Musings of a geek turned marketer...
Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP intends to prove to SAP customers that SAP is now a “cloud company.”
I must admit, it’s kind of strange not being part of the festivities in Orlando this week since I’m no longer with SAP.
I didn’t wake up early enough to catch all of Bill McDermott’s opening keynote, but reviewing announcements gives a pretty good idea where SAP is heading this year. This is interesting to hear given the recent departure of SAP HANA’s executive sponsor, former CTO Vishal Sikka.
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:
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.
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:
Here is a short demonstration of what the proposer is looking for with this idea:
[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.
While researching for a forthcoming blog I’m writing about applications of “Big Data” for social entrepreneurs, I ran across this amazing blog series by the Skoll World Forum called “How Can Big Data Have a Social Impact.”
The insights shared in this series are worth any business person’s time to read, as they show how typical problems with big data we face in industry are exacerbated when trying to solve the world’s hardest problems. Also fascinating is how the convergence of big data disciplines with cloud, mobile, and social technologies creates amazing solutions – but only when it improves the human condition.
“Big Data” has the power to improve the human condition or dehumanize and create inhumane conditions.
[SOURCE] © 2011 Thierry Gregorius, used according to Creative Commons License.
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… [Read more…]
Found some pictures I made over the last couple of years as social media gags about the IT industry.
Cross posted from my blog at SAP Community Network:
Yesterday Jeffrey Hammond, VP and Principal Analyst with Forrester, posted an excellent blog laying out a vision for modern custom enterprise application architecture. In his blog, “The Best Way to Develop Mobile Apps? Don’t Develop Mobile Apps!”, Mr. Hammond makes the point that custom application projects shouldn’t just be thinking about an app that fits a mobile device, but take a system engineering approach considering modern technologies and architectural trends such as cloud computing, web services, and big data in addition to mobile device platforms. What I especially like about his blog is his simple explanation of how these fit to create applications with the following characteristics:
Modern application architecture based on mobile platforms, cloud computing, big data, and web services – reality or Munchkin Land? [Read more…]
As a companion to my latest SAPinsider article, How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation, in this podcast I discuss how companies can leverage IT to drive business innovation, how a lack of governance between IT and business can hinder innovation, offer an example of one innovative company that I’ve heard about, and provide advice on how to use IT to bring more innovation to your company.
My championship First Lego Robotics Team from Graham Middle School, sponsored by SAP, trying to innovate a solution.
[SOURCE: (c) Greg Chase]
Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network…
So I’ve decided to take an approach that might sound backwards: discussing use cases and opportunities for a certain deployment option of SAP HANA without first looking at business requirements. While I’d never start a business case this way, I think it’s instructive to decompose the technical characteristics of cloud applications, see how they mesh with the characteristics of SAP HANA applications, and relate these to potential requirements of use cases.
Typical Characteristics of Cloud Applications
Those more familiar with traditional SAP HANA deployments may be less familiar with the world of native cloud applications.The best definition of cloud computing that I’ve seen was created by the National Institute of Standards. Part of this definition of cloud computing is 5 essential characteristics:
While the service model in which you subscribe to a cloud application may not provide the subscriber of a service all these characteristics, they are inherent in the supporting infrastructure.
[SOURCE: From ASUG 2012 Annual Conference © SAP and Asuret, used with permission]
The Geek Marketing Blog 