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.
[SOURCE: Andrew Hurley © 2011, used according to Creative Commons License]
“It feels right. But it’s emotional. Saying goodbye to anything you’ve done that long is hard.” –Angela Ruggiero
There is no better music for a reminiscent mood to than RUSH “Time Stand Still”
With a mix of sadness and excitement, I say goodbye to my colleagues at SAP this week after more than eight amazing years. Its no easy task to write a succinct goodbye blog with so much to reflect upon. So I will just focus on saying thanks to the incredible teams, customers, and partners I’ve had the honor to work with. While I name many people in this blog, there’s no way I can name everyone that deserves a thank you. So please contact me later and I’m more than happy to reminisce with you and thank you privately.
SAP is a company like no other. Between the amazing breadth of applications and technologies it’s developed and acquired over the years and the close strategic relationships it’s fostered with many of the world’s most successful brands, SAP well deserves the success it’s earned.
My time at SAP coincides with its transformation from traditional ERP vendor into a cloud services company. During that time I had a chance to hone my marketing skills by working with the world class marketing teams under CMOs Marty Homlish and Jonathan Becher.
I think of my time at SAP in four distinct epochs:
1. Helping SAP get saas-y by bringing SAP Business ByDesign to market
2. Guerrilla marketing for SAP Business Process Management
3. Going back to the cloud
4. Being assimilated by SAP HANA
[SOURCE: © 2014 Greg Chase]
I still have my original photo badge from when I first joined SAP eight years ago.
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.
Originally posted on SAPHANA.com on October 24, 2013…
Just in time for SAP TechEd, I’m pleased to announce the public beta of the trial cloud for SAP HANA. Our first released scenario is SAP HANA One and Big Data – Processing Wikipedia Data with Hive and Analyzing with SAP HANA and SAP Lumira.
The trial cloud for SAP HANA provides you fast, free access to pre-configured SAP HANA landscapes built for specific use cases. This lets you see how to work with SAP HANA through short tutorial activities.
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
My latest article for SAP Insider, co-written with my developer colleagues, has just been posted.
“SAP HANA One Illuminates new Possibilities” is a deeper dive into the subject of my blog “SAP HANA One – SAP HANA in a Light Bulb.”
For those of you already familiar with SAP HANA One, what’s new for you in the article is that we reveal a longer vision for the SAP HANA One bundle:
The Future of SAP HANA in the Cloud
SAP HANA One continues to evolve at a rapid pace, updating at least quarterly to include functionality from new versions of SAP HANA software and datasets. Planned future updates will include SAP HANA support package stack 6, as well as templates and adapters for scenarios that may include:
- MySQL application data connectors
- Elastic turbo-charging of specific SAP ERP business processes
- Public sector-specific applications, such as healthcare fraud detection and education
- Powerful bundled server-side business intelligence tools
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]
My latest article for download: How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation
Or see in the online version of SAP Insider.
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