HANA Cloud, Mobile, and Sports Analytics – Sapphire Followup

So I am back from 4 weeks on the road and I wanted to do a follow up from SapphireNOW. Based on the economy and the general gossip in the industry around travel restrictions that many companies have in place, I was concerned both EMC World and Sapphire would be “lite” to say the least. However, I found that not to be true, both shows were busy, with little options to find a seat. Even the beanbag chairs were taken. I mean who sits in a beanbag chair in a suit…?

 I have now been to around 6 Sapphire and SAP TechED events each and I can pretty much call what the buzz is going to be about. I said before the show. “Cloud, Cloud, HANA, HANA, HANA”, I also said you would see emerging innovations from smaller companies taking the new platforms and making purpose-built solution bundles. I was completely right.  With that said, I did find a few insights during the show of which many I will work into this Blog.  So how about some highlights you say? OK!

First, let’s talk up the keynotes. Unlike Oracle, this isn’t the Larry show, the stage is a bit egalitarian and its somewhat an art form in the way SAP integrates global social issues into their software roadmap. This year, Bill McDermott, has expanded on his traditional “sexy-customer” parade of UnderArmour and McClaren, by adding a few organizations from major league sports industry. The MC this year was James Brown from CBS Sports…good call. (An upgrade from the Morning Joe host last year) James and Bill introduced their all-star line up: Kevin Plank x-U of M special teams star and CEO of Under Armour, the deputy commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver; and San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York all up on stage in a sports show theme format. They drove into how analytics are changing the game of sports across training, marketing and fan consumption. It was mentioned that China alone has over 450 million fans of the NBA. Wow, can you imagine how that will effect the price of a season ticket over time?  This is a great example of how massive an opportunity exists to find consumers with technology and without technology, you can never supplyenough product to them. Imagine a stadium that could hold the global demand…  By the way, they carried this theme on to the show floor. Is was like walking into a Dicks Sporting Goods in some areas. They even had Gary Payton from the Sonics doing demos and talking to customers (Last year I didn’t see Reggie Jackson do any iPad demos…)

Ok, I got to admit, the theme was so good,that when they were in the keynote, I kept waiting to talk about how the Baltimore Ravens let there Super Bowl winning team completely disband (Protect this House!). It made me want to go watch a little sportsbar TV.  I also wonder if Bill has put too much pressure on HANA? Can HANA’s analytics prowess alone fix the 49er’s? Probably not.  Bill, EMC is based in Boston and we have many sports partners. The Patriots and the Red Sox may be a better test bed for HANA.  Ok my diplomacy seems to vacate when I talk sports, so let’s move on.

Jim Snabe took stage day 2 and in his normal flair, started with a big image of a indian tiger. He talked about how this female was an evolved specimen, close to perfection. He then moved into a discussion of evolution and anthropology. He took us from big bang, to dinosaurs to “in memory” and “persistence storage” requirements for HANA (only Snabe…)  I loved it, he is a great speaker.  Last year Jim said “The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones, and the disk age won’t end because we run out of disks”. Again, I loved how clever that comment was, BUT last year HANA was all in-memory in the diagrams. Customers by the droves walked up to us and asked “is disk dead”? I injected my reality that has unfolded. That reality is like electricity, there is a natural evolution of Information Technology that started in late 1800′s, and we are on that journey that will carry us forward for at least a couple more decades further as we  ”utilitize” IT. I also believe large customers will deeply leverage HANA, but storage and data center ready solutions will continue to be critical functionality. A catchy quote and a sales quota isn’t going to change these trends. This year, Snabe’s diagram put storage back in a prime position. This to me means SAP’s HANA is maturing and they are listening to their customers, which is a good thing. For example, most customers want to see HANA in their landscape standards, not a rip and replace appliance model. This you could see in the tenets of the keynote narrative.

Hasso Plattner, took the stage on Day 3. Hasso literally took the audience through a 501 level data structures class discussing memory allocations, columnar databases, merge tables, indexes, etc.  At first I was like this is odd to have the chairman of a large company taking me through a DBA level discussion, but then I was actually quite impressed with his intimacy with the details and the fact that most people who focus on this knowledge never become executives in top-level companies. He is a unique man. I thought it was an informative refresher. At the same time Hasso made a few comments that worked like a cross-cut saw against the grain of the industry trends.  For example he brought up Virtualization and said (paraphrased) that virtualization is good for splitting up infrastructure between multiple small companies, and he said we never virtualize large companies. He was using this in a context of HANA, but WOW this is so not the direction of the customer base. First virtualization has been a huge driver for transformation across SAP customers building for the  last 5 years. EMC, Cisco, VMW, and Intel built the Joint Venture VCE and their Vblock product a little over 3 years ago, creating the converged infrastructure market. “I often tell people casually virtualized converged infrastructure is half the price of traditional and twice as fast”. Of course I am lying, its actually much better than that, but no one would believe me without facts. In the last 4 weeks, I have met with say 150-175 SAP customers? (Many of them the biggest companies in the world) I will tell you 90% or more of them have virtualized a significant portion of their landscape or will do so in the next 12 months. Here’s an example of EMC “Riding our own Wave“.  X86 has won, virtualization is a done deal, and HANA will need to support it. VMWare and SAP had a big announcement last week at Sapphire on Virtual HANA, they have dislodged it from the “single node” limitation that neutered its value and I now see virtual HANA demand increasing over the next 12 months.

What else…Mobile users, I saw some maturation in the mobile community. There were let’s say 15 or so booths dedicated to mobile solutions companies. SAP additionally has evolved some of their interfaces. Including cool stuff around analytics toolsets from Hasso Platner  Institute in Pottsdam. I don’t believe I have ever seen so many tablet displays on a show floor , short of a Microsoft or Apple conference.

Who was busy?  All booths looked busy, well… Oracle’s booth had to hire an exterminator to keep the cricket noise down, but hey that’s to be expected at an SAP conference. At OpenWorld, I imagine the SAP booth is pretty empty. Actually I would say the big names in platform were slightly less attended than the booths of consulting companies (Picture below is from Optimal’s Party at ICE BAR (they must be broke…because it was packed). I don’t have pictures but the same is true for events I attended with Deloitte, Secure24/Sparta, Wipro, and Accenture. It seems everyone is super busy in 2013.

Additionally the small start ups seemed busy for purpose-built solutions.  This is a trend for Sapphire, because of the high number of Line of Business attendees who focus on company processes and I think its also fair to say SAP has transitioned the conversation from cost-cutting optimization to innovation over the last two shows which drives focus to the business process change agents.

There were many announcements about the Cloud. Examples include CSC announcing SAP support in Cloud IU, SAP announced HANA Enterprise Cloud, and VMW announced VMWare Cloud support for SAP HANA. I am pretty familiar with some of the details. As far as prep work, I am huge fan of the CSC Cloud IU offering, their investment in assets, processes and creating a top-notch cloud offering is second to none. There pipeline has been swelling drastically following Cloud IU’s introduction and I’m sure they had a busy Sapphire. We co-sponsored a customer reception and I got to hear first hand from their execs in charge, David Parsons and Lou DeCarlo, on the staging and solution streams they have injected into the process. Here’s a video at the show from Dave on the topic. Worth a deep review if you are serious about the cloud.  The SAP offering is a Bring Your Own license model, which currently only offers 99.5.. uptime for the customers. I think it is a smart move for SAP  to get the customers and partners engaged in HANA as a service. I also talked to some of the partners who are back-ending the offering and they seem to have some talent, but I am not sure if this is primary direction for SAP. Offering HR on a cloud is easy money, hosting HANA for ECC or say AFS in the cloud is another matter, (which they theoretically will consider on a customer by customer basis as of GA last week). Either way it moves the ball forward for HANA. Finally, VMWare’s cloud offering is a serious contender in its support and features. VMWCloud (my nickname for it) offers a virtualized subscription service which will have a sales channel through multiple paths including SAP. Both CSC and VMW’s offerings are not SAP specific, so customers can look at a broader landscape as they plan for the cloud. With that said I see most customers looking to put module by module in the cloud, not move entire landscapes, so we’ll see how these, and other offerings, will be consumed. I do believe there is a healthy market for HANA by the drip to address specific needs, you can see the options formulating now.

I will finish with one insight, I see the squeeze through the portal of today’s battle for dominance hinged on these factors:  Cloud, Big Data, Mobile and In-memory computing. You could say that 6 of the top 10 HiTech players will be in head to head war to win this cocktail of the new economy. I say just like Client/Server I believe this will be an expanding function, a reverse funnel. From Micro-computer to Client/Server we expanded the eco-system, demand and opportunity, we didn’t shrink it. Though we’ll continue to see consolidation of the HiTech industry, we’ll also see more options for cloud, big data, mobile and in-memory computing options, we’ll see a new level of interope

rability, and a growing productivity as the result. The question is how much of this will be on-premise, and how much will be addressed behind closed data center doors of cloud providers? Honestly, I don’t know the mix yet.

I will predict that both SAP and EMC are great harbingers of change who have a great deal of synergies which will positively impact a very important joint customer base.

On my way to Sapphire

I am sitting in the Airport heading off to a week of Sapphire. That means 17-20 hour days, endless meetings, new friends and catchups with many old friends.

What will we hear at Sapphire?

- I predict we’ll see more formalizaton of options for HANA. Customers will be able to buy hana from a wider array of partners with more options than the inital appliances that exist on the PAM today.

- I predict a heavy dose of cloud and virtualization for non-HANA components of the SAP landscape. currently our demand in this area is through the roof.

- I suspect this is the year that smaller vendors start showing up with hana specific applications and toolsets they have built. This will be interesting to see the innovation within a growing ecosystem

- I know I will have several meetings that tighten the grip on our partner Go To Markets. Similar to SAP’s partner grow plans, EMC has massively expanded its partner model over the last 3-4 years. Last week this matured into a merger of our Velocity Partner and Channel programs into a consolidated upgrade: EMC Business Partner program. This allows our customers more flexible options to get to the cloud in any form they wish and/or stage hosting in almost any location(s) on the planet for SAP Landscapes.

- Interesting thing is SAP is having a special event on Human Face of Big Data project and Book written by Rick Smolan. SAP repected the work Rick did in capturing how Big Data is changing the world. The interesting part is EMC is the primary sponsor of HFBD and its great to have a partner like SAP recognnize the work in this way (check out my previous blog on this for more data). I hear there’s a more creative work coming on this topic too.

-Ok plane is leaving, i’ll be writing more later!

If you are at the show find me at twitter: asitison

Brian Gallagher talks in The Real World about cloud storage

Typed in the field —- Excuse the typos

During Brian Gallagher’s ESD keynote, he took the audience through the changes to the VMAX product line.

Here’s some highlights frm his presentation

- 17 VMAX breakout sessions At EMC World

-VMAX Cloud Edition. During the discussion ran a video on the transformation of Navitare, Accenture spin off for airline industry.

-Vmax cloud , provision faster, 34% lower tco, and provide ITaaS with more consistency than AWS.

-VMAX Clud provides automation, strong use metrics as is sized simply through capacity and or performance needs

- Vmax runs 3x faster other compeition. vmax can optimise data placement in an exclusive way,
across data centers (up to 4).

-2.5 x faster than HP 3par and with replication it doubles its time to respond. Aka “Wicked Bad”

- Brian also talked about Vplex. Which had an interesting data factoid.

-It runs in 52% of the top 200 companies

- VRPA. EMC has virtualized recover point appliance allowing for more flexibilty and better cost for a portion of their clients. Brian said this is a sign of things to come

-CMA had a video. Talked about using Oracle RAC on VMAX as the best of breed platofrm for their busieness. Performance, scale, and reliabilty was quoted as the features that were most important. CMA can add many terabytes of data in a sngle day

- Future of Cloud storage, FAST today puts right data in right place at right time since its release in 2009 it has been impactful on optimzing capx optx for EMC customers. This week we”‘re extending to XtremeXF as an expansion of the storage it supports. In future.. It will be fully automated storage technology. Tubr fast policies n their side and optimize data horizontally across the storage arrays. Imagine storage tiering and data migration in one place, and extend to the backup device and hey the cloud…

- Brian also introduced (tongue & cheek) the VFrig which was a VMAX with a refrigerator in it. They are raffling off to one lucky receiptient.

- Today people are moving storage to compute, how about comiute to storage?? Low latecny systems, DB ops, analytics, should be running in the storage device. Using VMWare, Brian showed a demo of R&D work showing vmax with vplex running inside,

- Announces the release id Project Bourne and Software Defined Storage

-interesting, showed all the product placement of VMAX in the movies, fun little video. Called out and remediated problematic Dell servers

Ok that’s it have to run to the next meeting

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ViPR “Magic Venom” for Virtualized Storage

At EMC World, one expects to hear a series of announcements that impact the way IT is stored, mined, migrated, managed and protected. This year will be no different, there are several “new economy” architectures and models that we’ll all get to know a little better this week. One such announcement is “ViPR” Software Designed Storage.

Ok let’s stop for a second and appreciate after years of V-names from EMC, they have finally dialed in a name as Chill as ViPR…what what! I’m loving that augmentation alone.

So many of us have been waiting for EMC to properly enter into the SDS market and push an OpenStack integration through their mfg plant doors. I believe ViPR will be adequately received by the market and will have a health adoption curve. Some will say it’s a little late to market, but I believe when the critics get an understanding of the functionality included in ViPR’s first release, they will be impressed in what will be the market’s most aggressive entrant to date. Additionally, you have to think about just how much VMware activity is going on in the EMC install base, there is a huge demand for this type of management/facilitation product.

IDC in their recent “Digital Universe Study”, Dec 2012 talked about the paradox that data management product costs continue to notable drop, but the total investment continues to go precipitously up. They go on to state that from 2012 to 2020 servers will grow by 10x, data will grow by 14x, but IT professionals will grow by less than 1.5x. Optimizing Virtualization, Cloud, ITaaS are mandates to frankly…survive.

I want you to go by the booth or get on the web to get the complete juice on ViPR, but let me give you a few key data points. First ViPR leverages the intelligence of the underlying arrays, it doesn’t create a “not invented here” dynamic, but builds upon your current investments. The control path and data path are decoupled so you have more flexibility to architect and not impact performance. One nice feature is the data services strength with built-in ability to write once and then run the data everywhere. Its also a cloud app, has support for heterogeneous storage devices, and built in API to allow growth and tailoring.

ViPR Controller sits on storage arrays and connects to ViPR Data Services across File Block, Object and products like Hadoop(HDFS) Atmos, VMAX ,VNX, Netapp “file” day one; plus devices and commodity hardware slated for future releases. The Controller provides capabilities for automation, self-servce, metering and provisioning. Also a number of 3rd party providers have stepped forward to integrate.

In summary, ViPR abstracts the management of the storage from the hardware. It dramatically reduces management costs in an increasingly complex environment, provides faster time to value, extends and protects existing investments and ultimately delivers more choice on how and where to store data. This is a monster step in the right direction. I think one bite from ViPR and you’ll be a fan.

SHOW MADNESS! SAP Week, EMC World, Sapphire

NOTE TO WORLD: I am hiring, rockstars only. Operative in the App/Big Data space?  Ping me…

Well it is that time again. That time where the best part of 6 weeks is eaten up by planning and attending two major shows: EMC World and Sapphire.  That’s right, next week I am all week in Las Vegas, red eye back to mow the grass and then off to Orlando to sweat out the humidity.

SAP WEEK
Before I go there I have to tell you what made it really crazy! Last week we decided to hold SAP Week in Boston & Cork Ireland. Our SAP Weeks are held in our global executive briefing centers (EBC) at EMC. My team and the EBC have co-sponsored them for years, but SAP has become such a popular topic our events have had to limit attendance to meet fir

e codes.  In Boston alone we had more than 200 customers come through. We broke attendance records and it was a great success. Thanks to our partners SAP, VMW, Cisco and VCE for making it happen. I also want to thank the System Integrators and Services Providers like Secure24, Deloitte, Wipro, E&Y & FIT who spoke or otherwise participated.  Here are some of the videos from the event provide by Dave Vellante, SiliconAngle TV, & “The Cube” (you guys rock).  Also Thanks to the EMC, VCE, and SAP execs that supported the event: Frank Hauck, John Hanlon, Terry Breen, Chad Sakac, Scott Millard, and Kevin Chew.

Big topics:  Cloud & HANA.  First Virtualization, everyone is virtualizing SAP. We talked about private clouds, hybrid clouds, public clouds, cloud management, LVM, migrations from Unix to X86, migrations from Physical to Virtual, the whole gamut of options to consider. Including one customer who’s looking to put their entire SAP deployment in an off premise private cloud. BTW, EMC has a whole list of Velocity Partners who provide hosting, cloud and “_aaS” offerings for SAP. The real difference in the conversations today from say 3 years ago is that there are tons of customers who have virtualized in various ways, so the discussion is not about if, but how…simple.

The second most popular topic was HANA, and this wasn’t a use case discussion per say, the driving question was, I have developed a use for HANA in my business and need to go to production with it, how do I do that?  Many of these customers had done their sandboxes with other competing products, even with website  who sell tennis shoes, but many weren’t comfortable continuing with those decisions into production and wanted to hear EMC’s recommendations on Data Center Ready HANA, and we told them.

EMC WORLD

OK SAP Week alone was enough to fill up my Q2 with extra-curricular activity, no so fast.  I now head off to EMC World next week. OMG it is packed. I have seen some of the pre-release info and man its going to be a big show. Also a lot has changed since last year. Goulden has come in to run the show, Gelsinger has left to run VMW, Maritz returned for a short stint before going off to run the company called Pivotal.   We also have a new CIO since our last event. I am sure these changes will impact EMC World and the discussions held within.  Additionally we have apps galore; there is wall-to-wall content on Big Data, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.   I will be submitting comments via Twitter and this blog as we go through EMC World to share with you the announcements and 1 on 1 conversations I have.  I swear every year I will be diligent, let’s see if I keep my promise.

SAPPHIRE

Ok most sane people would stop, get some rest and plan their beach trip, but not me and my weary team, we pack up for Orlando and do it all again at one of my Favorite shows: SAPPHIRE.   If you haven’t been your missing something, the world’s GDP  flows through the hallways that week. As big as it is, it’s a small world. Like the person you consistently see in the Chicago airport as you both connect for a flight… I see all my friends across the SAP eco-system, I celebrate with some about our joint GTM success and with some we reconnect and ask the question if this is the year we will get serious about partnering together. It’s a dance of sorts… that makes the commercial world revolve.  EMC has some announcements coming, but better we have customers peppered throughout the event who are speaking of every stage about their successes and we, in some way, played a part in their success.  Again week 2, I will leverage social media to share some of the tidbits I learn

(Twitter: ASitison)

Boston: New History in a Historic City

One of the joys while working at EMC has been the ability to be a frequent traveler to one of the world’s most characteristic cities, the city of Boston. I find history colors a space, makes it interesting. I love that the “old” still stands by the “new” and you can touch brick, iron, and stone that our founding fathers possibly once placed a hand against. This is truly a special city which extends beyond its architecture into a cacophony of sounds full of dialects, horns and cracks of the bat. As we all know, sometimes history finds you; and yesterday a little more history joined the annuals of this old city.

We do not yet know the dementia that created this new tragedy, though we can “what if” our way oblivion. We do know that people have suffered, they need our thoughts for many have had their lives changed in a single moment. We do know what are the values of both Boston and the Boston Marathon. A real “running city” that has a strong culture of healthy living and in a special way, celebrates humanity in many forms.

We also know fear. Our northeast cities have had their unfair share of attacks as of late. This can create fear in all forms, and drive us all to steal from ourselves, our joys; like being part of a historic race on a sunny spring day. Net-Net, the perpetrators win when we choose to lock away our spontaneity, our happiness, our sense of peace. Though I am not saying, we can not prepare, this event was inundated with police, firemen, emergency workers, doctors, bomb sniffing dogs, blockades, etc. The solution can’t be a higher fence or a longer wait in a security line, terrorism of all kinds has to loose its effect of changing us. We need to be unified not in fear, but in the brilliance that is us. Ask any marathoner, most of the effort is mental. Its a minute by minute challenge, and achievement goes to those who harness the mental resolve to endure.

Though I am only a visitor to this great city, as one of your supporters, I urge you to build upon that which some would tear down. Continue to celebrate your unique experience. Continue to work to layer history in the form you want it created. And just like the Boston Marathon, you will continue to the retain global veneration through your accomplishments.

The comments of this blog are solely my own and not those of my employers or my associations.

SAP Week, “#PureMagic” in Silicon Valley

(…and a little bit about EMC’s April Events)

Unlike the rest of the snow-covered country, last week was mild in Silicon Valley. The cherry blossoms were blooming and the afternoon air’s mild nip seemed like a minor hindrance compared to the east coast winter I left. I will say it was the perfect setting for a getaway of sorts. A gathering of common minds around one big topic: SAP.

Last week around 150 people gathered at EMC’s Executive Briefing Center (EBC) for a full week of SAP Topics. EMC has long held solution-oriented workshops and executive briefings, but what we call “SAP Week” stands in a special category.  A handful of years back, primarily because of the convergence of SAP experts in and around the Silicon Valley corridor, we started taking over the normally refined and sophisticated EBC facility with a bunch of surly types who came in all flavors of SAP. The EBC was happy to do it, matter of fact they were, in part, the instigators. I remember the first year’s hot topic was showing the lab and demos of SAP running virtualized on VMware. Now there are thousands of customers who have taken that plunge. I am comfortable in saying that, that original SAP week was a key player in the early days of virtualizing SAP. Each year, new milestones have come along and the customers come from new locations around the globe. This year we had an international audience from Latin America, EMEA and APJ, along with the continental US and Canada.

The event has grown in popularity and what were a few EMC and VMware resources running around between customer whiteboard chats has grown into something quite more significant. Here are some stats: over 30 unique customers hosted, with over 10 partners ranging from product vendors to system integrators and service providers. SAP supported the event providing experts across categories and some reps came in with their customers. The place was filled with household names, customer and partner alike. All in all, the event ran for 4 days averaging about 30-40 people in the mix each day.

Of course you can go to SAPPHIRE and see the same list of companies, go by the booths and attend the 15 min conference meet-ups, but what is magical about this is that the pressure is off.  SAP Week, We tell the customer, “Here’s a room for the day, want to talk to EMC or SAP? Want to have Cisco join in?  How about Deloitte?”  The customer can blend their experience by picking and choosing experts in combinations. It reminds me of summer camp. By end of the week, you’re not the kid from Jersey and I’m not the kid from North Carolina, we’re all “Cabin No. 23”.

The stories, hors d’oeuvres, and a few shared glasses of wine at dinner…everyone becomes part of the shared experience that’s just a little bigger than the piece parts.  Here are some of the things we learned this time around:

1) We focused on the trends, problems and solutions, not products. You can get feature/function from a website but times like these it’s about reality. What have you experienced?  Where was your biggest problem during the rollout? Hey I’ve always wondered about…. Etc. It’s about the stuff you can’t read about.

2) Our speaker recommendations are: “dialog, don’t present”. Half of the experts who ran sessions didn’t use presentations. Some white boarded, some just talked about their business and their experiences. Ever see a person with 10-20 yrs experience present a standard deck? Boring! Instead tell me about your business, what you care about, what you are hearing about in the SAP info-sphere. This makes it uniquely interesting.

3) Cloud story is not changing but the demographics are.  x86 is continuing to knock down the “big iron” blockades to change. I used to consider it a win if a customer converted to x86/VMware based Vblock solution over several months of due diligence. Last week I saw 3 different customers mentally flip to a converged strategy in the course of a couple of meetings.  Why, the freaking results are outstanding! It’s hard to deny the real-life “wins” customers have had with the platform.

Additionally almost every conversation had a level of off-prem, on-prem, public cloud, or private cloud component. In reality, every customer is looking at having a little bit of every strategy. Whether it is hosting a Test/Dev environment on Secure24 (a SAP cloud provider who attended) or considering Ariba for procurement, it was like blood in the veins, it’s inherent in every conversation.

That leads to one of the newest and most active discussions, which was systems management tools for the cloud. I heard every flavor, vCloud Suite, UIM, LVM, Citirix. Not to cop out on trending, but I seemed to hear a different plan with every customer. There’s a tendency to buy cloud products that complement existing systems management expenditures. On a related topic, many customers who now change out from UNIX to x86 now have to reconsider HA clustering, some DR changes, these items are all the reality of “going to the cloud”. It’s messy when you make clouds…

4) HANA is happening. It’s not like it was the only topic at the event. It wasn’t, I wouldn’t even say it was the hottest topic at the event, but HANA is alive in the seeds of planning within our customer base. First let me say, the customers in attendance spanned from big industrials, to retail, to mid market players. So many of them aren’t traditionally early adopters. They don’t “go” the first 2 years on the average innovation wave. It’s usually what I would call a pragmatic group, squarely in the mass-adoption segment of the bell-curve. With that said, I can easily say HANA was in almost all customer’s planning efforts, some with sandboxes, some who were rolling out initial use cases, some who want to buy it as a service through a multi-tenancy offering. Many said why couldn’t I run this on my existing standards?   Unlike what we see in the initial phase of HANA go-to-market, I predict adoption will be like wildflowers in the field and not like a formal Italian garden. It will propagate and multiply in all sorts of variations and placements. Customers want to have a say in their architecture decisions, their leverage of cloud, and when to leverage appliances. The old and new generation of the SAP landscape will not be as black and white as the chalkboard it is drawn on. That…is ok! EMC has a long-standing belief that innovation happens in the field. Customers are an equal player in this IT experience. Bottom-line, I think these types of conversations tell me HANA adoption is advancing.  When you start to enable the pragmatic, you go beyond the hype phase and head into a more productive period.

5) One of my favorite conversations is with other partners about how we can take our value and their value, invest together and create improved offerings for our customers. I was fortunate enough to host several of our partners for business discussions aroun 2013 planning. I walked away with several opportunities, that if I could only hire another 100 people, we’d be able to complete them all by Q3.  Last year my team focused on about 11 partners developing joint assets and developing the building blocks that make our customer’s experience that much more valuable.  During our user group session over lunch, we had a partner speak about a customer for whom they were able to reduce their project deployment timeline significantly, thus reducing their time to value. The customer’s CIO had quoted that the project was flawless, almost boring even though it had challenging goals. This was in part attributed to the pre-work done to help the partner have the appropriate assets and training on that technology so they could out perform expectation. I have a new saying “Speed is a perception, founded on preparation”. I ask my team to develop solutions to reduce complexity, risk, and time to value, and improve value of the overall solution. I used to “pitch” for a living, but I find it more impactful to engage in the problem-solving process. If I’m helpful, build trust over time and offer great products, you’ll find they sell themselves. We’re trying to spend more of our time in these productive efforts.

So you missed the cherry blossoms and the Santana Row Sushi? That’s ok, there are more events coming.

In early April we will be running a series of SAP events across APJ where we’ll offer similar amenities.

And… the week of April 23 we are hosting a global event;  both our Boston, Ma and our Cork Ireland EBCs will be hosting a simultaneous  “Across the Pond” SAP Week.

So you like Sushi, Lobster or Guinness?  Great, pick your spot!  For more information hit my Twitter account @ASitison

Vishal Sikka Makes it Official – The Wall between Operations and Analytics is Obliterated

SAP Announced today the ability to run SAP Business Suite on top of their HANA in-memory platform. Like the fall of the Berlin wall, there is little now that stands between the real-time analytics functions and what will be lighting fast operational business processes running on the same state of the art platform. I have been talking in my blogs for a while… that analytic processes aren’t complete unless they kick off operational “actions” that follow through on newly generated insights. With this announcement, SAP takes the industry a step closer to that future, today.

Unlike Oracle, who has built an iron forest of Oracle specific appliances, SAP has enabled the eco-system to provide a “HANA economy”. The consumer has options for supporting products that resemble the assets that run in their current data centers (which is smart…) and there is a legion of well trained Global Change Agents (Read about some of them here) to help customers get from “idea” to “execution”. Time to Value is a hot commodity in this new world order.

At EMC we’re additionally seeing customers working to transform their legacy world. This combines not only hot products like HANA, but additionally addresses how to leverage cloud, _aaS initiatives, and to increase their Opx to Capx ratios. With SAP FKOM only a couple weeks away, its going to be a Fast start to 2013 as we all try scramble from talking about it through quotes, contracts, and time spent to get to results.

This also takes HANA out of the sandbox and into Data center. Though there have been notable production usage of HANA, today’s announcement moves from what was primarily greenfield, to a massive legacy install base. I’m sure we’ll hear more from SAP at FKOM on the details of this announcement and I am sure their initial limitations to ramp through, but the pit-bull has pushed his nose through the paper bag, HANA moves into the Mission Critical category without doubt.   This means an evolution of current limited specs to have HANA eventually look more like the rest of our customers’ landscapes. You can’t shove a multi-national fortune 100 in a several system nodes and call it a day. IT is a mature industry with lots of technology and process that will need to be integrated.

I look forward to the journey. See you at FKOM!

Here’s a few more write ups (some with slides, photos and opinions…)

ZDNET     CMSWire  INFOWorld  TECH-CRUNCH

Find me on Twitter: ASitison  or on SAP Community Network

SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid: and the Hat-trick of Business Transformation

Last week I spent an inspiring and almost sleepless week in Madrid for Sapphire NOW. The labor strike did not mute our collective efforts to align and plot our joint work within the SAP EMEA Marketplace. As expected, everyone was there. There were over 10,000 in attendance and many more connecting in via the web. From the “world of SAP” perspective, the concrete is still drying on the major changes that have been announced during the last few SAP events, so as expected, this was not a year of shocking new announcements, but more the foundational establishment of these ideas as they begin to be realized. I went to the show to understand if Americas and EMEA have different optics on SAP’s direction and if either showed a glimmer of a leadership position on advancing the “next gen” of SAP. (more on this later…)

 To accomplish this task, I had to talk with many customers, friends and SAP smart-guys alike. It started with a customer dinner sponsored by EMC, VMW, Cisco & Intel at the Casino de Madrid. Monday night 40 or more of us gathered in this grand hall for an friendly start of the week. An opening of sorts on the ideas we would continue to discuss throughout the coming days. What a brilliant location to do this. (Happy Birthday @Sylvie75015 & Parmeet!) 

To move forward in this one way discussion, let me first state my position on what is changing business today. I have heard no better summarization nor have I found any outliers to my assessment of where the business dollar is spent today to transform. I like my version, which I’ll share with you now. So… consider yourself lucky to get this brilliance straight from the Donkey’s mouth.   Today there are 3 things that are driving spend. A hat-trick of trends that are not only singularly important, but together they make an inertial jolt that cracks the patina off everything status quo.

Primary Business Dollar Spend Today:

-          Application Modernization (I include cloud/virtualization here)

-          Business Analytics

-          Global Mobile User

These three trends are driving the majority of focus and together they literally change the industrialized world from back office to storefront.  If you’re hardware and processes can float in a cloud, while your self-service global user uses “choose your own” mobile devices to interact with your business which is smarter about core competencies because of the better use of the data you own, you can see how optimization in cost, revenue, share of wallet, distribution, commerce, inventory, etc… all change.  Who’s the looser in this new world order?  Those who use 1990’s binoculars to view 2020 business models and those who frankly aren’t creative or open enough to engage their customer and eco-system in a transformative process.  Ok we are susceptible to DotCom-itis here. However, we’re not talking about ill-thought shallow commerce tools (I hope…). If you don’t see the opportunity for business model change, you may find yourself working for the person who did.

So to me, the strategy is to build the disciplines and open up the frontal lobe a bit.  Just as we have had massive specialization over the last few decades. I believe we will continue to see companies become more inter-dependant; “nodes” on an inter-linked mesh of business process and market options. We can’t make products and then sell them. We will need to be more collaborative across the process from idea to inventory to satisfaction and support. We reduce blockages between the expert and the consumer, our job is to hook our competence to the plumbing of “demand”. This requires much higher levels of trust, confidence and interactions between the platform creators, market innovators and the change agents that make it happen.

I bring all this up because I believe the SAP eco-system is the best staged in the industry to begin this journey.  First SAP has the three jeweled crown to make the most of the Hat-trick.  This includes their invigorated platform with key cloud offerings through the eco-system (aka CSC, AWS, SunGard, etc.). They have HANA/ASE to transform analytics, plus the database layer of the stack, and they have the Afaria mobility platform to engage the mobile user. Not that they haven’t done a good job creating the product suite, but the mastery is in how they changed the dialog. The last few Sapphires have focused on everything from jacked-up iPads running the front-end of SAP, to social stories about small business incubators who leverage SAP, analytics and mobile to reach places that don’t always have consistent power, much less german engineered business systems.  The keynotes predict the change and demonstrate the initial flicker of opportunity that awaits.                                                                                   Jim Snabe in his keynote, addressed the changing model of distribution. Smartly he used the analogy of  the music industry which transformed from LP albums to iTunes over a 20 year span. He took the audience through how these changes were not always comfortable and in some cases left some folks standing by the roadside, while giving birth to new innovators like Apple. Through this example he showed “tech” companies can be “business” companies as well.  From this clear example, he took the collection of us through other industries like fashion and financial services and showed how these same patterns are appearing across industries. Reduced formalized/packaged distribution, increased consumer involvement in the design and fulfillment process. He implied how output becomes less of a  structured assembly-line product and more of an interactive “result” (consider Gone with the Wind vs Call of Duty; or Catcher in the Rye hardcover v/s Rye Whiskey Wikipedia entry…).

I also heard a common message from what I call the change agents, the Deloittes, Accentures, or Bluefins of the world. Whether large or small most are working on speeding business process change while looking at a massive customer base who’s running SAP like they did in the 1990’s. There is a treasure box of services waiting for those who can help companies apply cloud, analytics and mobile in new ways to speed their time to value, reduce costs/risks, while they enjoy performance improvements in the new world order.  Good news, the platform technologies help like they never did before.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to hear Sanjay Mirchandani speak on the transformation of IT at EMC (including a global deployment of SAP), you are missing one of the best examples of the future in the market today. Sanjay can talk for hours about ITaaS, choice driven mobility integration, and what you realize in this message, you can’t even begin until the landscape is 100% virtualized.  His choice tool for this were “Vblocks“. The improvements he has driven in responsiveness, cost reductions and ultimately…agility are profound.  If you look at the technologies he used in the plan (VCE, VMW, EMC, Cisco, SAP, Spring Source, etc.) the needed combination of innovations have only been together for approximately a year.  We are on the cusp of great change.  As for change agents, Sanjay’s team used experts from the eco-system like Accenture to help get it right and apply tribal knowledge. These changes I speak of requires the piece parts to come together to make change happen.

I stated that there were not many ground breaking announcements, but on Thursday VMware and SAP announced HANA on Vsphere. Today this only supports non-production deployments, but having the ability to virtualize HANA provides a new level of flexibility and improves provisioning during the sandbox period, helping accelerate HANA adoption. EMC and Cisco were happy to see this alignment push through. Again one more example of convergence between the big drivers of business transformation.

I’ll end by mentioning the SAP Mentors. If you haven’t had the pleasure of spending time with the Mentors, it’s your loss. This is a “band of brothers” who have been honored by inclusion in the Mentor program. You can’t buy your way in, you have to earn it. Membership spans outside of SAP and this group is on the front lines of change. I had the chance to catch up with several mentors at the show and I can tell you that what many of us would call keynote “hipe” is substantiated in the “hands” of these mentors. Customer innovation isn’t an empty demo, these guys are seeing it happen in the field. Some of them relatively young (compared to me) will be the lead guard of what’s to come. They are helping set the new agenda.

Again it was a great trip. I mentioned at the front of this blog that part of my journey was to highlight the similarities and differences between Americas and EMEA. I am shocked to say, I saw little difference. The dialog is global, so as you slip between one geographic theater to another… the wall-paper is quite familiar. Its more about meeting the people involved than drastic differences in strategy. People work with people they like.  In a swirling whirlpool of transition, some things never change. Chao.

Optimizing on the Question – Big Data Analytics

In life there are opportunity costs. I have spent many a Sunday fretting over whether to clean the basement, watch the game, or spend the afternoon on single track with one of my kids. We unfortunately can’t create a duality that allows us to experience two simultaneous events, I always have to choose across my options. Companies face opportunity costs too. Do you hire head count for Brazil, reduce inventory in mid west, manage COGS, or acquire a company. There are constant decisions that leave alternative opportunities like dust on the floor. Matter of fact, companies are really layers of opportunity cost decisions we call strategies.  Strategies allow us to plan and execute with focus. Sometimes strategies are new and/or overt; sometimes they are organic and implied (a kin to culture). Usually companies have an agenda that is known by most and for this conversation I will call it a strategy. I would say for the majority of companies, strategy isn’t always democratic and out of the box for everyone. There’s a bit of trickle down defined and disseminated. “This is a growth year for us, we need to penetrate the market…”, “We’re concerned about Europe…”, “Divisional goal is 500 million…” or something similar.

Many of us, at various levels in the organization, are bounded by constraints and are asked not to create and advance the cause aimlessly, but to a set of criteria. This is important to align the organization and execute with powerful sameness.  Yet once in a while something happens, the market changes, new tech shows up. When this happens, the technologists get geeky and the C-level gets hungry, scared, or both.  Something “new” arises from the corporation that breaks the rules, and clears paths for new ways of thinking.  Think about the Dotcom wave, it is currently the quintessential example of this scenario.  All of a sudden, 20 year olds were becoming executives, Dotcom companies had valuations that surpassed blue chips, and people who sold socks to dogs were getting millions in VC money. The “rule followers” were punished and mocked as dinosaurs. The companies considered long-standing cultural strategies as broken and many chose to replace process while revolutionizing their offerings.  This worked for some, destroyed others, and embarrassed many in the ranks. We’re now entering a similar wave around Big Data Analytics.

My term for this wave/bubble/era… is Big Data Analytics (BDA). I use this inclusive term for the wave of change that is taking BI and departmental analytics and merging it with social media, global mobile user, cloud, and various forms of big data. Here within this wave again we have many great examples about how knowing more about us (from what data exists around us) allows for new insights and is ushering a new age. There are examples like “The Human Face of Big Data” (#HFOBD) with Rick Smolan, EMC/Greenplum Analytics Workbench on a 1000 node cluster developed to study big data (i.e. twitter, facebook, etc). or SAP’s recent “Real-Time Race” (#RealTimeRace) pitting two System Integrators against each other on stage developing live solutions on HANA. These bits of news get us all thinking “what if”.  However, as a large group of capitalists, I’m not sure we know how to leverage it, how to make decisions around opportunity costs for BDA. We’re in a bit of an innovation bubble and the ultimate question is what can we do to improve and prioritize our choices?

I have a few recommendations for everyone to consider in their business. It’s a short list of 3 things that I believe the smart companies will consider either organically or by reading this blog

1)      Data is the new Information Technology (IT). Read “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr and you’ll see that since the birth of the “industrial company”, there has been a “technology” group which consists of smart, well-paid resources who apply the latest tech to business. First it was electricity & machines, then business systems, then computers, then data centers, and I propose the next wave will be whatever Big Data Analytics becomes.  (I would call it “Knowledge Management”, but we already blew that logo in the 90’s…) What this means is BDA will be pervasive and inject itself in many aspects of business, not just creating opportunity to increase revenue through traditional means.  Companies need to build new disciplines that identify and develop data use. Picture the 1960-1970′s. We used vacuum based mainframes, typewriters, rotary phones, and business men took 2 hour martini lunches. The world of iphones, tablets and angry birds is very different. I believe our future world will be thoroughly basted with data driven wisdom which will have even larger impacts.

2)      A Corporate Decision Strategy is needed. How we make decisions and what questions do we ask? We need to be much better at asking questions than we are today. I am under impressed by the long line of shopping basket, alternative offer, or Twitter sentiment studies I see.  This is applying old perspectives of your customer to a field with much greater opportunity. How do we involve crowd sourcing, self-service, social media, and data analytics to change the customer experience, the corporate workforce, and ultimately what is considered corporate core competencies.  I think a great way to start is a review and inventory of BDA capabilities within the business and an assessment of how questions are asked that create data analytics projects. Questions and decisions don’t serve the strategy, they are the strategy going forward.  Also note, the people who can define the right questions are more like artists, musicians, song-writers.  Many know there is a strong correlation between scientists and musicians. Similar to how computing jobs became loaded with creative people, we’ll need to migrate these skills away from programming and towards question development and decision strategy. Good news, the new recruits have grown up as “gammers”, this plays well into foundational skill sets needed.

3)      Change Business Systems – I’ve written assembler code and I’ve run analytics models. They are both very difficult to conceptualize and navigate. It’s a relatively small group of individuals that can execute these skills and thus create a real problem of scale. AI and machine learning are the beginnings of techniques that begin to help the average person to become a contributing member in this new age. We need decision support within BDA to morph from manually running a “K Means” model or hand developing “ordered pairs” to something less academically rigorous, and data capture/management/cleansing to become more intuitive and automated.  If we can automate “Mario Kart” as far from assembler as it is today, we can do the same in the era of BDA.

As companies refine and develop their BI/Data Analytics programs into the era of BDA. I think there’s an equivalent need to rethink the questions they ask. Do we need less sales execs? Do we need more data security?  Do we want to know what else we could sell someone buying running shoes, or do we want to help them design a new shoe specifically match their demographic/health needs? Can our customer sell themselves? And if so, how do we need to change what we sell to be competitive? What are we good at? What companies should merge to exploit inherent opportunity?  These are the opportunity costs of the new era that will emerge from BDA. To gain insight from data, we must first ask the right questions of it…