Andrew White

Unofficial Trip Report: SAP Sapphire 2009

Last week I had the good fortune of attending SAP’s annual Sapphire event in Orlando.  Other than some warm weather, and some pretty exciting thunder storms, there were lots to see and hear at the event.  As usual SAP put on a good “show” with lots of content, customer speakers, and product updates.  Some of the more interesting tidbits of information I found included: 

• SAP Business Suite 7 (released worldwide May 2009) – specifically Product Lifecycle Planning (PLM) was demoed and this showed, I thought quite nicely, the concept of embedding analytics into the business process (and resulting application).  Too many vendors think that “embedding analytics” means a stand alone application for “analytics” which is OK, but not really what users want.  The functionality seemed flexible and could easily be extended to other application domains and processes, such as ERP, CRM, Procurement, and SCM.  I believe that is what SAP will do looking forward
• Sustainability – SAP unveiled/updated the attendees with its own efforts in this important area (how SAP the vendor is monitoring its carbon footprint, and reducing it) as well as how it plans to help its customers/users manage and reduce their own footprints.  The problems in this area are many and can be boiled down to:
  • data (do we have what we need to determine footprint)
  • scope (what and whose footprint are we talking about anyway)
  • legislation/regulation (external, possibly even silly, requirements to report and even do things)
  • business case (trying to relate this effort with the pursuit of profit is complicated as it is)

SAP’s strategy is not to bet on any one approach across these 4 dimensions of complexity.  Instead the vendor has created a nice playground in which its customers, partners, and other interested stakeholders can participate by providing input to SAP.  Using this web site you can all vote as to where you think SAP should focus.  At least we won’t get dinged for chasing SAP now; SAP can blame the lack of, or specific responses from, the community for the decisions (or lack of).  In all seriousness though, SAP is making efforts and this should be looked at positively.  However, I myself would like to know more about the model they use (the scope, data) in order to understand how well SAP understands this problem – and growing opportunity.

• SAP MDM – strategy was updated, expanding their efforts related to governance – a very thorny topic for MDM users (from all vendors).  SAP has several “products” in the MDM arena and it is making efforts to align the product naming conventions that come from, more recently, a more evolved product strategy.  Watch this space for news on this (well, watch our web site at www.gartner.com).
• Hasso Platner, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board, presented for an hour on a new in-memory database design that seems to show promise increased performance over other database designs.  The whole key note for day 2 was spent on explaining to attendees how new and powerful this database design was, over all-comers.  No need to wonder what this was all about.  Guess what’s gonna happen soon…
• SAP demoed their new SAP Business Objects Explorer.  Now this product looks very interesting.  It looked like a flexible data mining-cum-data analysis tool.  It is designed to sit across lots of data stores and provide an English language search capability that automatically aggregates and/or presents data intuitively to users.  Imaging searching for “customers”, “region”, “revenue”, “last 3 years”, “top 3” (or something like that) and the within seconds (speed as a key characteristic) a grid is populated with sales data for the last 3 years sorted by customer and region.  Of course, the tool is bounded by the accuracy and effective integrity of the data and stores (no “single view” results in crappy output).  More interesting, the paradigm (over used word, sure) that the application offers is new; the problem I have is that users do not, yet, think or work this way.  During the demo I thought to myself, “meandering BI” in that the demo implied that business users sat around in front of the screen all day just toying with ways in which to interest with their data.  This was unfair (I figured afterward) in that the demo    Molson Coors has been written about on their use of the product. 

Other than that, the time was spent in various 1-1 meetings with SAP executives and customers.  The event was well received and helpful in building out research positions.

My overall highlight however was the pleasure I had in attending a breakfast session hosted by Backoffice Associates.  These guys are a small vendor that focuses on data migration and data governance in and around the SAP environment.  They seem to play a niche role in helping firms get governance of master data underway in preparation of and In support of the technology that would come from SAP (SAP NetWeaver MDM).  I was on the panel and heard some great stories of large SAP customers that had worked with Backoffice Associates with SAP ERP.  These were customers with complex businesses, often global, with lots of MDM challenges, and that had used Backoffice in association with SAP applications.  Very informative.

Better yet, I had the pleasure of getting my picture taken with Brent Spiner – otherwise known as ‘Data’.  This was not favoritism – he was on the show floor so lots of folks had their picture taken.  Anyway, you all should know who Data is – and if you don’t, you should J.  I could not wipe the smile from my face all day.