In a relaxed mood at JD-OD World Headquarters in Alcaudete, Den and Jon hit on the high points of SAPPHIRE Now Madrid with coffee (and tea) in hand.  Torn between giving SAP credit for its best show of the year and keeping the fire firmly lit underneath, the guys talk about what SAP got right and where the pitfalls lie.

Topics du jour include: can SAP scale the innovations we’ve seen, is BW on HANA a killer app, and where does SAP stand in terms of engaging developers from the “bottom up.” This video sets the stage for the upcoming Influencer Summit, where the JD-OD team will be re-united in a few short weeks in chilly Boston.

Show Notes

0:00 Why Madrid was better than expected

1:14  SAP and its “developer situation” – is it improving?

2:23 Train Race and Innojam had “fantastic innovation,” but customers need apps

3:48 SAP leadership rethinking top-down versus bottom-up approaches to engaging SAP developers

4:55 The HANA message was much more customer-focused and balanced, but can innovation scale?

6:17 Getting developers on board is NOT a marketing problem

7:42 Sustained dialogue wins, radio silence loses

9:25 Get the customers on stage and let them do their thing

It’s become a JDOD tradition – participants give their take on the event, but they must do it in only one word. The results defy rational explanation.

What if a simple thank you won’t do? How about a flash mob? Done. This short video documents the SAP community’s special surprise thanks to Marilyn Pratt during SAPPHIRE Now Madrid.

The premise was simple: get a bunch of folks wearing “What Would Marilyn Pratt Do?” to surprise Marilyn as a tribute during her expert lounge presentation on… community. The results were unscripted and memorable. The JD-OD team was on-site to document the moment with Dennis behind the camera.

The event was initially sparked by Ram Manohar Tiwari, or “rmtiwari” as we know him on Twitter, who suggested to Jan Penninkof to think about ”What Would Marilyn Pratt Do?” before firing off an angry comment. Many SAP community members, including the JD-OD team, have been similarly inspired. Here’s the proof.

The usual suspects ie Jon Reed, Vijay Vijayasankar, John Appleby and Den Howlett shoot the shit on SAPPHIRE Madrid 2011. The call to arms? Developers and how SAP needs to partner enable the ecosystem. Enjoy.

Frank Scavo, CEO of Computer Economics, describes himself as a buyer advocate, analyzing the ERP market with the customers’ interests in mind. So what did he make of SAPPHIRE Now Madrid? Dennis caught up with him after day one to find out.

Frank gives his take on the viability of SAP’s mobility strategy and whether or not a SUP-focused approach will engage developers. He also reviews Snabe’s keynote and how it compared to the messaging in previous SAP shows.

Show Notes

0:00 Does SAP’s mobility platform strategy make sense?

1:35 Is developing on SUP realistic for engaging a broad range of developers?

2:30 How can SAP provide a deeper level of value to its customers?

3:49 The past and the present: revenue model transitions

4:55 Frank’s reaction to Jim Snabe’s keynote

6:15 Does Frank feel more comfortable with SAP’s customer message after Madrid?

Turns out Deloitte isn’t just one of SAP’s HANA partners, Deloitte is also a customer drinking SAP’s HANA champagne on internal projects. To find out more, Jon talked with Christopher Dinkel, IT Leader EAG Deloitte Services, about what Deloitte has done with HANA so far and the lessons learned.

Chris tells Jon about the Contacts and Influencer HANA project he presented on at SAPPHIRE Now Madrid and why, in this case, speed and data integration had a beneficial impact on customer service. Chris also talks about how Deloitte measures the success of HANA projects and what he is looking for next from SAP.

Show Notes

0:00 Deloitte is drinking SAP’s HANA champagne with its own internal HANA project

0:50 Why does BI matter to Deloitte’s IT department and in its customer relationships?

1:30 More on Deloitte’s first HANA project, the Contact and Influence Finder, which integrates all the associated touch points Deloitte has with customers.

2:14 How does the speed of the Contact and Influencer finder impact the business?

3:29 How does Deloitte measure the success of these initiatives?

4:00 Deloitte’s Crystal Reports project

4:45 What’s on Deloitte’s wish list for future HANA improvements from SAP?

5:35 Deloitte’s use of unstructured analytics with HANA

6:05 What Dinkel hopes to get out of SAPPHIRE Now Madrid

For this special JD-OD SAPPHIRE Now shoot, guest host Tom Raftery of Greenmonk talks sustainability with Scott Bolick, VP Sustainability Solutions, SAP.  Pulling no punches, Tom asks Scott if the interest in sustainability is wearing off and if sustainability has lost momentum in a tough economy. From there, the guys dig into the key sustainability issues that SAP customers are addressing, and how big data enters the sustainability picture.

Show Notes

0:00 Is the interest in sustainability is wearing off?

1:40 Are companies willing to spend on sustainability given the state of the economy?

2:45 What are the biggest areas of investment in sustainability for SAP customers?

3:55 How will SAP handle the big data issues that come with predictive analytics and risk management?

For the first-ever JDOD SAP StreamWork customer story, we talked with Oliver Feiliz, Key Account Manager with All for One. All for One is a Business Suite Customer, a Business ByDesign partner, and now a StreamWork customer.

Jon talks with Oliver about why they implemented StreamWork, what the benefits of the implementation were, and what All for One would like to see next from StreamWork.  Oliver raises Jon’s eyebrows with a StreamWork – Solution Manager integration scenario. The guys also talk about why integration with the Business Suite is a key value point for StreamWork going forward.

Show Notes

0:00 All for One’s many hats in the SAP ecosystem

:50 All for One’s challenges before implementing StreamWork – decision making for global teams, “death by email.”

2:00 Evaluting StreamWork versus Microsoft SharePoint

2:40 StreamWork scenario #1:  – Using StreamWork for ByDesign project management

3:15 StreamWork scenario #2: CRM-StreamWork integration

3:55 We’re working closely with SAP for integration with the Business Suite, working on the roadmap

4:30 StreamWork – Solution Manager – integration? What are the benefits?

5:45 How does All for One measure the success of StreamWork so far?

6:25 StreamWork wish list for SAP  – what All for One wants next from StreamWork

Very much a top of mind issue, Usman Sheikh, VP SAP EcoHub explains what’s going on and how SAP plans to embrace the developer ecosystem. The good news is that SAP is working towards lowering the developer barriers to building and deploying applications in the SAP Store for Mobile Apps.

Testing is free through 2011 (and may well be free into 2012.) Once an application has been accepted onto the store, SAP is only looking to take 15% of the agreed price. Better than Apple but not quite as good as Android. The not so good news is that right now, SAP is only looking for applications that take advantage of the Sybase Unwired Plartform. They can take advantage of other SAP technologies but SUP is a pre-requisite. ;(

Harald Reiter did the honors and interviewed Udo Patzelt of AOK for us. Thanks Harald! It’s a great story about how a healthcare IT provider massively accelerated data loads in an SAP data warehouse environment. Here is the transcript courtesy of Michael Koch:

HR: Hello, this is Harald Reiter for JD-OD. Today it’s my honour to interview Udo Patzelt. First of all Thank You, Udo for taking the time to talk to us today. So first of all, who do you work for and what is your role?

UP: Hello, my name is Udo Patzelt and I work for AOK Systems where I am responsible for Product Management and Architecture of our solution called OSCARE, which is an industry solution for statutory health insurances in Germany. AOK Systems is a separate IT service provider which originates from the AOK, Germany’s largest statutory health insurance. In Germany, AOK has about 24 million insurance holders and holds a market share of about 35%. Over the course of the last 10 years, AOK Systems and SAP have collaborated on this industry solution for Healthcare. Today, OSCARE is used by AOK Systems and other statutory health insurances in Germany.

HR: Super! We’re sitting here to talk about SAP HANA, so the first question is: Why HANA?

UP: Well maybe I should start by explaining how I got to know HANA. First time I became aware of HANA was during last year’s annual DSAG congress in Germany. Up to this point, there had only been speculations about SAP’s plans with in-memory, which I more or less filed under „Ideas“. However I soon found out during said congress that SAP actually had more serious plans with HANA and I therefore decided to get deeper into the matter. Simple reason for this was that I could think of many HANA use cases for OSCARE. Easy to imagine if you take into account that we’re holding data for 24 million insurance holders. I was able to think of many problems where HANA would be able to help us with. We then dived deeper into the subject and came up with questions such as „What happens when we’re having a power cut?“ and so on. We always received decent answers and then decided to start working on a roadmap, taking into account the perspectives HANA offered to us from the outset and tried to describe what HANA could mean to AOK. So we worked towards a clear goal, ie „what is the perspective we see for HANA?“. We then presented the roadmap and our findings to the various AOK boards and met a positive response, as HANA offers solutions for many of our problems. Next problem was that all of this sounded great in theory, but what about the real world?

HR: So you took the initiative, rather than SAP approaching you? You had the vision of what HANA can do for you and you then suggested it internally?

UP: Yes, however SAP of course also became active and certainly supported us during the exchange of information very well. We then initiaited an evaluation project, because we wanted to see ourselves how well HANA would work in a real world environment.

HR: And when did you start this?

UP: We installed the HANA appliance during June 2011.

HR: Still as part of the ramp-up ?

UP: (Yes) still as part of the ramp-up and with version SP2. Our aim was not to become too involved with performance and strengths of HANA. Instead, prior to the installation we came up with specific, real world, productive applications which are already in use today without HANA, with a defined dataset and clear response times. We then wanted to see how this would look like if you use the same under HANA.

HR: Excellent. So when the boxes arrived, did you get any help from SAP in terms of Data Model, for example, the actual technical realisation?

UP: Of course SAP supported us with this. We had one –sometimes more- consultants onboard. This is necessary, as it is a new technology after all. Our main aim was not to write some sort of new HANA application, but rather transfer existing application use cases onto HANA. From this perspective, our work was less creative, but more of a building kind of nature. We copied over the data sets and loaded it onto the box. In a next step we mimicked the data selctions and then compared the results.

HR: Could you describe which use cases you transfered over to HANA?

UP: It varied, partially complex SELECTs, as we would have them at AOK, such as overviews of transport costs during arrival day of new hospital patients. Basically real world selections which can be demanding and usually have long run times. But also data mining and analytics for procurement scenarios. For example there is one case for diabetic diseases where all data is accumulated and later sliced and diced in different ways.

HR: Does the data come from non-SAP systems, or SAP systems or a mix?

UP: It’s a mix. Nowadays the majority of data is held in the SAP system, but there is also relevant data for these specific cases which is held in non-SAP systems. The result sets are then all amalgamated in HANA, similar to storing them in databases today, where you deal with BW extracts, for example, and are then analysed using SQL and other analytics tools.

HR: What kind of data volumes are we talking about?

UP: We chose a medium sized AOK, simply because the HANA appliance we used had limitations and does not allow for unlimited memory. State of the art back in June was a model with 1 TB of main memory, a large HANA, so to speak. We loaded hundreds of GBs of data from various datamarts and datamart applications.

HR: What surprised you the most?

UP: The biggest surprised were the results, which scared us a little.

HR: I hope they were correct?

UP: Well, had they been bad then we would have had a different problem altogether! But we made an experience I’ve never had before. Usually, when you do some performance tuning then you have to face the fact that the results never are as good as you expected them to be. But with HANA the exact opposite was the case. The results were quite astonishing. Someone who knows and understands IT can simply not believe the results.

HR: Suprised in a positive way?

UP: Yes. For example, in our application scenarios we never had a test with an acceleration factor of under 25. 25 was usually the smallest factor. On average, we had acceleration factors of 30-40. Our colleagues then said that this was achieved without tuning. As of today, some applications have acceleration factors of 200. The datamining application normally runs for about 150 hours, with HANA it took 20 minutes. Unbelievable results. There were some things we couldn’t test, as HANA functionality wasn’t there yet, but there will obviously be further SPs. However we are 100% convinced that HANA works and provides remarkable results.

HR: So what does HANA’s future at AOK look like?

UP: I already mentioned the roadmap. Our perspective is that the entire operational data processing is done using HANA. Our ambition is to create the OLTP / OLAP convergence. At the moment we have 3 core SAP systems at every AOK: an ERP, CRM and custom system for other developments. In the future, these will have a common HANA data basis, which will also be used for analytics. This means no more distributed datasets, no more replications and analytics is based on real-time data. Quite unbelievable, really.

HR: What were your challenges during the technical realisation? I can imagine that a large amount of complexity is involved here. Different to your standard SAP and ABAP development. It involves new skills.

UP: First of all, this was an evaluation project. We wanted to find out if HANA really holds up to its promises. The conversion itself wasn’t overly difficult. Main challenges were the new toolsets, such as the HANA Studio, the analytical and calculation views. New terms and new skills basically. The biggest challenges are ahead of us. SP3 has arrived and this is the starting point of the next step of our project. At AOK we have a short term and a long term goal. Due to the advantages of the short term goal we have now decided to license HANA. Our short term goal is to use BW on HANA, we will remove all relational databases, which should already give us some in-memory performance advantages. This should be possible without touching our BI applications, which represent an investment of about 60 man years. It would be a big problem had we to redesign these. However our expertise tells us that this is not necessary and we will simply swap databases and load our remaining non-SAP datasets onto HANA. We will then arrive at a consolidated data warehouse, which enables us to pick a specific application area to redesign in the future. This means there won’t be an investment barrier, we have a clean platform.

HR: And finally: in terms of HANA, if you were granted one wish by SAP, what would it be?

UP: My wish would be that the roadmap would include more definition with regards to OLTP / OLAP convergence and also specified the exact dates and interim steps.

HR: Let’s hope that SAP watches this and listens. I know they do, of course. All the best for the future and your work with HANA.

UP: Thank You.

We’ve been talking about business analytics for 20 years – so why the emphasis now? To get at that question and look at how BI 4.0 fits into the picture, Jon sat down with Adam Binnie, EVP and GM, BI, with SAP.  Binnie talks about the impact of real-time, the impact of mobility on BI, and what customers have to overcome to take full advantage of data too often stuck in systems of record.  Binnie also fields the question of what SAP is going to do about Flash given the importance of Dashboards and the Apple iOS – a topic that picked up relevance the day after this shoot, when Adobe announced plans to stop investing in Flash for mobile browsing in favor of HTML5.

Show Notes

0:00 Why is analytics a crucial issue for customers now?

2:20 What are the challenges for customers to overcome to take advantage of BI tools?

4:00 Will BI 4.0 help customers address their BI and mobile issues?

5:55 Dashboards – What is SAP going to do about Flash?

7:20 What is Adam looking forward to this week?

One of the hottest topics in the SAP ecosystem is the future of SAP developers. Gateway and SUP are coming on strong, but will SAP find a way to open up the platform for developers who often find themselves on the outside looking in? SAP’s Aiaz Kazi thinks SAP can pull this off.  In this JD-OD shoot, he gives us his view from the field as the rules of developer marketing change.

Kazi also works closely with Vishal Sikka‘s team on Sikka’s keynotes, so the second half of the interviews moves into Sikka’s keynote messaging (think: HANA) and whether HANA talk is going to move beyond speed into business value.

Show Notes

0:00 “You don’t market to developers – you give them software they can get their hands on”

1:10 How does SAP engage with developers who are not part of large SAP partner shops?

2:55 The challenge: will SAP make progress on this by SAPPHIRE Now Orlando?

3:30 Barriers to overcome:  “It boills down to culture”  – access versus monetization

4:30 Vishal Sikka keynote  themes – HANA and customer value

6:30 HANA talk should be about business value more than speed – would Sikka agree?

You might expect some Salesforce.com customers would move to SAP CRM for better back end integration, but for overall usability? For this interesting customer story, Dennis sat down with Daren Carpenter of e2v to get the skinny on why they moved to SAP CRM and what the benefits were.

During the convo, Carpenter explains the strides SAP CRM has made and how back end integration (including BW) has led to a “360 degree view of the customer”, including better predictive forecasting. He also warns about the perils of over-customization and the dangers of bogging down salespeople with functionality they don’t need.

Show Notes

0:00 Why e2v moved from Salesforce.com to SAP CRM

1:17 The perils of over-customization

1:58 Darin’s backround and challenge at e2v: business process strategy using SAP software

2:55 How Salesforce.com stacks up against SAP in terms of usability and back end integration

3:55 The strides SAP CRM has made with look and feel and overall functionality

4:46 What’s in the future for e2v and SAP CRM

5:40 Results: “360 degree view of the customer” and, yes, even spreadsheet use reductions

For the “influencer wrap” to SAPPHIRE Now Day 1, Jon and Den put John Appleby on the couch for a quick day 1 wrap prior to their meeting with Vishal Sikka. The guys assessed Jim Snabe’s keynote and riffed on SAP’s overall commitment to mobility and on-demand. Note: this video is rated PG-13.

Show Notes

1:00 John Appleby’s Jim Snabe keynote impressions – HANA, mobility, cloud.

1:55 Jon’s “grouchier” take. Questions about on-demand commitment and challenges of building an apps developer ecosystem.

2:50 Dennis: came into show with low expectations  – how did the show rate so far? Mobile development too tied to SUP – SAP needs to open things up.

3:38 Dennis to John Appleby : Where does John think SAP stands on mobile and SUP licensing?

4:17 Jon on Gateway – impressed by the quick journey to cool UIs with Gateway he and Dennis saw on the Train Race journey, but what about the developer access and barriers to entry?

5:30 John to Dennis: Is SAP’s lower emphasis onthe cloud and the departure of John Wookey related? Further discussion on SAP’s commitment to on-demand ensues. Before the video wraps, the  guys also touch on the need for the Line of Business SDK (coming in the spring, and SAP’s decision to move ByDesign off Silverlight to HTML5.

One of the interesting things about the Business ByDesign ecosystem is the number of firms that wear two hats – customer and partner (implementer). Such is the case for TRIAS (hq Germany). CEO Oliver Quirmbach made the trip to Sapphire Now Orlando and sat down with Jon Reed to share some lessons from the TRIAS ByDesign experience.

During the conversation, Quirmbach explains why TRIAS became an early ByDesign customer and why he expects cloud ERP to have an impact beyond SME. Quirmbach also talks about what TRIAS looks for in ByD consultants and why the business side of ByD is more important than the technical side for both customer and implementer.  Learnings from TRIAS’ 15 ByD implementations are also shared.

Show Notes:

0:00 TRIAS’ experience at Sapphire Now

0:45 History with ByDesign

1:35 “It’s Easy to Implement Cloud Solutions”

2:30 Does implementing ByDesign require different skills?

3:40 Building a mix of new and upskilled ByD consultants

4:39 What new features are in ByD 2.6?

5:22 Lessons learned from 15 ByD live customers

7:45 TRIAS” plans for future ByD growth