Vinnie’s book, SAP Nation, dissects the mega ecosystem, the trillion dollar software nation that has built up around the company with the mantra “the best run businesses run SAP”. There are other enterprise, business systems software companies, but it was SAP who emerged from the large pack of providers around in the 80s to be one letter of the JBOPS acronym, the big 5 ERP vendors in the 90s (that’s JDEdwards, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP) to then become the ERP leader of the last decade and more. Vinnie calls on his experience as a big systems implementer at PwC, an analyst in this enterprise space at Gartner, and then as a consultant, enterprise blogger and influencer harrying the SAP ecosystem on behalf of the buyer for the decade that I’ve known him. And that’s a disclosure, because he’s a friend and part of the Enterprise Irregular blogger community of which I’m a member. Although I don’t agree with some of the positions he takes up, Vinnie’s book is a must read for any CIO of a medium to large enterprise, or anyone involved in the enterprise software
game.
Vinnie is well known for criticising the high cost of an SAP implementation versus the return on that investment. He is well known for criticising the comparably modest mount that SAP reinvests in new functionality and innovation, and he explores those themes in this book with over 30 case studies. Some of those highlight companies that have chosen Software as a Service alternatives for selected functionality, and his message is that SAP has been slow to innovate and shift in to those areas, and that’s true — but they are slowly catching up. He provides an immense amount of detail around the numbers and the financial model that is the SAP ecosystem. He dwells a lot on project failures — there are many to chose from, but it would have been good to hear more success stories to even the balance a little. When Vinnie read this inmy Amazon review he commented that he was calling out the failures because they have been quarter after quarter, year after year. He told me:
“Chapter 7 is clearly a depressing one, but many of those stories were broken byChris Kanaracus. Few other journalists, analysts, media have pointed it out given what a background buzz it has been”
In the book Vinnie quotes a wide range of customers, practitioners and influencers — all great raw material to help you build up a broad picture of the SAP market as a whole. His desire is for better execution so that a modest saving in the overall cost of the SAP economy could be reinvested to create value. He calculates that SAP’s product R&D is only around 1% of the overall spend, and that can’t be good for either SAP themselves or their customers. He wants more than that, and so should all SAP’s customers. This is a must read, and the hope is that senior executives, both in SAP and in the service providers and systems integrators that operate in the SAP Nation put themselves in their customers shoes, read this book and listen to Vinnie’s call for action.
You should also read Dennis Howlett’s review over on diginomica.
(photo of Vinnie from Alex Dunne)
(Cross-posted @ David Terrar on Medium)
So is this you call me Haji I will call you Haji? Friends eulogizing each other and their great work. Well the book is published now and must be sold. Whatever be the credentials of the author, does not matter. How much noise the book can create through social media and friendly referrals, will decide its fate. Why should anyone read what a large software vendor has done or doing? Why is this important? They may feel aghast, shortchanged, frustrated, illuminated about SAP. But what is the end outcome? To fell “I know more” or “I can use some of this in business”? It certainly sounds like the former. Good for beer table talks of random low self-esteemed CIOs than anything meaningful.
First, you only know I’m Vinnie’s friend because I quite rightly disclosed that in my review. Second, I take your inference that I’m only publishing a positive review because he’s a friend as an insult to my integrity, and it’s an insult to any reputable blogger or journalist who expresses opinion alongside a disclosure of a friend or customer like that. Admittedly the standards are a lot more difficult to uphold in a world where anyone can publish their thoughts or a rant to the worlld in a few seconds, but go and check through my archive of posts on this site going back the the start of this site in 2006 to figure out if my voice and reputation have any credibility in the enterprise software space.
It’s quite clear that you haven’t read the book – please respond if I’ve got that wrong.
You ask why you should read this book. I’ve been operating, originally as an implementer but mostly on the sales and marketing side, in the field of enterprise business software since the late 70s. SAP have grown to be a major force in that field since I first met them in the 80s, the business system most likely to be used by a large enterprise, the company that is most likely one of your top 3 competitors if you sell software in this field. The whole premise of Vinnie’s book is that the size of the customer base and the associated ecosystem has created a huge economy in its own right. If you are interested in enterprise software and technology in any way then this is a must read, with lots of useful case studies. Plenty to learn from in terms of reason for failures, trends and successes.
By the way, if you go over to Amazon you’ll see a version of this review and the fact that I have given it 4, not 5 stars (sorry Vinnie!). Must read, very good – that’s my opinion.
TechYogJosh, it is striking how many you have managed to target with your comment
a) David – glad he responded above. This is my fourth book. To my knowledge, this is the first one David has written a lengthy review on. The Enterprise Irregulars, that we are both part of, have over 50 blogger members. I offered each of them a preview copy of the book. Several took advantage but only a few like David have written reviews. We are respectful but fiercely independent of each other
b) SAP CIOs – The book profiles 30 of the best and brightest CIOs in SAP world. There is much to learn from them. BTW SAP CIOs spend $ 200 billion a year as the book elaborates. . So “low esteem” as you call them hardly seems appropriate
c) You ask about my credentials. If you have not read the book, at least check out for free the first few pages on the Look Inside feature on the Amazon book page at http://amzn.to/12FBn1J In the Preface you will see my 25 years of SAP experience and the extensive research that went into the book
d) By Hajis, I presume you are referring the sacred Muslin pilgrimage. Why invoke that in a technology forum?
Please read the book and I would be happy to discuss any specific comments you may have.
Cheers Vinnie – agree with all you say. This guy TechYogJosh hasn’t given us a link to a website so effectively anonymous – wonder what he has to hide?
I did do a review of New Polymath somewhere or on Amazon maybe (can’t remember), but my review was a while after the flurry of publication and launch activities. I remember you did a great stint at one of our EuroCloud UK meetings! Anyhow, glad I could be in the advanced guard this time around.