SAP and Zoho Come Together
SaaS September 28th, 2009
At least on screen… Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu delivers his keynote @ NASSCOM, and what’s the background? SAP Business ByDesign.
Business ByDesign: probably the best All-in-One SaaS suite NOT (quite) on the market today. 
Tags: A1S, bbd, business bydesign, byd, nasscom, SaaS, sap, zoho
Video Interview with SAP’s John Schwartz
Enterprise Software August 31st, 2009
NBC’s Press: Here host Scott McGrew, TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy and Fortune’s Jon Fortt interview SAP Executive Board Member John Schwartz in this two-part video.
Schwartz came to SAP through their acquisition of Business Objects, and unlike many acquisitions where the “assimilated” CEO gets slowly marginalized, this one seems to have worked well. In fact John Schwartz is becoming somewhat of a front man, especially as his analytics become the growth engine SAP badly needed, with their traditional transactional system being somewhat stale.
Another interesting aspect is that while SAP now has a an On-Demand Tzar in ex-Oracle John Wookey, his team is still largely strategizing – while Schwartz’s Business Objects is a showcase of a formerly traditional software company turning to SaaS aggressively.
Btw, this is not the first time an “acquired” exec catapults fast in SAP: the previous guy arguably started lower and raised to stardom fast… but he is now at a Better Place (pun intended).
Anyway, enjoy the discussion.
Btw, these videos have been online for a week now, but on the first day the were practically unviewable: watch for 3-4 seconds, then wait for long buffering… again… again.
One Customer at a Time is a great principle – in Customer Care, not on-demand video. 
Related posts:
- Columnar Data Storage
- SAP Gets Transactional with In-Memory Database: Changing the Game for Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft
- SAP’s Position on On-Demand, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
Tags: acquistions, analytics, business objects, SaaS, sap, schwartz, video, wookey, xref
SAP Discusses SaaS Strategy
Enterprise Software, SaaS June 11th, 2009
John Wookey has a tough job. The former Oracle Exec, currently EVP @ SAP, the Enterprise Software leader is supposed to charter SAP’s foray into On-Demand – in a company whose bread-and-butter is clearly in installed applications and which still largely considers a threat to its traditional lucrative business.
He spent the first 6 months crafting the new strategy, which he first announced at the SIIA OnDemand Europe conference in Amsterdam.
Tags: business bydesign, byd, Enterprise Software, On-Demand, SaaS, sap, siemens, smb, software as a service, succesfactors, talent management, xref
Who Says the iPHone is Not for Business When SAP Runs on It?
Enterprise Software, Technology March 11th, 2009
Well, SAP Executives, for starters .. just ask Vinnie Mirchandani or Larry Dignan. SAP Execs and key customers were quite dismissive of the iPhone as a business communication platform. But like I’ve said before discussing Oracle’s SaaS offering, it’s not what they say … it’s where they put their money. 
Granted, the SAP – Sybase partnership just being announced at these very moments (webcast) isn’t all about the iPhone: it’s about making the SAP Business Suite 7 available on iPhone, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. Still, it’s nice to see they chose the “right phone” for the video. (hat tip: Jeff Nolan)
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Tags: blackberry, bs7, iPhone, mobility, sap, sap bs7, sybase
Business ByNetSuite Goes After SAP, While The Giant is Sleeping – Where is Business ByDesign?
Enterprise Software, SMB / SME, SaaS November 7th, 2008
Ben recently reported on how NetSuite is going after Salesforce.com, by announcing their Renewforce program. Today NetSuite is going after bigger fish: the leader in Enterprise Software, SAP.
The aptly named Business ByNetsuite program guarantees at least 50% savings to current SAP R/3 customers relative to – watch this! – the annual maintenance fees they are now paying to SAP. Yes, it’s not a price-to-price comparison. With the perpetual licence model customers pay upfront, but are still forced to pay annual maintenance fees – with SaaS there is only a subscription fee, and now NetSuite proves it can be half of only the maintenance component of traditional software’s TCO.
Read on to find out how SAP’s own blunder around their excellent product, Business ByDesign opened the opportunity for Netsuite…
Tags: A1S, bbd, business bydesign, byd, Enterprise Software, marketing, netsuite, SaaS, sap, sap byd, small business software, smb, sme, software maintenance
SAP TechEd: Windows is Out. But Windows are In.
Humor October 14th, 2008
My fellow Enterprise Irregulars are at SAP’s TechEd in Berlin, Germany. David Terrar is apparently in Windows-prison, as he observed:
Here in the Bloggers Room at SAP TechEd 2008, the Windows users (of which I am one) are consigned to one end of the room. We have to take regular abuse from the Mac fanboys. As you can see, the score is Apple Mac 8 Windows based PCs 3. In the blog world we M$ types appear to be a dying breed.
I told him he’d probably get a very different count in the keynote theater, where the real corporate folks are, who don’t have a choice – unless they all work for Citrix.
Photo credit: David Terrar
But there’s something else strikingly obvious on this photo. Windows is out. But Windows are in – I mean the real ones, letting daylight in. This is something we’ll never get in the US. I almost forgot the luxury of having windows (not the MS-kind) is quite normal in Europe.
Tags: Apple, Enterprise irregulars, ergonomics, Humor, mac, ms, sap, sap teched, Windows
SAP Sets the World on Fire
Humor, Misc May 20th, 2008
SAPPHIRE 08 in Orlando: Bush fires in Florida right after we left. (This miracle house is worth a look: everything around is charred except the house and lawn.)
SAPPHIRE 08 in Berlin: The Berlin Philharmonic is on fire.
Who says old SAP can’t set the World on fire? 
Tags: sap, sapphire08
I don’t normally do this, but I figured if re-tweeting on Twitter is accepted, then re-blogging should be OK, too.
Some of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars are at SAP’s European Conference, SAPPHIRE 08 in Berlin, and James Governor juxtaposed two photos taken there:
James leaves it to the reader to work out which group the bloggers are.
Tags: Blogging, media, press, sap, sapphire08
My SAPedia …
Misc May 18th, 2008
… from almost two decades ago. A found this gem amongst a bunch of old photos I saved by digitizing them. This was a rookie consultant’s SAP knowledge base. Search wasn’t quite as powerful as it is on SDN, Wikipedia or just about any Knowledge Management tool today. Oh, and it was quite local: you either had to right binder with you or not. SAP Consultants typically bought big heavy pilot cases trying to carry at least 3 binders for Client visits. If they lucked out, the correct three …
It was quite a good workout though.
Today’s equivalent: a laptop? Perhaps an iPhone?
Tags: Knowledge Management, sap, SAPedia, SDN
Florida Burning – Miracle House
Misc May 13th, 2008
OK, OK, so SAP’ s annual conference was supposed to set everything on fire – but did they have to take it literally? We barely made it home and now Florida is burning. Oh, and one lucky person owns a miracle home: everything is charred except his house and lawn.
Do you think it’s Photoshopped? That’s what I thought, too, but Orlando Sentinel photographer Joe Burbank says he took the shot from a helicopter tour of the area.
Zoli Erdos
