I only offer a few new twists following on from yesterday’s at-length notes.
Listening to Irfan (CTO) again I will temper my concerns yesterday re his vision statement. I concede a point. Perhaps SAP has not driven totally new innovation, but SAP Hana SP09 does seem to represent a more rounded set of capability from a well established enterprise vendor. Yes, I would accept that. So not net new per se, but rounded.
Innovators Overshoot. I do think, more clearly now, that SAP needs some serious product strategy to determine how to monetize its innovation-enabling SAP Hana solution:
- Re-invent what it means to say, “ERP” (when you embed real-time analytics in an in-memory ERP system – ask the 1,450 Suite on Hana clients)
- Re-invent what information governance and interoperability such that cloud to cloud will become simpler than app to app. With no serious semantic-based response, its hard work
- New partnering program to support new ways to leverage HCP (I guess that’s obvious)
- Package up more of the one-off stories we keep hearing so they can be re sold (again, I think SAP is doing some of this)
I think of SAP Hana this way: imagine buying a souped-up, high-end gaming PC with 8 cores and 100 gig of memory, quad video cards each with 4 gig video memory. Then running Microsoft Word on it. It really opens up fast, and you can start typing really quickly. But we need new games and apps to leverage this new found power. We saw, this week, developers with zeal play with new toys. But beyond this, we need new reasons for being.
I’ll give you another example. Being an F1 fan I was impressed and in awe when I saw on stage at Sapphire, Ron Dennis of Mclaren. He and SAP were touting the power SAP Hana would bring to the ream in analyzing the telemetry streaming from their cars during each F1 race. All teams get the same data feeds. Only Mclaren had Hana. Only problem is, the team has not really altered its win rate on the track. So does this mean that the team users have not, as yet, figured out the new, next, innovative questions to ask of the data? The fastest calculator is not that useful if you keep asking the same old questions. I want to see Mclaren win. And I want to hear how SAP Hana made a difference.
