The fine print from the SAP-Sybase roadmap

The dust has settled on SAP’s Sybase roadmap announcement in Boston. While the big news (to me anyway) centered around SAP’s plans to release a mobile development platform in nine months there were a few other interesting tidbits to come out of the event, particularly in the “deep dives” held after lunch. 

That includes some somewhat vague roadmap details, but we can expect more detail at TechEd and plenty of fanfare at next year’s Sapphire conference, which should arrive just around that nine-month timeline. For now, this is what people have to go on.

Mobile

SAP-Sybase currently supports the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows tablets and Symbian devices. In the next nine to 18 months they will support Windows Phone 7, HTML 5 and then Linux.

“We think it’s going to be the Linux that’s going to be used for the Asian markets,” Gary Kovacs, Sybase senior vice president markets solutions and products said.

Cloud (what event would be complete without it?)

Sybase currently has a Web services interface, telecom expense management integration and Sybase mobile services integration.

“The key cloud services in the next version will be much richer in its support for more commonly deployed cloud services and integrate with additional carrier services,” Kovacs said.

Integration between SAP and Sybase

Sybase has completed some integration with the SAP NetWeaver Mobile platform, including TCO reduction, an enterprise app store, Mobile BI and Analytics.

Over the next nine to 18 months the two companies will work to integrate Sybase with NetWeaver Mobile and BusinessObjects Mobile BI.

Applications

SAP and Sybase have already rolled out Mobile Sales for SAP CRM and Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite.

Get ready for an enhanced mobile field service module. The next mobile application project is Sybase Mobile service for SAP CRM and it too will be delivered in the next nine to 18 months. A more detailed roadmap will be made available in Q4 2010.

When it comes to mobile applications SAP is clearly banking that Sybase becomes the mobile middleware platform which its partner network can build mobile applications on top of. Those who have already gone down the path to NetWeaver Mobile and Business Objects Mobile will have to wait for that integration, which SAP hasn’t put a timetable on.

The future for third party mobile middleware on the other hand seems uncertain. It certainly sounds like Sybase-SAP wants partners to be able to build the applications on Sybase-SAP middleware — which leaves lingering questions for partners like Syclo and Antenna.

“There are third party middleware platforms that supply some unique needs we do not want to cut off,” Kovacs said. “There will be partner and custom applications that we enable [for them].”

Mobile technology beyond the phone

The other interesting area that Kovacs mentioned and industry analyst Josh Greenbaum brought up was SAP-Sybase’s plans for mobile technology outside of mobile phones.

“If there is a process or application that’s driving that business we want to enable that,” Kovacs said, bringing up GPS in cars, IP-enabled devices for nurses and even machine to machine. “The first launch is the low hanging fruit but the vision and the roadmap encompasses so much more.”

Sybase’s business

Sybase will continue to be run as a separate business and it became apparent that both sides see a lot of opportunity. Sybase CEO John Chen practically salivated as he talked about the 22 industry verticals SAP is in which he sees as “low hanging fruit” for Sybase to sell into.

Additionally, SAP certainly sees Sybase as another way into the Asian markets.

“They are the leader in Japan and China,” SAP’s co-CEO Bill McDermott said, “a place we need to grow our business and will grow our business.”

Information management and analytics

On the information and analytics side, my colleague Mark Brunelli offers up some perspective on what SAP-Sybase means for Oracle vs. SAP.

Clearly SAP sees some opportunity combining Sybase and BusinessObjects for complex event processing (CEP). SAP CTO Vishal Sikka used an oil company using CEP as his demo. Sybase plans to rename its CEP products the Sybase Event Stream Platform.

Brunelli also passed along this note from the event:

Also, at one point, Brian Vink, Sybase’s vice-president of data management products, sought to reassure the crowd that Sybase’s popular PowerBuilder developer tool will be a part of the company’s mobility strategy going forward. PowerBuilder is a development environment which allows users to create BI, Analytics and types of applications. According to Sybase, one of the key features of PowerBuilder is DataWindow, which helps users quickly build data rich applications with minimal coding.

“Work is being done in the lab on how we can leverage that data window capability onto mobile devices,” Vink said.

Some other post event coverage beyond the straight up news:

Kevin Benedict, an SAP mentor and mobile consultant blogged on all the SAP-Sybase mobile news.

Jon Reed, another SAP mentor and head of JonERP.com recorded a video interview with Vishal Sikka.

Eric Lai offered up some other tidbits and Tweets from the show at his Sybase blog.

SAP ROI chief amongst customers’ concerns

This past week, I had the opportunity to attend a New England Chapter meeting of ASUG. At EMC offices in Franklin, Mass., about 50 SAP professionals gathered to network and hear about a few highlighted topics – the SAP variant configurator, Enterprise Asset Management and data quality.

I love attending these events because they bring me back to reality. While we squabble in the IT press over the market’s innovation via the cloud and mobile devices, customers’ challenges in the trenches are considerably more prosaic and perhaps, even more challenging.

I heard the same theme from attendees there that I’ve heard over and over again at SAP shows – “our board doesn’t think we’re getting the ROI from our SAP installation that it counted on.” And, “folks are going off and buying software to do things that we could probably do in SAP, if they’d just ask us.”

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SAP and CA partnership boosts SAP’s position in GRC market

Excel is the biggest competitor in the Enterprise GRC space, Gartner’s French Caldwell said to me on a call about SAP’s new IT GRC partnership with CA.

That sentiment jived with a survey we recently conducted on SAP priorities on SearchSAP.com. Most of our readers said they weren’t using SAP’s GRC applications, either because they weren’t aware of them or they didn’t need them.

But Caldwell’s clients are finding that managing everything in Excel leads to “spreadsheet chaos,” he said. Therefore, he’s seeing more interest in buying one platform to automate these processes.

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Where’s the innovation around SAP maintenance and support?

This piece by Forrester’s John Rymer was blowing up my Twittersphere Thursday morning. Don’t write off SAP, Rymer contends, because, among other things, SAP is the worldwide IT foundation of so many organizations.

Rymer writes that SAP’s biggest chance for success is selling software to its enormous existing customer base.

With this in mind, allow me to beat a dead horse, or perhaps resurrect him. SAP’s working on a bunch of innovative things to keep its customers coming back for more- mobile, in-memory, on-demand. But if SAP’s future is based on making its existing customer base happy – let’s revisit something that made them extremely unhappy – the infamous maintenance and support fee hike.

One of the ways that customers expressed the distaste for the new maintenance and support policies was by not spending with SAP on discretionary projects.

“I think they were listening to their sales channels, and the people who processed purchase orders from customers who had nothing to do all year,” Duncan Jones said to me in a previous interview on why SAP caved and offered two-tiered support. “I think it was the impact on license revenue as much as the vocal complaints.”

I.e., because customers didn’t buy stuff, SAP caved and offered two maintenance and support options.

But is the issue really resolved? SAP mentor Jon Reed and I chatted the other day about the fact that while SAP sort of won the PR war on this issue, there really isn’t much of an option at all. Inflation and fees for extended support on releases older than ECC 6.0 will bring SAP Standard Support close to the cost of SAP Enterprise Support eventually. Dave Dobrin penned an excellent blog post on the topic. We’ve covered the Standard Support issue as well.

Could renewed attention on the maintenance and support issue be one key to keeping customers with SAP? And just as SAP is embarking on an “Apollo project” with in-memory, on-demand and mobile, isn’t the same boldness of vision needed in the maintenance and support question?

Reed said that “the whole support issue suffers from a failure of imagination.”

The KPI program with SUGEN could be called imaginative. SAP said it was a “model for the evolution of software support.” User groups sang its praises. And then, suddenly, when SAP re-introduced “options,” it was gone. SAP blamed it on the program being too difficult. My understanding is that tracking the KPIs relied on heavy use of Solution Manager, and many companies hadn’t configured it for the task.

But there are still ways SAP could revolutionize the maintenance and support model. SAP constantly touts SDN, and with good reason. SDN/SCN is one of SAP’s crown jewels, and one of the most “innovative” things a vendor long criticized for not being all that innovative has fostered.

Many customers are looking to their peers through SDN to solve their support issues. Some in the market have suggested that, in some way, participation levels on SDN could be leveraged toward maintenance and support contracts. Perhaps eventually the same model could be applied for user group forums.

You’ve got to start somewhere.

“The maintenance cow that all these vendors have milked is going to become a little skinny goat. And the more you hold onto it, the more in the end you’re going to lose,” Reed said.

Can SAP innovate quickly and quietly?

SAP CTO Vishal Sikka is big on the mantra “innovation without disruption.”

But in a recent research note, Gartner analysts make the case that while the “on-premise, on-demand, on-device, in-memory” vision that SAP proposes is innovative and exciting for its customers, it’s also potentially pretty disruptive. SAP still needs to prove to customers where, and how, it all fits in.

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Can Boies really work his magic on third-party support?

By hiring David Boies of Microsoft and Bush vs. Gore fame, Oracle’s at the very least making a strong threat to litigate the TomorrowNow case.

When TomorrowNow closed a couple of years back, it was assumed that the case would settle rather quickly. There is the possibility Oracle’s hired Boies to push SAP to settle for the “billions” it’s alleging SAP/TomorrowNow cost it. But a settlement conference scheduled for this month has been pushed off to September. It’ll be the third such conference, and with every conference the likelihood gets less and less that the case will settle.

But was this case really about the past? Does Oracle really care about money lost through TomorrowNow? Or is it about the future – the potential of third-party support to chip away at profits?

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SUGEN to tackle BusinessObjects product roadmaps

Today, SUGEN announced that it’ll work with BusinessObjects customers — both SAP and non-SAP shops – to give them a stronger voice with SAP on product roadmaps.

SUGEN is made up of representatives of SAP user groups worldwide.

“There’s a great thirst for knowledge not only of the BusinessObjects portfolio, but also on the integration roadmap,” said Craig Dale, chief executive of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group, which is leading the charge. “We’ve seen a vast rise in special interest groups dealing with BI.”

To that end, SUGEN sent a survey to every BusinessObjects user to determine what they want and how the user group can support them better. The organization is asking questions like — what are their requirements? What are they looking for from a user group around education, networking? What do they want from SAP? How do they see SAP? The survey closes at the end of June, and SUGEN expects to have the results by August, Dale said.

“We can probably offer them a lot of benefits they don’t understand yet,” he said.

From what SUGEN has learned so far, customers’ main questions are around product roadmaps, Dale said. So BusinessObjects users aren’t clear on where BusinessObjects is going. And having just completed a survey of our own readership on SearchSAP.com, the same is true for SAP shops – folks are still contemplating where BusinessObjects fits into their BI plans and where.

In this sense, bringing the two user groups together is a win-win. It may prove especially valuable for SAP shops that haven’t yet deployed BusinessObjects and are looking for an SAP BI roadmap.

SAP BusinessObjects BI tools will replace SAP’s BI products going forward, yet SAP customers are still confused on where BusinessObjects will fit into their landscapes and how to adopt them. Networking with BusinessObjects users will give SAP customers real examples of the good, the bad and the ugly on how these tools work in practice.

In turn, SUGEN’s hope is to give BusinessObjects customers a stronger voice on product development. SUGEN has a good track record of getting its point across. With more clout, BusinessObjects customers can call out what they don’t like about the tools, what needs to be fixed, and influence future produce development – providing a stronger product for SAP customers.

The key challenge will be reconciling the heterogeneous customer base – BusinessObjects users on different data warehousing platforms, different ERP and software backends – and ensuring that product improvements useful to not only the largest and most strategic customers make their way through.

Marin County sues Deloitte: Is it really SAP’s problem?

Over the past couple of weeks, a pretty major lawsuit involving a so-called failed SAP implementation has been unfolding. Marin County California is suing Deloitte Consulting. What’s most interesting is the chief complaint of the claim – that Deloitte misrepresented its skills and experience, according to an excellent blog post on the topic by Michael Krigsman, who studies IT project failures.

The fact that a customer is suing the systems integrator, not the vendor, is interesting. The adage that it’s not the software’s fault you didn’t put it in right is coming into play. But, as Krigsman points out, there is obviously a certain level of guilt by association here. The question remains – what’s SAP doing to ensure that people know how to implement its software in the first place?

Last year, former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker made headlines when he suggested that more of the SIs should hire certified consultants. To be precise, here’s the quote from “Between the Lines” ZDNet bloggers.

“I don’t give a s**t if it’s Accenture or IBM. I care about the customer. I find it shocking people are walking around talking to customers and have no experience on [SAP]. [Consultants] get hired [sic]of people and have no clue. It’s annoying but that’s a fact. Let’s start by certifying people,” said Apotheker.

In that vein, Jon Reed of JonERP.com and a team of SAP mentors dubbed the Certification 5 — Reed, Martin Gillet, Michael Koch, Leonardo De Araujo, and Dennis Howlett -recently completed a thoughtful analysis of the certification quandary. They challenge SAP to look at some of the issues surrounding certification, and its perception. They contend, among other things, that certification is perceived to bring little value to the hiring process and is not as trusted.

“As such we believe that being an SAP certified engineer should be viewed in the same way you might view a qualified doctor, dentist, lawyer or accountant. It should be a mark of quality, reliability and assurance that implementations are in safe hands,” the report reads.

It’s well-known that some of the biggest systems integrators don’t certify their consultants.

And certification seems to rarely factor into hiring decisions, according to Reed.

He recently ran some numbers on the IT-jobs website Dice to see what percentage of jobs require certification. Of the 1,700 SAP-related jobs listed that particular day, only 24 had SAP certification in the job description and only seven listed SAP certification as a requirements (five were SAP software partners).

“To me, that’s the bottom line. It’s just rarely a factor in hiring,” he said.

The Certification 5 recommends to SAP, for starters:

• Tie certification more closely to relevant field experience and problem solving skills, especially at the professional level
• Establish a certification ‘influence council’ of customers, partners, and community leaders
• Provide a timetable for the now-postponed Master level certification
• Help customers by educating them on how to evaluate and hire SAP professionals

Certification is always a touchy topic, and there are plenty of amazing uncertified SAP consultants to be sure.

But the issues that Marin County allegedly had with Deloitte aren’t going to go away. At Sapphire, my colleague Barney Beal pointed out that SAP’s pushing all of these new initiatives around mobile and in-memory. Are the corresponding skills of its workforce going to be there to keep up with SAP’s vision? What can it do to make it so?

At the “new SAP,” Reed hopes there is at least room to talk about how to ensure that.

“It kind of seems like right now, with Snabe and McDemott talking about the new SAP, a new approach to certification fits in,” Reed said. “More transparent. More responsive. More in tune with customer needs.”

Users tout the benefits of in-memory at Sapphire

During his keynote at Sapphire Now this year, Hasso Plattner discussed plans to fit in-memory databases into customers’ existing landscapes. He referred to the initiative as “Enterprise 2.0″ and even went as far as to make the claim that it would be bigger than the release of SAP R/3.

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Sapphire 2010: Innovation on the iPad

Anyone who attended Sapphire this year saw the iPad everywhere. From Hasso Plattner’s keynote to the booths of vendors on the show floor, everyone wanted to demo their products on Apple’s newest gadget.

So I wasn’t surprised to see a gentleman who looked to be in his late 20′s in the row over from me using one on the plane ride home from Orlando. He showed his colleague and my boss some of its features. His colleague remarked, “I think this is the future. You’ll go into your boss’s office with one of these.” The iPad owner answered, “Ya, this is really game changing.”

I thought, did Bill McDermott plant this guy on the plane next to me? “Game changing” was a phrase he used over and over again at Sapphire, and has used in the months leading up to SAP’s big show. Mobility has changed the game, he told us. The new worker wants this. Enterprises need this.

And that’s exactly what those folks sitting on the plane were saying.

Much of SAP’s customer base is just starting to wrap their heads around the types of “knowledge worker” applications SAP’s talking about now mobilizing. Sure, pretty much everyone has their email on their BlackBerry, iPhone or Droid. And there are plenty of organizations that are doing very innovative things with mobile devices and have been doing so for years. But many are still trying to figure out how and why they would run ERP-related, SCM-related, etc… applications on a mobile device.

A conversation I had with a reporter on the bus to a Sapphire event backed up my hypothesis. She covers mobile exclusively, and therefore, goes to a lot of mobile-focused user conferences. She said she was somewhat surprised at how few people at this conference were mobilizing enterprise applications. Sure it’s cool, she said they told her, they just needed to figure out how it would work in practice.

The iPad could truly be where the rubber meets the road with this stuff.

My colleagues are I remarked several times this week about how the iPad is the perfect device for a lot of these functions. The size, weight, and user interfaces all lend itself well to mobilizing applications that are harder to manuever on a smartphone.

SAP’s faced a lot of criticism for being too late to the game with a lot of things – mobile applications among them.

But maybe it’s arriving just in time.