What Does “Data-Driven Company” Mean for a Developer?

At Pivotal Software, we frequently pitch about a virtuous cycle of of data-driven app development where:

1. A cache of data is collected and stored.
2. A team of analysts or data scientists discovers an insight or optimization opportunity
3. This affects the app development which generates more data.
4. The company continues through the cycle more and more agilely.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

However, the story above is more of an analytics story than a developer story.  This became clear to me while sitting with some crack developers at dinner at the Spring One 2GX conference.

One of my table mates asked me, “I understand what Pivotal is saying about the virtuous cycle, but what exactly happens between analytics and apps stages?”

Why I Joined Pivotal Software

Cross-posted from my first blog published on LinkedIn…

Not only did I recently join Pivotal Software, I found my way into the swag closet…

I’m proud to announce that I have joined the marketing team at Pivotal Software.

There’s a special kind of excitement in helping build a business that you know can change the world. I’m excited to have a chance to work with the many talented people here at Pivotal, and be part of an amazing company and culture dedicated to helping customers create new innovations in big data.

Rapid innovation prototyping on SAP HANA with SAP River

Customer story of NetApp using SAP River to develop an innovative custom application POC on SAP HANA.

Clamoring for Innovation Ideas Using SAP HANA at HANA 2014

Cross posted at the blog at SAPHANA.com…

As I leave the HANA 2014 conference in Orlando this week, I am simply impressed with the enthusiasm I felt from a room full of enterprise architects looking for ways to support innovation for their companies with SAP HANA.

When I was asked to present at SAP Insider’s HANA 2014 Conference in Orlando about business innovation as it relates to SAP HANA, one of my favorite topics, I jumped at the opportunity.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a room full of eager attendees waiting for me at my 8:30AM session this morning.

I always start by asking a few questions to get to know my audience. At HANA 2014 for both my sessions the audience responded as follows to my unscientific poll:

•          50% work for SAP customers
•          50% are consultants serving SAP customers

•          25% are working for customers that already have or are actively considering  purchasing SAP HANA

•          Less than 25% were business analysts concerned with software requirements
•          75% said they are Enterprise Architects
•          A smattering, around 5%, said they are developers

As I said, the poll was unscientific and audience members did answer multiple times in the poll choices.

You can get an idea of the perspective and interest of the people attending a session about building innovative custom applications on SAP HANA. They were not developers, but they were very interested in hearing about how they could support developers in creating innovative applications on SAP HANA.

While it’s not my intention to recreate my session in blog form, I have some interesting takeaways for myself as a result of interactions with the attendees in my sessions.  Check out the slides of my presentation on  Slideshare.

 

1.  When it comes to fostering a “culture of invention” 90% of my attendees companies appear not to partake in more forward looking approaches such as holding company Hackathons or cross functional innovation days with employees. Nor do many of them partake in crowd sourcing programs such as Kaggle, or check out SAP’s crowd sourcing program for SAP HANA customers: SAP Idea Incubator.

2.  Audience members appreciated my “3 Questions to know if you have a SAP HANA Application” slide. Many of their questions were related to geospatial data capabilities of SAP HANA and predictive analytics functionality.

 

 

[SOURCE: © SAP, used with permission] Three questions for determining if your custom application might be suitable for developing on SAP HANA.

Open Innovation Crowdsourcing at SAP Idea Incubator

Previously posted by me for the blog at SAPHANA.com.

We have just unveiled a new kind of crowd sourcing campaign on SAP Idea Incubator – “Open Ideas” which feature completely open business cases, data sets, and results.

Our first project in this category, “Help Build an Open Source Administrative Tool for SAP HANA” (login required) exactly fits this definition. Proposed by IBM Global Services, they ask the following from the SAP HANA community:

1. Create a tool to improve administration of SAP HANA
2. Sample data model will be shared for all participants
3. Winning solution will be asked to contribute their solution into an open source project.

Here is a short demonstration of what the proposer is looking for with this idea:

 

What Can Companies Expect from Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing?

[SOURCE] Crowds gathered in a Mall in UK.

Originally posted at SAPHANA.com.

Whenever new Internet-based business models are invented, some quickly create new kinds of companies – like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter.  Others mature more slowly such as in the case of crowd funding and crowd sourcing. Crowd funding is finding funding for projects, products and companies from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and AngelList helping crowd funding mature. Crowd sourcing is sourcing work or creative ideas from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and 99 Designs successfully showing different models of crowd sourcing.  These concepts have been around since the beginning of Web 2.0, but enterprises are still trying to understand how these might fit into their existing businesses.

Having been involved with SAP’s first crowd sourcing programs, the SAP HANA Idea Incubator, and the SAP Idea Place, I’ve run firsthand into the many different expectations that people have about these concepts. Most understand some of the benefits they might receive, but not the corresponding duties they have to making their project a success. Similarly, I think involving a crowd has some far reaching benefits that only some have set up their campaigns to fully realize.

 

On Cloud Transformation vs. Disruption

Originally posted on Oct 22, 2013 at SAPHANA.com…

In Silicon Valley, many of the start-ups birthed or relocated here are out to replace incumbent technology companies and disrupt entire industries. Venture capitalists only invest when they think they’ve found those new companies who have the chance to shoot for the moon, even if it’s a big challenge. They mitigate their risk by betting on several companies at the same time.

“Disruption” isn’t the kind of conversation that SAP has with it’s customers. Instead, SAP speaks of “non-disruptive evolution” in terms of lower order change and “business transformation” in the case of higher order change.

Business transformation is a high-value retooling of existing business models allowing companies to realize new opportunities.
[SOURCE] © Elvert Barnes, used according to Creative Commons License

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 2)

Part II of my guest blog at the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability blog…

This blog is a follow up to my prior blog Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1) where I discuss the book Betterness: Economics for Humans, by Umair Haque as a new standard for how we measure the contributions of business to society.

In this second part, my I want to investigate how well this framework can inspire thinking for “betterness” by evaluating common wealth contributions of a company I know well since I work for them, SAP. Let me be clear that these are my own opinions, and I do not speak for SAP nor any of the programs described, other than the one I directly support for marketing, SAP HANA One.

First we look at indicators whether a company’s management realizes it needs to do more – are they leveraging cause marketing, and are they reporting in sustainability and social responsibility. The second part of the framework examines direct contributions to the common wealth by operations and products.

Many companies are engaging in cause marketing because they know their customers want to feel like they are participating in something bigger than just being part of a market for a company trying to make a profit off of them. Sometimes this is just shallow “cause-washing” such as 10% of proceeds go to fund some charity, and sometimes it’s much more profound.

SAP has the challenge of many business-to-business companies. How do you explain the impact to the average person in the world of a company that sells enterprise business management software to over 250,000 other companies and institutions around the world? SAP does this by telling stories about the impact its customers are making through the use of this software. Often these are familiar consumer brand names that the public will know.  This helps position SAP’s impact as being much bigger than merely selling software.

Two examples of SAP’s brand marketing around “Helping the world run better”. Click images to see original sources. © SAP

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1)

My guest blog originally posted to the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability Blog…

Common Wealth Contributions By Business

Much to the annoyance of some past bosses, I have a habit of asking in meetings, “Why are we doing this, and what are we hoping to achieve?”

The economic turbulence of the last dozen years has led to me wondering the same thing about how we humans conduct our economic exchange. Asking the question, “what should we want to achieve in our economies, and how do we measure it?” eventually led me to the short book Betterness: Economics for Humans,  by Umair Haque.

Hypocritical Innovators, Making Smartphones Smart, Salesforce Promises to be Green, and SAP HANA Crowns Hadoop

Some Good, Fast Reads From Last Week

Greetings Geek Marketing readers.

The last couple of weeks I have been pouring my heart into developing content for a few new initiatives I’m involved with. This has left me with little time to keep the Geek Marketing blog fresh. However, I’m very much looking forward to sharing some awesome things my various teams are developing.

In the meantime, there are a few blogs I read over the last week that I keep thinking about, so I thought I’d share them with you. No, they aren’t in any particular theme, just some cool stuff.

[SOURCE: © raider of gin, used according to Creative Commons License]

Coming out of my content cave to share some good reads…