What happened to the SAP I knew?
As an innovation author, I generally like to look ahead. But the mysterious time machine that is LinkedIn will often bring back colleagues and friends I have long lost touch with. A recent re-acquaintance reminded me I first encountered SAP 25 years ago installing R/2 in a Price Waterhouse data center in the then re-emerging […]
SAP more of the same
I tend to not pay too much attention to quarterly earnings – whether they are good or bad. But my friend Dennis Howlett says “SAP’s Q2 results are stunning by any standards” and I decided to apply my own “is this an inflexion point?” st…
Sapphire 2012: The Softer, Greater SAP…I Hope
Let me start this with a strange and seemingly incoherent (but truly more inchoate) statement. “If SAP marketed to the rest of the world, the way they produce conferences, they could arguably become the best technology company on the planet.” I’m not going to say anything more about this until considerably later in this post. […]
Pinch me. SAP is Dreaming up Social for the Enterprise.
With Patel’s new position, SAP recently moved “social” into its cloud group where it will support all SAP suites and concentrations (CRM, for example) in a new social platform that will be structured to support the business horizontally and seamlessly across on-premise and cloud offerings. The group is building what they’re calling, “Project Robus.” (Latin for resolve or purpose.)
A Tale Of Two Perspectives — Customers Of And Investors In HR Technology
Cover of serial Vol. V, 1859 “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it […]
SAP’s M&A Strategy: the Key to a Successful SuccessFactors Acquisition.
As the enterprise software market parses the news that SuccessFactors will become SuccessFactors, an SAP company, the question of how well SAP manages its M&A strategy is coming to the fore. SAP has been buying small and large companies for a while, and though nowhere near as avaricious as Oracle or IBM, there are now three big […]
Can it be third time lucky for SAP?
At first sight, the recruitment of Successfactors CEO and founder Lars Dalgaard to SAP’s executive board — once it completes its acquisition announced this weekend — looks promising. There’s been plenty of comment in the past 36 hours on how this will bolster SAP’s cloud strategy. Except that SAP doesn’t have a good record of […]
SAP/SuccessFactors — Help Me Count The HRM Codebases
Shall We Leverage Your Code Or Mine? I’m working on a mega-post about the SAP/SuccessFactors deal, but in the meantime I could use your help in making sure I’ve got the full list of HRM-related codebases that must be addressed — strategically and tactically — as a part of this deal. Much of this post […]
TechCrunch trivializes SAP’s $3.4B billion cloud acquisition
Photo credit: Cloud watching by Michael Krigsman TechCrunch trumpeted an odd lack of interest in SAP’s acquisition of human capital management vendor, SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion. The popular technology startup blog offered these choice comments: In what is perhaps the most boring piece of tech news to come out of this week, German software giant […]
Cloud-y Days Ahead
Good to be a Cloud Software Shareholder (but not a customer!) Any doubts anyone had about the legitimacy of cloud application software should have been laid to rest the last few weeks. When Oracle weighs in to buy RightNow as part of a larger acquisition strategy to acquire cloud software products, then the landscape of […]
