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News Analysis: SAP Business Suite on HANA

Published on January 11, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Next Stop On The Road To HANA: SAP Business Suite

In a global announcement in Palo Alto, New York and Frankfurt, SAP’s top executives Dr. Vishal Sikka, Rob Enselin, Jim Haggeman Snabe, and legendary founder and chairman Dr. Hasso Plattner announced availability of SAP’s Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. SAP has rewritten the Business Suite to work on SAP’s HANA platform and believes that customers will benefit for four reasons:

Smarter. The embedding of intelligence at the transactional level opens up new business models and process transformation. SAP’s customer Derek Dyer, Director of Global SAP Services for Deere and Company, emphasized that SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA has “revolutionized” how products and services are introduced to the market, especially in the MRP world. They see some transformational innovation as a result to faster MRP runs.

Point of View (POV): Embedded intelligence has been a key failure in today’s existing transactional applications. Customers have sought access to not only real time reporting, but also prediction. The goal is to get to smarter decisions at all levels of the organization. Customers will benefit from embedded intelligence. However, this will require people and technology training of the system to identify the patterns and algorithms required to serve up insight on demand. This will require intelligence at every vertical and micro vertical business process. Moreover, right-time requirements for in-context computing will turn out to be the surprise benefit as relevancy becomes more important through time, location, role, relationship, sentiment, and intent. Relevancy and context provide the smartness that is missing in today’s systems.

Faster. SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA addresses the need for speed. The in-memory columnar database reduces the input/output (I/O) time and allows for fast access to information. The result – faster processing and faster scenario evaluation. Fast transaction management times lead to faster decision making.

(POV): The analytics and crunching capabilities is what’s driving organizations to seek faster speed. Speed is the difference between a five day drug recall and a five minute drug recall. Speed is the difference between a 30 day supply chain plan versus the ability to reroute 2 iPhones to your store in 30 seconds. The impact is huge for customers if SAP does succeed. SAP’s not the first to do this as Workday has already done this for HR and Finance. However, for the entire SAP suite and given SAP’s market share, this is a big deal as this reduces the need for separate business intelligence systems. The performance difference will create a huge competitive advantage for those who adopt versus those who do not.

Simpler. SAP Business Suite on HANA delivers consumer grade user experiences. The goal is to embed live insight into business processes to drive immediate action. Today, people expect consumer-grade user experiences and the power to translate their live insight into immediate action. Enzo Bertolini, CIO, Ferrero Group expects to improve the trade promotions and supply chain planning process through both better simulation and mobile access.

(POV): SAP Business Suite on HANA provides SAP an opportunity to rethink how information is created, consumed, and shared. The push to a design thinking focus within SAP has led to significant improvement of the user experience throughout their portfolio of products. SAP Business Suite on HANA will be an opportunity to show case this new user experience.

Open. SAP plans to support database technology and vendor choice for its customers. Many database partners have committed to work with SAP support in-memory optimizations and provide the necessary support to ensure that customers will succeed. SAP is providing rapid deployment solutions, trained implementation consultants, and a comprehensive set of services to help clients make the migration to SAP HANA.

(POV): SAP has the opportunity to drive down database costs and improve performance. While the pricing model will be based on the percentage of application value, SAP must find a way to drive down overall costs if it is serious about improving adoption. This licensing requirement must be addressed as it will emerge as the most significant barrier to adoption.

SAP Faces A Challenge of Adoption Not Because of Technology, But Because of Customer Vision

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Market Maker 1:1: Steve Miranda, Oracle Fusion Applications Update – The Inside Story

Published on December 31, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Inside Story On Oracle Fusion Apps At The End of 2012

Constellation sat down with Steve Miranda, Oracle’s Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications Product Development to discuss the state of Oracle Fusion Apps in a no-holds barred honest conversation about what’s working, what’s not, and what to look forward to in 2013.

R “Ray” Wang (RW): Steve Miranda is Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications Product Development. He is responsible for leading all aspects of product strategy, product development, and product delivery for Oracle’s applications and related cloud services. This includes Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle’s newest products for customer service and support, commerce, and talent management.

Mr. Miranda joined Oracle in 1992 and has held a variety of leadership positions within the development organization. In 2007 he was asked to lead the engineering of Oracle’s next-generation suite of software applications, Oracle Fusion Applications. Under Mr. Miranda’s leadership, Oracle has continually delivered on its promise to help its applications customers innovate and remain competitive while leveraging their existing IT investments and increasing the value of those investments with new Oracle products and services.

Prior to Oracle, Mr. Miranda worked at GE Aerospace. He holds degrees in mathematics and computational sciences from Stanford University.

CATCHING UP ON ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS TRACTION

(RW): As 2012 is coming to an end it is a good time to reflect on how Oracle Fusion Applications has been doing this year. It would seem that Oracle’s been quite quiet about Oracle Fusion Applications throughout the year. Is the product selling? What’s the state of the Oracle Fusion Applications product lines?

Steve Miranda(SM): Oracle Fusion Applications is doing very well. We’re actively selling the product. In fact, we already have over 400 customers on Oracle Fusion Applications. We’re doing better than Salesforce.com when they started. Keep in mind, we have a rich customer base looking for innovation.

RW: When you say “Oracle Fusion Applications is selling well”, is that the whole suite or components of Oracle Fusion Applications?

SM: We are actively selling the product. More than 400 customers are on Oracle Fusion Applications, that’s any part of Oracle Fusion Applications, not including RightNow, Taleo, Oracle Business Analytics, or Oracle Fusion Middleware. Two thirds of the customers have chosen to deploy in a SaaS model. Then the second largest deployment model but far below are on-premise and the rest are hosted in our managed services.

RW: Does “managed services” means they own their own license, right?

SM: That’s correct. What’s powerful about these deployments patterns is that customers are accessing innovation faster than before. We are at over 100 live customers and are averaging one go-live a day right now.

RW: I understand that Oracle deployed Oracle Fusion Applications internally? How was that experience in “drinking your own champagne”?

SM: Ray, that’s correct. We did drink our own champagne and we are now using Oracle Fusion CRM internally instead of Siebel.. We have a global single instance for the business. When we deployed, we started out with 2 instances to show case a co-existence approach and an end-to-end Oracle Fusion Applications approach. As of June 1, 2012, Oracle Fusion CRM was up around the world. All the territories, forecasting, quotas, sales force automation, and contacts are in Oracle Fusion CRM globally.

RW: Is it one instance now?

SM: Yes. We also went live w/ Oracle Fusion Financials Accounting Hub on the back end. We replaced Hyperion and Oracle E-Business Suite GL and also went live June 1, 2012. We’ve already done several month-end closes and we also have Oracle Fusion Talent Performance Management up live. Employees and managers are now doing goal setting and appraisals.

RW: To be honest with you Steve, we aren’t seeing Oracle much in head to head competitive new deals. We don’t see big press releases about new wins. Where are the customers? Who’s buying what and why?

SM: Well, first of all, many of our existing customers are coming to us about Oracle Fusion Applications. Second of all, and you may not believe this, we’re not focused on publicity, but rather we want to ensure customer success.. Each go-live is very important to us. In our first set of go-lives, we have 10,000 customers who want to talk to the first 10 go lives. We also don’t want to overwhelm our initial customers.

Let me give you some details and examples so you understand the breadth and depth of what the Fusion Apps base looks like and so there’s no confusion. Here’s a selected slice:

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Monday’s Musings: Why Next Gen Apps Must Improve Existing Activity Streams

Published on August 30, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Upcoming Data Deluge Threatens The Effectiveness Of Activity Streams

Activity streams, best popularized by consumer apps such as Facebook and Twitter, have emerged as the Web 2.0 visualization paradigm that addresses the massive flows of information users face (see Figure 1). As a key element of the dynamic user experiences discussed in the 10 elements of social enterprise apps, activity streams epitomize how apps can deliver contextual and relevant information. Unfortunately, what was seen as an elegant solution that brought people, data, applications, and information flow into a centralized real-time interface, now faces assault from the exponential growth in data and information sources. In fact, most people can barely keep up with the information overload, let alone face the four forces of data deluge that will likely paralyze both collaboration and decision making (see Figure 2):

Massive activity stream aggregation by enterprise apps. Every enterprise app seeking sexy social-ness plans one or more social networking feeds into their next release. The mixing and mashing of personal and work related feeds will leave users confused about context and lower existing signal to noise ratios. Yet, proliferation will continue as users seek to bring aggregated sources of information into one centralized feed.
Explosive growth in the Internet of Things (IOT). Beyond just device to device communications, the web of objects, appliances, and living creatures through wired and wireless sensors, chips, and tags will drive most of the growth in the internet in the next 5 to 10 years. With an estimated 100 billion net-enabled devices by 2020, these networks seek to discover activity patterns, predict outcomes, and monitor operational health. The massive amounts of sensing data driven into systems will not only overwhelm users, but also handicap the performance of today’s data warehouses, analytics platforms, and applications.
Flood of user generated content (UGC). User generated content continues to grow. Facebook has over 500 million users populating pages with rich social meta data. There are over 300 million blogs. Wikipedia has more than 15 million articles. Content sources will propagate at geometric rates, especially as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries up their adoption.
Proliferation of social meta data. Organizations seeking a marketing edge must digest, interpret, and asses large volumes of meta data from sources such as Facebook Open Graph. Successful identification of social graphs require matching gargantuan volumes of meta data (e.g. likes, check-ins, groups, etc) through introspection across a vast array of objects. Human centric and object centric events will inevitably coexist and engulf unified activity streams.

Figure 1. Activity Streams Improve Collaboration And Deliver Dynamic User Experiences

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Tuesday’s Tip: Understanding The Many Flavors of Cloud Computing and SaaS

Published on March 22, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Confusion Continues With Cloud Computing And SaaS Definitions

Coincidence or just brilliance must be in the air as three esteemed industry colleagues, Phil Wainewright, Michael Cote, and James Governor, have both decided to clarify definitions on SaaS and Cloud within a few days of each other. In fact, this couldn’t be more timely as SaaS and Cloud enter into mainstream discussion with next gen CIO’s evaluating their apps strategies. A few common misconceptions often include:

“That hosting thing is like SaaS”
“Cloud, SaaS, all the same, we don’t own anything”
“OnDemand is Cloud Computing”
“ASP, Hosting, SaaS seems all the same”
“It all costs the same so what does it matter to me?”
“Why should I care if its multi-tenant or not?
“What’s this private cloud versus public cloud?”

Cloud Computing Represents The New Delivery Model For Internet Based IT services

Traditional and Cloud based delivery models share 4 key parts (see Figure 1):

Consumption – how users consume the apps and business processes
Creation – what’s required to build apps and business processes
Orchestration – how parts are integrated or pulled from an app server
Infrastructure – where the core guts such as servers, storage, and networks reside

As the über category, Cloud Computing comprises of

Business Services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – The traditional apps layer in the cloud includes software as a service apps, business services, and business processes on the server side.
Development-as-a-Service (DaaS) – Development tools take shape in the cloud as shared community tools, web based dev tools, and mashup based services.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – Middleware manifests in the cloud with app platforms, database, integration, and process orchestration.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – The physical world goes virtual with servers, networks, storage, and systems management in the cloud.

Figure 1. Traditional Delivery Compared To Cloud Based Delivery

The Apps Layer In The Cloud Represents Many Flavors From Hosted To True SaaS

SaaS purists often challenge vendors on delivery models in the cloud at the apps layer (see Figure 2). Often classified as OnDemand, there are 3 common approaches:

Single Instance – (a.k.a. “On Demand”). Think traditional apps deployed one cusotmer per app or per server. Many vendors provide hosting capabilities. Customers don’t worry about the IT infrastructure and retain the flexibility to modify, customize, and in most cases choose when they want to change the code. All customers can use different versions of the software
Multi Instance – (a.k.a. “Server Virtualized”). Think “VMware” like. Apps deployed into a shared-web hosting environment. A single instance copy of the app is configured and deployed into a web directory for each customer. Vendor benefit from easier to manage multi-instance environments. Customers don’t worry about the IT infrastructure and retain the flexibility to modify, customize, and in most cases choose when they want to change the code. All customers can use different versions of the software.
Multi-tenant – (a.k.a. “True SaaS”). Apps in a multi-tenant deployments provide a single operating environment shared by multiple customers. Config files are created and deployed each time a customer request services. Customers don’t worry about the IT infrastructure and retain the flexibility to modify, configure but NOT customize the code. Customers usually receive upgrades at the same time. Everyone shares the same code.

Figure 2. Different Strokes Of OnDemand For Different Folks

The Bottom Line – Different Models Bring Varying Degrees Of Trade Offs In Cost Versus Flexibility

Keep in mind there are cases where one deployment option is more favorable than another. Just because you are multi-tenant SaaS doesn’t mean you are better. On the other hand, when vendors tout OnDemand as a SaaS offering, then the SaaS bigotry begins. Be on the look out as more vendor provide mix-mode offerings to support disconnected modes, SaaS and On-premise, Public and Private clouds, as well as other improvements in integration with stronger client side ESB’s. Expect many vendors to put their offerings into the Cloud as Cloud/SaaS moves beyond the mainstream for apps strategy. Let’s take a look at a two decision criteria:

Scenario 1: From least expensive to most expensive to run for a vendor:

True SaaS

Server Virtualized

Hosting

Why is this important? Let’s see, you choose a Hosted solution and the vendor’s costs to run the app goes up with each new customer as it has to manage the different environments. No matter how hard the vendor will try to “fit” everyone to standard configurations and deployments, that’s not always possible. Flexibility has a cost. In a “True Saas” solution, the cost to add an additional customer is minimal and each customer reduces the overall cost for everyone. Ultimately, a True SaaS deployment will have the lowest cost/user/month fee. What will you do 5 years into an Hosting scenario when you are locked in?

Scenario 2: From most customizable to least customizable for a customer:

Hosting

Server Virtualized

True SaaS

Why is this important? Your may have specific needs in an area where the SaaS vendor has not provided the deepest level of configurations. You can’t just go in and modify the code unless everyone else wants it or the vendor’s has it on the roadmap. The cost of comformity is the lack of flexibility. What will you do 5 years into a True SaaS scenario when you are locked in and the vendor won’t add the feature or functionality you need?

Your POV

What’s your view on SaaS vs Cloud? Does this help clarify the definitions? Are you looking at private, public, or hybrid cloud options? Add your comments to the discussion or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Please let us know if you need help with your SaaS/Cloud strategies. Here’s how we can help:

Crafting your next gen apps strategy
Short listing and vendor selection
Contract negotiations support
Market evaluation

Related resources and links

Take the new and improved survey on 3rd party maintenance

20100322 Monkchips – James Governor “Defining Cloud is Simple. Get Over It. The Burger”

20100319 ZD Net: Software as Services – Phil Wainewright “Is SaaS the Same as Cloud”

Monday’s Musings: Next Generation CIO’s Face 11 Skill Shifts In A Disruptive World

Published on January 18, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

The Era Of CIO Dictatorships Ends With 2009

Less than 5 years ago, the mighty CIO controlled his or her organization’s destiny by shepherding multi-million dollar projects and ruling with a fist. Business leaders had to pay homage to the IT team and they hated it. The economic crisis, advent of the cloud and SaaS, and the massive number of IT failures have rapidly changed the role of the CIO. Saddled with the burden of maintaining legacy projects and faced with a shortage in budget and resources, businesses now move around the IT team as they must meet a flurry of business requirements. CIO’s have lost a lot of control in guiding how technology is used in the enterprise because the world of consumer tech has out innovated enterprise class technologies.

CIO’s And Their Organizations Challenged By The Pace Of Change In The 2010′s

Similar to this past decade, organizations will face massive amounts of change in the next decade. While change is nothing new to CIO’s and their organizations, the velocity of change has increased – to a point where the rate of obsolescence outpaces the rate of change. Conversations with over 200 CIO’s this year reveal an anxiety in remaining nimble, cutting costs, and just keeping up with change. CIO’s must rapidly respond to disruptive forces in the market, workforce dynamics, business models, and pace of technology adoption (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Four areas of change responsible for major disruptions in today’s organizations

(Source: R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC)

The Bottom Line – The CIO Role Shifts To Match Next Gen Enterprise Requirements

What’s the role of the CIO in this next gen enterprise? Well, next gen CIO’s must help organizations navigate complexity while realizing the benefits of a solid business technology strategy. While the immediate focus may be on hot topics such as security and risk, third party maintenance, cloud and SaaS, and email replacement and unified communications, there are significant transformations across 11 broader skill sets (see Figure 2.) Next Gen CIO’s must begin the process of transforming themselves and organizations in 2010 to meet the demands of the decade, anticipating the disruptive business models, technologies, and processes to come.

Figure 2. Eleven Skill Shifts For The Next Gen CIO

(Source: R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC)

In This Series

10 Essential Elements of Social Enterprise Apps
Personality Traits of the Next Gen CIO
Lessons Learned From Next Gen CIO’s
Profiles of Next Gen CIO’s

Your POV

What skill shifts are you seeing in your work as a CIO? Do these shifts resonate? Do you have a different point of view? Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.