By the time we tracked him down at the SAP Influencer Summit, SAP Mentor Dick Hirsch had already written the most extensive analysis of SAP and Success Factors from a cloud architecture perspective. SAP was legally bound to keep their silence on SuccessFactors at the Summit, but we were not.
So on the Thursday morning after the show, we sat down with Dick in JD-OD Park Plaza headquarters for a special JD-OD shoot to talk about his blog and what he learned at the show. The result was a free flowing conversation about possible SAP-SuccessFactors cloud architectures, as well as the technical and cultural challenges that lie ahead.
Show Notes
:45 How will SAP and SuccessFactor’s cloud architectures fit together?
2:10 SAP’s made progress on its PaaS architecture – will SuccessFactors wreak havoc on it?
3:22 How will SuccessFactors fit into SAP culturally and technically?
4:33 SaaS vendors approach partner development differently
6:06 SAP’s struggle to simplify its PaaS messaging
7:18 Why SAP blew up “core versus edge”
8:20 Predicting the post-acquisition outcomes
9:20 Did Dick change his views on this while at the Summit?
11:00 Grading SAP’s marketing around PaaS
12:20 “SAP couldn’t talk about SuccessFactors this week – but we did.”
Hi Guys, always good analyses fresh out of the oven.
Did you try to think that there were some intent to lay down SaaS into Paas, spread into HANA clusters, and virtualized for example through Suse SLES on Amazon EC2 ? What would be the other options ? VMware with Hadoop/HPPC ? Not sure.
SaaS using, Java or Abap (light weight with HANA) along with a programming model should not worry about Paas. DNA Cloud attributed to Success Factors is more in terms of Business Models and sorting out (or clearing out) overlapping features (HCM, FI etc…)within the application portfolio (eventually originating from on-premise family as well), not to mention the UI technology (HTML5) unified rendering.
Lvan, you raise some interesting points. However, this was a 12 minute video not a technical deep dive.
As such, there were a lot of topic we couldn’t cover. Our real goal was to provide a high level view of Dick’s recent blog, what we learned at the show, and what’s coming next.
I disagree with you pretty strongly on the PaaS aspect, I see that as vitally important, and we don’t know till after the acquisition clears what the future is there. Vishal and Lars, in their only comments on it, have implied in my opinion two different things, but you can’t read too much into early comments so we’ll see what happens after go live. SAP is (and should be) very concerned about PaaS because that is how you engage developers on a common platform and build an enterprise apps store culture. You can’t have a bunch of separate SaaS products without a common underlying structure if you want developers to understand what you are trying to do and get them involved building apps.
Your talk about HANA clusters and on-demand is worthy of a blog post, you should write it as there is very little public information about that out there now. I also recommend you read all of Dick’s blogs if you haven’t before, you seem to wish that we got into more details than we had time for – his blogs are very deep so this was intended to be a higher level view.
Thanks for the comment…