• Launched
• Introduced
• Announced
• Previewed
• Pre-Announced
• Private Beta
• Beta
• Selective ramp up
• Ramp up
• Rolled out
• Limited Availability
• Shipping
• Limited General Availability
• General Availability
• Functionally complete

I go to a lot of software conferences, and read many press releases.  In the last few weeks I have seen and heard all these terms, and a few more that I have forgotten to note.  For all the talk of the move to Apple-like simplicity in enterprise software, trying to figure out when software is real or still in the imagination of its creators is becoming more and more difficult.

This is like the gathering in the Highlander. And Bill Kutik is the Christopher Lambert character with the beard and vast broadsword.  Bill as been around in HR technology since the Lyons tea room payroll, and  he is  constant as the northern star, of whose true-fix’d and resting quality, there is no fellow in the firmament.

Actually its the best opportunity to check out the latest in HR technology in one place.  I get to lurk this year, but my colleague Jim has a starring role, doing the final keynote.

I’m not planning on taking a lot of formal meetings. Lots of vendors have been asking for meetings, but we can do these anytime during the year, just set up a call via vendor briefings.  I plan to walk the floor, catch some customer sessions and avoid injuries.

I’m interested in sophisticated workforce analytics, innovative use of social software beyond recruitment, mobile otherthandoingthestandardapponthephone, workforce management systems and tales from the nitty gritty of global HR systems deployment.  I also want to discuss how New Zealand will cope with yet another Rugby World Cup defeat with the Sonar6 folks.

Assuming the flights work, I’ll make it to Naomi Bloom’s soiree too.

Seriously, if you are evaluating HR technology, this event is well worth attending,  eventhough it is in Vegas, that blasted heath.  I’ll only be there for the first two days, but I’m really looking forward to it.

The agenda is looking good, even if I say so myself.  Pat Phelan is doing a lot of great research on competency centres, training and really driving down costs in operating ERP, Johan Jocabs brings strong local knowledge and some of the leading thinking on CRM, and Dan Sholler has the measure of NetWeaver and related technologies. As chairperson I get to do the raffle , talk about user experience options and give an overall positioning presentation. It will be a busy few days.

It will also be interesting as the event is a couple of days after SAP Sapphire in Orlando, so it will be an opportunity to see how (or if) SAP’s messages have resonated with the local customer base.  Some of SAP’s most innovative customers are in South Africa, and it is always good to see ingenuity of those organizations.  South Africans aren’t afraid to say it as it is, so it will be lively.

I have been involved with the South African ERP and HR  community for most of my working career, so it will also be good to see familiar faces and old friends.
As usual Lisa and her team do a fabulous job in organizing it. If you’d like to attend, drop Lisa a note via the website.

It will be great to catch up with family too. While I’m there I’d also like to hook up with any South African startups in the HR /ERP space, I’ve been impressed with what I have seen so far, but I’m keen to see more.  I will have a few days in Jo’burg  meeting clients  and I’ll be popping down to Pietermaritzburg to watch my brother run Comrades (a rather long jog of 89 kms).

photo via cc of Svenwerk. Thanks.

Earlier this year, SAP did a good job at Sapphire in laying out more compelling vision. I expect Teched to be about adding some details to that vision, and I’m looking of evidence of execution: These are the things I’ll be scrutinizing.

1. By Design progress, both in terms of customer adoption and as a platform for SAP to build new on-demand applications.

2. What is “orchestration” exactly?

3. River and the other on-demand efforts. What’s really flowing?

4. Mobile strategy. Apps, ecoystem, costs.  Beyond the hype.

5. SAP and databases.  newDB, Sybase, in-memory etc. Timings.

6. BW and in-memory impact.

7. Gateway, UI, UX and future of SAP portal.

8. NetWeaver 7.3 details

9. MDM, BPM impact on existing customers

10. Impact of “cloud” on Business Suite.

11. Running SAP cheaper. SAP and ecosystem tools that reduce the day to day running costs of SAP.

From a partner perspective, I’m looking for alternative UI work, or UI enhancements, such as RIA, iPad etc.  Making SAP easier to consume is a research theme for me and several colleagues over the next quarter. Also anything that makes SAP cheaper to run.  I’m also very  interested in chatting to users to gauge how they see SAP’s plans and execution. 

If you want to catch up at Teched, drop me an email, or tweet me at @vendorprisey

Gartner clients may wish to read our note on the state of NetWeaver. SAP NetWeaver: The past, present and future.

Many organizations are unsure what NetWeaver is, or what it will become. What SAP has delivered differs significantly from the original vision. Rather than the enterprisewide middleware platform SAP envisioned, it’s best-suited to deploy SAP applications and integrate SAP applications and processes.

Over the years at conferences around the world, I’ve strolled the vendor booths, and seen all sorts. Some, just a desk and a couple of chairs, others vast multi-story gaudy edifices. They are all a bit of a blur. 

This week, at the HR tech conference I saw the best booth ever.

It was designed to

• draw attention
• bring delegates into an area where they couldn’t escape easily.
• be eco-friendly
• be participative (you could write on it)
• relate to the company culture and marketing message
• be 100x times cheaper than a typical stand

I give you the sonar6 minimalist box.

There is a software metaphor here too.  There is goodness is a common practice done uncommonly well.  At the event I saw evidence of some vendors starting to build simple applications that bring a consumer simplicity to existing, rather bloated, HR processes. 

The session I’ll be leading will digging into UI and usability options and challenges. We will present an extensive survey we have done on SAP UI perceptions, and look at options with SAP and third party tools.

I’m receiving an increasing number of client calls about UI/UX options, be it making the best out of SAP, or alternative tools that augment or replace the standard UI experience. There has been a big growth in tools and options to improve user experience, especially for self service and transactions like sales order entry.

I’m expecting to write some research with Jim Murphy on SAP UI options and roadmap later this year too, so I’m on the look out for Ui innovations in the SAP world.

There is significant appetite for a better user experience, but it is easy to get carried away with the tools.  A client research note published by my colleagues Ray Valdes, Eric Knipp and David Mitchell Smith on HTML 5 and Flash makes for sobering reading. I’ll quote a bit that is relevant here.

The average enterprise will continue to make ineffective use of any and all available UI technologies. The root problem is not lack of powerful UI technology. Instead, the root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development process. Rather than taking these steps, we see a lot of projects that are “stakeholder-driven” (i.e., driven by internal politics). Very few organizations center development around user needs by relying on objectively measured data about user behavior. Most enterprises don’t seem to care enough about the user experience to change their habits (in terms of processes that are developer-driven, vendor-driven and stakeholder-driven, rather than user-driven). The principles of creating effective user experiences are well-known among successful external-facing e-commerce or consumer sites, such as Amazon, eBay, Expedia or Facebook. Unfortunately, it will likely be a long time before these principles become part of the average enterprise skill set.

Developing a user experience that delights your users is not as much about the technology as it as about design. It is easy to knock the user experience of most standard software.  It is a lot harder to build something better yourself.

I hope it will be an interesting session. After our workshop the group and I  will go over and meet some of the SAP user interface team. I expect that meeting won’t be short of questions.

If you are interested in learning more about the Enterprise IT Leader SAP Peer Community, drop george dot martin at gartner dot com an email.

 Firstly: Dr Sue Black. 

I’ve not met Sue, except on twitter, but I have admired her efforts to support Bletchley Park for some time now. She blogs about them here. 

I think Bletchley Park should be a global heritage site. It is one of the cradles of our industry, and the work of the people there was as heroic as that of any soldier. Sue’s work in raising the profile of Bletchley is my main reason for featuring her, but her campaigning for women in technology is relentless, and her academic research is well worth a read too. 

 Secondly:  Theano.

I’ve not met her either, and she isn’t on twitter.

Theano of Crotona was the wife of Pythagoras.(born c. 546 B.C.),

According to tradition, Theano was the wife of Pythagoras. She and her two daughters carried on the Pythagorean School after the death of Pythagoras. She wrote treatises on mathematics, physics, medicine, and child psychology. McLemore writes that her most important work was the principle of the “Golden Mean.” But discerning what Theano actually did is extremely difficult. As stated in the article in the Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science.

That Theano continued to operate the school of Pythagoras after his death is often affirmed but not confirmed. Thus, it can only be stated that, according to tradition, Theano was a mathematician, a physician, and an administrator—someone who kept alive an important training ground for future mathematicians.

In addition, Damo (ca. 535-475 BC), the daughter of Phythagoras and Theano, is said to have published her father’s treatises on geometry as well as treatises on the construction of a regular tetrahedron and the construction of a cube.  via this site.

According to one source, Theano’s principal works included a Life of Pythagoras, a Cosmology, The Theorem of the Golden Mean, The Theory of Numbers, The Construction of the Universe, and a work titled On Virtue. None of the primary sources that remain, however, reveals anything of her personality.

Theano’s most important work is said to have been the principle of the Golden Mean. Like the geometrical constant pi, the Golden Mean is an irrational number that shows up in many relationships in nature. Its decimal value is approximately 1.6180. In geometry, a “golden” rectangle is one whose sides are related by the Golden Mean ratio, for example 13:8. Both the ancient Greeks and Egyptians designed buildings and monuments with proportions based on the Golden Mean. It is now known that some growth patterns observed in nature occur in accordance with the Golden Mean, examples being the spirals in the nautilus shell and the ratio of clockwise to counterclockwise spirals in a sunflower.

In a treatise on the construction of the universe attributed to Theano, she reportedly argues that the universe consists of ten concentric spheres: the Sun, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Earth, Counter-Earth, and the stars. The Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury move in orbit about a central fire. The stars are fixed and are not considered to move. In Theano’s theory, the distances between the spheres and the central fire are in the same arithmetic proportion as the intervals in the musical scales. via this site.

It is a shame that the work of both Theano and Damo is lost in the mists of time. It is my view that many of the great scientists of the past owe much more to their spouses or sisters than history lets on. Programmers may have heard of Theano as a python library.

(cross posted at my personal blog)

(photo mine, use with cc attribution licence) Hotel Fusion, San Francisco.

I’m just back home from a trip to California. I attended Oracle Open World, and had several other meetings in the bay area. 

I saw the Keynote presentation, and on the next day  I spent an hour or so with the leaders of HCM product Fusion product. Colleagues of mine here at Gartner have spent more time getting a deeper look, so I will leave the detailed product analysis to them for now. No doubt I will learn more over the next few months, but at the event I was more focused on getting to grips with PeopleSoft 9.1 and catching up on progress of EBS 12.1.

I have read quite a bit about Fusion over the last few days on twitter and on blogs, some of it thoughtful, some of it wishful and some of it rude. 

My thoughts.

Larry Ellison spent most of the keynote talking about hardware, with the odd barb aimed at IBM.

(photo via Oracle’s cc flickrstream. thanks)

He left Fusion right until the end.

It was enough of a look to show that it is relatively close to being done, or at least significantly further along than halfway. Larry outlined the scope, and mentioned some of its innovations. The demo was adequate without being awesome. It set some expectations, but it didn’t promise a new form of sliced bread. What Larry didn’t do is pontificate on how much revenue this thing will do. No suggestions of 10,000 customers, or billions of dollars of revenue. He didn’t promise much at all, other than a vague some time next year. 

He generated interest, but not enough to put a freeze on PeopleSoft 9.1 and EBS 12.1 upgrades. 

It would have been nice to see a bit more, but Oracle is in no rush. Oracle has the Sun acquisition to complete and digest, so I’d expect Fusion get more of push once Oracle has Sun on board and aligned.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Fusion comes shipped on its own special piece of hardware.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I’d suggest you read the whole post here.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know poet.  She never knew her father.  She is considered by historians to be the first programmer. Charles Babbage called her the Enchantress of Numbers. The programming language ADA is named after her.

The software industry is relatively new, yet is it more male dominated than most other industries. This doesn’t reflect well on the industry. And we have no excuse.There should be no place for misogyny.

The software industry would be stronger and a better place  if we all could encourage more women to see their future in technology, we are missing out on the next ADA. Showcasing role models rather than just models is a damn good place to start doing our bit to address this inequality.  I’d urge all my readers to sign up here. Over a thousand people have done so.

The German IT market has its own quirks and nuances. SAP looms even larger than it does in other markets, so I expect lots of discussions and mutterings on SAP’s maintenance moves.  I’ve had quite a few calls and meetings  with German CIO’s recently, and they are feeling more than a tad grumpy about the changes. I heard words that expand my German vocabulary but  are not suitable for a family blog.

Gartner subscribers may want to read Peter and Alexa’s note, Guidelines for Responding to SAP’s Increased Maintenance Fees (G00162411), 05-NOV-2008.

Clients are concerned about the significant cost impact of SAP’s new Enterprise Support offering, and have struggled to distill the benefits commensurate with the increase in fees. Gartner offers a six-step plan of action to help clients improve their situation with SAP.

The agenda has something of a green theme. As a society, "green" is not a new thing in Germany, it has been going on for decades, so the Germans have a good nose for Greenwash. 

The presenters are a mix of international and German analysts.

It will also be an opportunity to catch up with my German Colleagues. A conference half an hour’s drive away up the autobahn. Sweet. We have a merry band of German based analysts. Andy Bitterer, Carsten Casper, Martin Gutberlet, Christian Hestermann, Martina Kurth, Mick MacComacaigh, Frank Ridder, me, Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Jürgen Weiss, Peter Wesche, and Annette Zimmermann.  Many of them will be at the event.

In between my rather hectic travels, I’m working on figuring out my research agenda for 2009. I’ve not written anything about SAP since I joined, but now that I have some more personal distance, I hope to play a more active role in the SAP coverage at Gartner. These are interesting times.

If you would like to attend the event, Details here.