random notes from SAP TechEd

Wow, awesome.

A large, established, competitive firm opened up it's doors to a bunch of non-vetted and definitely uncontrollable bloggers. And not only it's doors, they gave us full freedom to roam, ask, poke - no restrictions.

I think some of the "press handlers" were a bit uneasy at some of the press meetings, I mean when you invite people like Dennis, James and David you get somewhat unexpected questions in a somewhat more frank form than they're used to... a good sign though that they stayed behind and kept the discussion going after the classic press people left the room. Kudos to the PR/Press department for opening up!

It was not a corporation we met, it was people, smart, engaged and open people - herewith a big thank for spending time with us and being so open to Marilyn, Craig, Mark, Mark, Amir, Charles, Frank, Frank, Bill and many, many others. And Thomas of course.

And then we found a firm which does a damned good job, executes proficiently, who's serious about what it does and which does many things right. Respect I say.

Myself, having a direct interest in the enterprise software space, albeit with a slight twist (or perhaps twisted sight some may say) poked around, queried, discussed and never stopped. Much appreciated, SAP has earned a few stars in my book now.

For more helicopter view of what we learned I'd rather refer to Dennis, James, Prashanth and David - I'll stick to my very own personal views in the light of my take on and interest in enterprise software.

I'll stick to a much more biased analysis, a kind of SAP vs. thingamy tack (just had too!) so here goes:

Marketing departments are marketing departments (sigh), but I would suggest that the SAP strategists put on the critical hat and re-read some of the stuff, there might be things to challenge, or be challenged by:

"World of business is driven by change" found it's way into a promotional video snippet before the first keynote. Me, I would suggest to my potential customers that they "drive the change". More fun and often more profitable to be leader than follower. Sun Tzu and Game Theorists would agree with me - the one who prompts the reaction is in control...

Defending their "pre packaged" approach they have stuff like "Should the prime rate ever come in al dente, we'll make one kind of software solution" - come, come I say, strategies springs out of the same question "What value to deliver to what customer and how to be different" leading to same business model task "how to use resources to deliver that value and keep some yourself". If your software was designed to develop from that end and not from the nitty-gritty accounting or inventory end of things, then the software would be one kind. But we do know where SAP comes from.

Then I tried to get my messy head around the immensity of SAP and understand why it is so complex, even tried to understand if I'm completely off piste when I say that it should be possible to simplify. Really simplify.

So here's my rough and simple take on that:

Organisational hierarchies as model + acceptance of applications + event or transaction based processes = huge complications.

Let me expand...

Organisational hierarchies, I see these as having one single purpose - to deliver the workflow, implement the business model. Organisational hierarhy is a model in itself developed in times when we had no IT and based on human nodes and their old-hat communication modes.
Using IT to model a model that was modelled using non-IT methods must end up rather... eh... messy.

Applications are true mashups of tasks. Your word processor is used for creating an offer, make a report, order a widget, whatnot. Having "workstations" like this for multiple tasks creates much back and forth, loss of flow, messy data and of course - complication again.

Event- or transaction-driven workflow is interesting as it produces two sets of data objects per task - one order and one report / sheet/ document. 23 tasks and you have 46 data objects - hello reconciliation and be embraced by much complexity. As Frank mentioned to me, Berlin had 12,500 forms, now with SAP's help they pared it down to 3,500. Well gentlemen, take 21 unique objects and you can build a few billion different forms... or use one object only to drive the flow, well... hint, hint.

Take three sources of complexity and mix'em up, well, it gets hugely complex. And complexity inevitably leaves "white spaces".

Funny thing, or rather quite sensible thing, SAP uses those white spaces to their own advantage creating a Partner Ecosystem in the same swat - effectively enlarging their salesforce and powerbase tremendously.

IWC Shaffhausen and Blancpain get paid for immensely complex watch movements, SAP ditto, but an IWC watch is indulging in luxury while run your business systems should not pay for such luxury or what?

Disclosure time: Thingamy skips the organisational hierarchy leaving all workflows to be delivered by the system, rips the tasks out of the applications and puts them where they belong in the flows and lets the things/objects drive the flows with objects to represent one on one (data to real world object) to build any form, sheet, document, report you want when report-time comes.

In the Wednesday keynote Shai Agassi revealed that they introduced the BI Accelerator, in essence moving the complete database into accessible memory thus increasing speed 100 fold. Good thinking I say! Of course we've been there since our inception six years ago... in addition we built our own OODB straight into the core so we look at even more than the 100 fold.

Governance, Risk and Compliance. Good stuff, and most important of course. Spending some time at one of their "pods" with that heading I found that SAP is taking much of the same path as we're taking (with thingamy), except we focus a bit more on absolute true history of objects and true transparency as that in itself delivers instant ethics and moral. Hey, even a thief would think twice before stealing in front of everybody. In fact we build more on this "look over the shoulder" thinking instead of pre-set flags and walls as SAP does.
No bad idea to have flags, but it requires much management of specific rules - and no rules are ever completely fool-proof either. Methink it has a slight tendency towards creating a false feeling of security - sounds nice, not so efficient in reality as any wall, fence or rule has holes. So we'll stick to the notion of real historical truth transparency as it prepares us for the next regulation as well, whatever it is.
Where we are identical is the importance of process - do not offer temptation, good thing that this is easily fixed by process.

SAP has in my mind one big advantage in the world of middleware and SOA - they have a core, a platform in it's heart. Many will disagree with me here, but if you have one place for much of the raw data and apply logic to it on the outside you loose less and have more power. Too bad that it covers so few of the processes a business is made out of.

But hey, those whitespaces is what creates their grand Ecosystem!

That core by the way is not very young, thus it may lack a few built in standards - support for XML-RPC in the core for example (as we do of course). That makes for many bespoke interfaces to the outside world. But what can they do? They've got what they have and that is that.

Just have to love the SDN and BPx communities, well done SAP. Of course the BPx (now 50,000 members after only a few weeks, SDN has 700,000 +) interest me, the bridge between business and IT as they said.
Luckily I was introduced to Marilyn who's responsible for the BPX community - and not being able to keep mum I gave her a quick intro to our rather radical take on processes (thing driven / ball is the game instead of event / transaction driven). Marilyn being in the market for provocative messages wanted me to join the community, to which I was flattered of course.
Mark though, soon found out that I might be a tad too close to becoming a potential competitor dragged his feet - which I do understand! BTW, challenged him to mention one business function that thingamy could not cover... for a beer... the bet is still running :)

As a wrap up, completely sticking my neck out now - the question you may ask, if I'm right, or even half right, or a quarter right, would SAP be able to change and go more in the direction I'm pointing to?

Sure they could, but it would mean rethinking and ditching their core, kill the Ecosystem and live with lower margins (I'm asking much, much less). It's been done before, sometimes it must be done - but the investors with less than five, six, ten year patience would not be happy... ;)

Comments

[Thomas Otter]

Sig,
Glad you enjoyed it.

I reckon you could/ should look closely at the netweaver toolset as a way to connect your stuff to core applications.

[sig]

Thomas, been wracking my brains in that direction - but my stuff captures more than the SAP core, and even delivers the flow to capture that so I could not see why to connect to something - but I may be wrong though (happens ;))
Would it not be a bit like hitching a cart to a car I wonder? Hehe... still in the spirit of twisted views so guess once which I see as usually being behind a horse!
Nevertheless, this whole thing was nothing but a very positive experience - I'm most impressed by SAP now, good firm to relate to I would say!

[Dennis Howlett]

Sig - this is exactly the kind of innovation that makes SAP think hard - and that's a good thing. They could of course make you a ridiculous offer and ensure they kill off thingamy...if there is a price on that. Or... they could stick to what they said and talk about innovation around the edge, which you can do, and let the community decide where it wants to take thingamy next. That is equally good. Either way, the last thing SAP wants to be doing is pretending you don't exist.

To be fair to SAP, they've been trying to 'de-couple' for more than 6 years and gave up when they found the (at the time) 800 processes simply couldn't be disentangled without breaking the core process engine. They've componentised for everything since around 1998 but not dealt with the core. That's the bit they want to keep precious. Understandable even if 'we' don't necessarily agree.

So it is now about finding those places where an engine like thingamy fits well to SAP core and leaving them to tidy up the best practice areas they know they need to manage. To my mind, that's a good division of responsibility.

[sig]

Dennis, I do get the point - and I am really wracking my brains as to how... but end up asking myself (beyond the how?)... but why?

You probably know by now that I do not necessarily buy the slingshot theory (for everybody) suggested by the keynote speaker, partly because he got the physics wrong as well ;)

[Prashanth Rai]

Sig, You have referenced my personal blog could you please link it to the CIO blog....http://cio-weblog.com, thats where i write tech stuff.

[sig]

Fixed! Sorry about that Prashanth :)

[Sheamus]

Exceptionally good post Sig!

Can companies and other organization purchase and implement thingamy at this point in time?

[sig]

Thanks Sheamus!

We're just now doing some much needed work on the interfaces and usability (never ending task of course), then some few features to add and more testing and it should be there as a very first version... late autumn if things goes smoothly.

That said we risk some getting frustrated by trying it out, bugs and all :)
Will probably let that group increase when the stuff gets a tad easier to use (= de-geeked). But I would not use it for critical stuff yet as we may still have basic changes coming up that would make current data hard to port to next versions...

And purchase will be easy as in "Here's the 30 MB, plonk it on any box and build and test and have fun / get frustrated. When you use it for real then you pay us per month and user. If you expand and build new processes, add those users to the payment as it happens. If you stop using it, then just stop paying us. All upgrades free of course." :)

[Craig Cmehil]

I must say you certainly had some radical ideas - it was great meeting you please be sure to have your son email what he's doing with his DB myself and several others on SDN are quite interested :-)

- Craig

[sig]

Craig, great meeting you too, had a great - and interesting - time indeed!

Will try to glean something out of my young geek, but afraid that documentation is not a 17 year old strongest suit :D

[Craig Cmehil]

Would a t-shirt help motivate? ;-)

[Marilyn Pratt]

Actually Sig, it's me feeling lucky to have had the chance to meet you at TechEd. I'm offering a belated thanks to you for your patience and enthusiasm in explaining Thingamy to me in Amsterdam, in terms that even a techno-ignorati could digest.

And while it has taken me a bit of time (a month at least) to get around to the thanks for that generous explanation, and find your blog, and read through these threads, and take notice of a number of your very interesting fellow travelers here, I think thanks are still in order and hope that late is better than not at all.

The path here is interesting. While continuing to look to promote fresh conversations in the BPX space, I met Thomas Otter and possibly because I’m still fairly new at wrapping my head around this gift of unstructured communication modalities, here in the blog world and the realm of business social networks, this took me on a wild (unstructured) link ride and read, leading me (how very ironic) back to your contents Sig and thoughts about Thingamy.

So when the same cast of characters seems here assembled before me, (the names growing more familiar daily) I’m thinking, here’s a play worth watching, and maybe even participating in. Here are folks that are passionate about their conversation, passionately defending market free style of speech, and I’m wondering, can we transmit that same quality of spirit into our BPX community?

I guess the answer is simply to invite some of the conversationalists to bring the play over to BPX and help ensure that we will have discussions with folks who are not just pontificating, but also really listening to one another.

[sig]

Marilyn, thanks for your kind words!

And as said before - I was amazed by the openness I met (and the smart people of course!) at SAP, that's the way it should be.

I know that Mark balked at me joining in at the BPX a bit when he found out that "thingamy does accounting too..." - of course ... probably ;)

But I'm more of the "open source competing" school (if there is one that is) as described a few post later here.

Keep up the good work, what you're doing with the SDN/BPX is not only good for SAP but also for the community out there and that is after all the objective of doing business for us all!