
Was the S4HANA launch rushed?
As I listened to the SAP launch in NYC of its S4 product I told a few folks I was struck how high level the presentation was. That they should have field tested and matured the pitch with many customers and presented a more mature version at Sapphire 3 months from now. I went back […]

Hello again, Moore’s Law
There are rumors of massive layoffs at IBM. True or not, there is no denying the company has had years of consecutive quarterly revenue declines. Poor Ginni Rommety gets the blame, but my view is IBM forgot about Moore’s Law and continuous value improvements as it diversified into software and services over the last two […]

How SAP Missed An Opportunity
Hello, it’s me again. Your Friendly SAP — foe? If you follow me you know that I admire the technical prowess of SAP, but despise about twice as much their marketing “acumen” (there are no other words that are politically correct and fit nicely between quotation marks). I wrote about it in more detail in […]

Danger zone: Enterprise maintenance and support
Recently, a client asked for advice on whether to continue paying on-premise maintenance and support to a major software vendor. Support is a complicated issue for many IT organizations, with the pros and cons generally as follows: Why vendor-supplied enterprise support is valuable Avoiding risk: When the system has problems, you know who to call […]

The SAP Fort Knox
Andrew Nusca at Fortune interviews Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP here. What’s striking is Bill talks incessantly about the “new SAP” : HANA, Ariba, Concur, SuccessFactors, Hybris, Fieldglass, Sybase. The stuff is not exactly new – most of the products are decades old, but they are new to SAP and Bill is clearly enamored with […]

SAP Nation Excerpts: Chapter 1 – The Customer Pivot
Amazon has SAP Nation on the Kindle and in softcover. Over the next few weeks the book will be available in other print and eBook formats. As I have done with my other books, I plan to excerpt here about 10% of the book over the next several weeks for my blog readers. Here is […]

Book review: SAP Nation — a must read for CIOs enterprise software watchers
This is a must read, dissecting the massive SAP enterprise software ecosystem and economy. Hopefully senior executives, both in SAP and in the service providers and systems integrators that operate in the SAP Nation can put themselves in their customers shoes, read this book and listen to Vinnie Mirchandani’s call for action.

SAP Nation Excerpts: Preface
Amazon has released SAP Nation on the Kindle. Over the next few weeks the book will be available in other print and eBook formats. As I have done with my other books, I plan to excerpt here about 10% of the book over the next several weeks for my blog readers. Let’s start with the […]

SAP Rumored to Launch Hana-Based Cloud Planning Solution Next Week
Well, it’s pretty clear that SAP will be announcing something in Chicago on Monday, judging by the above re-tweet from SAP head of EPM product management David Williams, and by the content in the SAP Conference for EPM program, itself: … Continue reading →