wanton usage. To manage this risk, carriers will introduce new service tiers at lower  price points — with concomitantly lower data limits — that will reduce the barrier to entry for those subscribers not yet convinced that they get their money’s worth.
• Messaging +data services - these growth engines have only served to balance the concomitant decline in voice revenues — keeping ARPU nearly flat over the past few years. This trend will continue, as the growth in data subscriptions will be tempered by the introduction of lower-price voice offerings designed to maintain growth
• Data access revenues will approach $20 billion in 2014, the rate of growth will slow as the average monthly price of a data bundle decreases from $17.34 per month in 2009 to $16.64 in 2014
• Today, nearly one-third of active handsets are 3G; by 2014, more than four in five handsets will use 3G technology — whether that’s UMTS, a flavor of HSPA, or CDMA2000 — or its successor, LTE.
• Today, even the most recalcitrant voice-centric customer isn’t able to buy a new handset in this category, and these devices constitute a paltry 3% of active phones in the US market (see Figure 3). By 2014, this number will have fallen to less than 1% of all active handsets, confined to the remaining “glove box” users and those served by remote rural providers.

Economy + Internet Trends - Morgan Stanley

• Mobile Consumer - 10billion + Units

India - An interesting article in the Wallstreet journal

• Radio Via Phone - With the more than $200 million in revenues phone company executives expect this year, the radio via phone business already makes almost as
• much as consultants at KPMG estimate all the regular FM stations in India will make.
• ......requires tailored services that are delivered simply and can work even on a $20 phone.
• Monthly ARPU, Q4-2006 - 300+ Rs, Q2-2009 - <200Rs, The biggest phone companies have also started charging per second rather than per minute, further crimping the number of rupees they get from calls.
• The mobile value-added service business, which also includes standard nonvoice services like texting, will rise close to 70% in the next year to 165 billion rupees ($3.6 billion), according estimates by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
• So far these types of services make up only about 10% of cellular companies' revenues, analysts say. But in the next five years the portion of revenue generated by these services could rise to as much as 25%, they estimate. Telephone Revenue from Non Voice Cellphone Services - 2006 - 25 Billion Rs, 2008 - 75 Billion Rs, (Estimated) 2009 - 100 Billion, (Estimated) 2010 - 160 billion Rs.
• New revenues won't come anytime soon from so-called 3G services. India has yet to even decide which private companies will be allowed to offer 3G services, though an auction of spectrum is expected early next year.
• many of India's 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators

Source : 1,  2, 3

Tags: mobile - data - mobile+trends - ms - morgan+stanley - forrester - india - US - japan

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.

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)

Daily Reading - 1st Jan 2009

When your laptop is a pain in the neck

If you use a laptop for hours at a stretch, you’re setting yourself up for muscle problems that can make your entire upper body hurt. Simple ways to make a laptop more ergonomic

Supporters of Satyam launch website,blame media for Satyam crisis

In a damage control initiative, the supporters hosted a dedicated website here on Thursday, which has received good number of messages across the world. With a tag line of "Satyameva Jayate", the website solicits public support

25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek

It's the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs' eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. "I don't think about that," he said. "When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, 'Get it away!' and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed. You have to look forward."

Web 2.0 Summit Presentation and Talk

An important part of our future is being invented out in the world. And it is from that world that I want to share stories about two companies I am involved in. Between them, they cover the two most important screens of our interactive lives - the computer and the mobile. The two companies are Novatium and NetCore.

Prashanth Rai

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