SAP’s Brand, Product Lines and Channel Partners- Reconciliation Needed
I attended SAP’s Channel Partner Summit in Miami last week. While I generally applaud (and welcome) Jonathan Becher’s (SAP’s CMO) decision to reposition SAP’s brand, I believe some bigger issues have yet to be reconciled or subdued. These issues impact SAP’s channel partners, the company itself and its customers. SAP CMO Jonathan Becher Copyright 2013 […]

SAP, SAP, Wherefore Art Thou SAP?
SAP Founders 1988 — Klaus Tschira On The Left I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for SAP. When I published my first (and thus far only) 700+ page book in 1994 (“Human Resource Management and Information Technology: Achieving A Strategy Partnership”), Klaus Tschira, one of SAP’s founders, became a big fan of my […]

Why Cloud ERP? Cutesy Video
The cutesy video above was created by SAP, the first part talking about the benefits of Cloud ERP, the integrated approach in general, and while the last minute turns into a SAP Business ByDesign pitch, it could very well be viewed as overall industry promotion, applicable to archrival NetSuite, and to some extent Workday, and […]

SAP Energizes Its Cloud Strategy – The Lars Dalgaard Era Begins
One of the most amazing cross-country flights I ever took found me over the center of the country at night, flying through an unbelievable electric storm, with an almost constant arcing of lightning illuminating vast canyons and mountains of clouds. As the pilot maneuvered us through this unforgettable vision of nature’s wonder, he came on […]

SAP Assembles Powerful Cloud Portfolio with Ariba, SuccesFactors Acquisitions
Emphasis on “assemble”, as opposed to develop. For years SAP and Oracle fought a religious war of acquire/assemble vs develop in-house. SAP’s view was (even under the current Co-CEOs) that you can only get to a coherent, seamlessly integrated suite by development. Apparently they have changed religion, borrowing a chapter or two from Larry Ellison’s […]

Cloud dancing: CIO perspective on SAP’s cloud strategy
SAP has made important strides in building a cloud strategy. Here’s what you need to know.

NetSuite Welcomes SAP as Customer, even while SAP Swaps it for ByD
NetSuite History, Wayne’s World style NetSuite is no stranger to aggressive marketing, and SAP has clearly been their #1 target for a while starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAPPHIRE 2006 to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs Windows and […]

SuccessFactors swaps NetSuite for ByDesign
There was a great piece of theatre on stage at SuiteWorld in San Francisco this morning when NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson revealed that the company had signed an important new customer from the computing world: its archrival SAP. The software behemoth’s newly acquired subsidiary, SuccessFactors, remains a NetSuite customer, Nelson revealed: “They just renewed their […]

Bring out the fact checkers
‘Tis the season for debates and fact checking statements by candidates. Not politicians, but technology vendors.
Like this one by SAP in a column titled Cloud Strategy that I saw courtesy of Jon Reed:

What a Large Enterprise CIO Would Think of the SAP Cloud Position
I’m well into the second day of the SAP Analyst Summit. SAP executives have been pounding the following talking points: – We’ve caught up on the cloud! – We have a lot of on-demand apps! – We can’t wait to cross-sell these to our client base! – We will continue to build more on-demand apps […]