The Reinvention of SAP 2 Can SAP Deliver IT Simplicity? 3 SAP’S Top 10 Priorities to Real-Time Analytics, BI Ahead Become Undisputed No

May 31, 2010 SAS

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A n a l y t i c s A lert C o n t e n t s The Reinvention of SAP 2 Can SAP Deliver IT Simplicity? 3 SAP’s Top 10 Priorities to Real-Time Analytics, BI Ahead Become Undisputed No. 1 9 SAP SaaS Strategy Needs to Deliver In a rollout of new products and a renewed strategy 10 How SAP Is Leading the Mobile centered on in-memory and column-oriented database Enterprise Revolution technology, SAP promises a commitment to “real” 13 SAP Must Prove Sybase Synergies real-time analysis without risk. With a new manage- 16 SAP Bets on In-Memory Tech 19 Hasso Plattner’s Six Steps to ment structure, co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Real-Time Database Nirvana Bill McDermott, along with Hasso Plattner, founder 20 Oracle Hammered by SAP for and chairman, laid out SAP’s new orientation, vision Stifling Customer Choice and plans for the future. 23 SAP Customers Get a User-Group Champion 25 Quick Takes on SAP’s Sapphire Announcements 27 How Will Larry Ellison Counter SAP’s Mobile Offensive? 29 iPhone Sets Response Time for Enterprise Apps: Plattner 30 SAP Smart to Snare Sybase’s Mobile Mojo R einvention of SAP

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May 24, 2010 Can SAP Deliver IT Simplicity? By Doug Henschen

There’s no doubt that SAP customers are excited about the in-memory and column-store database technology announced at the recent Sapphire event. But are they hearing only what they want to hear from SAP? And if that’s the case, when can the company deliver what they are really after?

SAP put the emphasis of its SAP Business Analytic Engine announcement on delivering what it called “real, real-time” analysis. But among the SAP customers InformationWeek canvassed, the bottom-line takeaway on the “New DB” described by Chairman Hasso Plattner was that it could simplify IT environments by eliminating business intelligence infrastructure.

“Most of what we look at through BI is just data that’s in SAP R3 put in a different place so that we can report on it quickly and efficiently,” said Mike O’Dell, CIO at Pacific Coast Building Products. “If suddenly I can do that same reporting on a live system because it’s in-memory and it’s fast, then I don’t need the infrastructure for BI.”

An executive at Kraft Foods had much the same take. “The real value is in removing complexity,” said Tom Zavos, senior director of business intelligence at Kraft. “I won’t have to do ETL any- more, and I won’t need a separate business warehouse database or additional appliances like the [SAP] BW Accelerator.”

In fact, Zavos and others told InformationWeek that the desire for simplicity trumps the demand for real-time analysis. “We do have situations where people want real-time insight, but that’s more often the exception,” Zavos said. Customer-fac- ing users like salespeople might Bill McDermott’s appreciate real time, he added. time to co-lead. But he questioned the need for

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marketing, procurement or manufacturing personnel to go beyond daily updates.

In the six-step roadmap outlined in his keynote address, SAP’s Plattner said the New DB/SAP Business Analytic Engine would first serve as a sort of turbo charger alongside existing application and data warehouse infrastructure. This “no risk” approach offers the advantage of not ripping and replacing existing systems, he said. Workloads will be moved over to the new environment gradually and aging legacy systems decommissioned over time.

But if simplicity is what customers are really after, how quickly can companies hope to get to the latter stages of SAP’s roadmap? It’s too early to say, co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe told Information- Week. He did allow, “it will start in analytics, and then you’ll see us building more advanced optimization applications like planning.”

The response at least suggests that customers won’t have to wait years to consolidate BI infrastructure. The real question on most customers’ minds is “How much will it cost?”

In an interview with InformationWeek, co-CEO Bill McDermott said questions about cost could only be answered when the product comes to market, but he noted that “by definition, it seems that removing layers takes cost out... There will be different situations for different customers, but the theme is ‘let’s get rid of redundant IT and free up cash flow for innovation.’”

The bottom line is that SAP is selling consolidation as well as real-time performance. And on both fronts, there are many questions about cost, performance, storage capacity, data integration flexi- bility and several other details that are nowhere near being answered. Nonetheless, SAP customers like what they’re hearing.

May 17, 2010 SAP’s Top 10 Priorities to Become Undisputed No. 1 By Bob Evans

Crisis and opportunity often go hand in hand, and several months ago SAP appeared to be hell- bent on heading for the crisis ward: one CEO ousted, two new co-CEOs appointed, and a leg-

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endary chairman speaking out with brutal candor about lousy employee morale, outdated product development approaches and, worst of all, the loss of trust from customers.

That bumbling and troubled organization of earlier this year is difficult to recognize as SAP kicks off its Sapphire global customer conference, reinvigorated by impressive quarterly earnings and a high-profile agreement to acquire Sybase.

But the biggest change at SAP is one that’s simple to describe but often so difficult to achieve: assertive, confident and highly informed leadership. Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Snabe— and, of course, chairman Hasso Plattner—have done a magnificent job of clarifying SAP’s strategy, articulating its vision, reclaiming its customer-focused perspective and calming the jittery nerves among employees wondering where their company was headed in an increasingly aggressive and high-stakes business.

Here’s an example: In their Integrating SaaS and comments after SAP on-premises ERP means “a lead announced its quarterly earnings in April, Snabe and isn’t stuck as a lead. It McDermott simply and confi- becomes an order, a delivery, dently explained not just what had happened in the last three an invoice and a payment.” months but how SAP would —SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe shape its destiny in the coming year.

Snabe’s key points were the unified thread of on-premise, on-demand and on-device; the enormously important melding of business apps with business intelligence; mobile’s move to preeminence (and three weeks later, hello Sybase); and the role Business ByDesign would play in SAP’s future.

The message was simple, clear and confident: Here’s what we have, here’s where we’re going and here’s how customers will benefit.

Then McDermott, in equally simple and clear messages, pounded home the company’s resur- gence by describing the return of transformational deals accompanied by some “knockout” wins against Oracle (he didn’t say it was Oracle, but it was); emphasizing that double-digit growth

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was broad and deep; and signaling the return of customer trust by noting that 90% of customers were purchasing SAP’s top-tier support package.

That was enthusiastic, focused, clear, simple: Here’s the market, here’s what customers need, here’s where we fit in and here’s how we’ll drive even greater customer value.

As someone who’s followed SAP’s strategies and activities very closely for 18 months—and who’s been sharply critical of SAP throughout that time—I have to say I’ve found this turnaround to be nothing short of remarkable. And in the belief that a healthy, aggressive and customer- focused SAP is much better for its CIO customers than a stumbling, apologetic and internally centered SAP, we present this list of 10 priorities that SAP should establish to become the world’s top enterprise software company.

1) Keep Rebuilding Customers’ Trust: Help Them Grow. McDermott has been pounding home the message that SAP is the only company that seamlessly connects the corner executive office to the shop floor, and that’s certainly an essential capability. But customers already expect that from SAP. Also needed are powerful connections to customers, prospects and markets: more emphasis on the world outside, rather than the world within. What better way to build customer trust than to help those customers increase their own revenue and actionable market intelligence? Another vital chore McDermott and Snabe have undertaken is to gain insights into the feedback from all of SAP’s 100,000 customers, not just the top 100. In his comments about the company’s problems earlier this year, Plattner said SAP had developed a habit of devoting rigorous attention to its top 100 customers’ attitudes and impressions, and then assuming those opinions held true for SAP’s other 99,000 customers. That deep disconnect made many of those customers outside the top 100 feel that SAP didn’t care about their opinions, didn’t listen when they were offered, or both. Conversely, McDermott and Snabe are making it clear that the interests, needs and priorities of customers—all customers—will drive much of the company’s decision-making going forward.

2) Keep Rebuilding Employee Morale: Beyond Adrenaline Rush. Snabe and McDermott have delivered clear and concise strategic messages, they’ve engineered a dynamic acquisition with Sybase, and they’ve delivered some very promising financial results, and all of that has certainly fired up the troops and gotten the adrenaline surging. But Red Bull exists because adrenaline is temporary—so the co-CEOs have to prove that the buzz wasn’t just fleeting and that the proof will be in the execution of the product strategy of on-premise, on-demand and on-device; that the

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first quarter financials weren’t a one-time blip but rather the beginning of the new normal for SAP; and that the synergies promised from Sybase are rapidly transformed into tangible customer value and business value.

3) Articulate and Pursue a Grand Ambition. “Best-run businesses” is a great line and SAP should do everything in its power to live up to that. But SAP is rapidly moving into a position where its primary value to its customers won’t be in how it helps them run their businesses but rather in how they help those customers grow, expand, innovate and transform their businesses, as often as necessary, to keep pace with and take full advantage of the markets those customers serve. IBM has “smarter planet.” What is SAP’s grand ambition? A highly directed mission like that will certainly help keep No. 1 and No. 2 on track while also serving notice to the world that the SAP of 2010 and beyond is transcending the SAP of 2009.

4) Raise the Profile of “Value Engineering.” SAP has compiled extensive information on the processes, approaches, outcomes, problems and metrics of more than 6,000 of its global customers, which yields a knowledge asset that few if any companies in the world could match. For example, across multiple industries, SAP has metrics comparing the number of enterprise applications per billion dollars in revenue: At best-run companies, it’s three to five apps. But at less effective companies, the number of enterprise apps per billion dollars in revenue soars to 150. Such numbers might not solve any particular big problems, but they sure can give customers a sense of where they stand and how badly major change is needed.

In fact, for the past year, I’ve been making the case that those insights for what can be achieved with SAP’s software are becoming as valuable as the software itself, because in today’s highly fluid and dynamic global economy, it’s not just about how you “run” your business; it’s more and more about how you anticipate changes, predict what’s coming and pounce on opportunities as they happen, not after all your competitors are fully aware of them.

Here’s a perspective from Kerstin Geiger, SAP’s global head of industry solutions: “The pace and speed of innovation across the board is increasing dramatically, and it’s no longer a flat world but rather a world that has been turned upside down. Traditional industry boundaries are blurring significantly, and companies are beginning to play along their entire value chain and ecosystem instead of being just traditional players in one isolated part of the field.”

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“A mining company acquires its way into the steel production business and extends its value chain, and in other cases ecosystems extend from growing wood to paper production,” Geiger said in a recent phone interview. “In all these changes, new ecosystems are creating entirely new kinds of businesses.” How can SAP share the promise and detail of such insights most effectively with its customers and prospects?

5) Data Integration and Making It All Work. SAP is prominently pushing the notion that it’s an open environment with room and freedom for everyone, while it is stepping up its attacks on Oracle as a closed environment offering customers little or no alternative choices. That’s fair crit- icism, because Oracle’s new position is that heterogeneity breeds excessively expensive and complex infrastructure, which is based on an interview with Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president. But to live up to its talk, SAP must do more than just hammer Oracle. SAP must make a huge commitment to simplifying the thorny and time-consuming problems that enterprises face in trying to weave together data from different applications, platforms and departments.

6) Dazzle Customers With Mobile Innovation and Value. The acquisition of mobile-enabler and key partner Sybase is a great start because it gets SAP over a huge mobile hump that’s plagued several big IT companies. Many talk reverently about the coming mobile explosion and the need to lead, but almost none have matched the platitudes with specific action. Beyond Sybase, SAP has committed to mobile as a central element in its three-tiered strategy— on-premise, on-demand and on-device—and both Snabe and McDermott have said the day is very rapidly approaching when smartphones and PDAs will become the leading rather than the supporting platform for consuming and acting upon corporate information. SAP’s Value Engineering team should be intensively tracking and analyzing the impact of the mobile enterprise—and maybe SAP should also partner with a great research company on that same topic. After all, leaders don’t just talk about being leaders; they actually get out front and lead and do things no one else is doing.

7) Bring Transparency to Enterprise Support/Maintenance/Annual Fees. The customer-led rebel- lion from a year ago has been well documented and the company has said big customers are signing up almost unanimously for top-tier support. That’s a good start, but not enough. Since many of SAP’s customers still find the whole philosophy and business model of 20% or so annual “support” fees to be baffling—and feel exactly the same way about Oracle’s annual fees—SAP’s new commitment to transparency and customer value would be well served by the company explaining in great detail where those enterprise-support dollars go: Product development?

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Advanced engineering? Value engineering? Bottom line? All three? If SAP wants to truly remake itself and be the world’s greatest enterprise software company, it will trust its customers to see and comprehend how SAP is using those support dollars to generate significant value for its customers, while also being able to drive profit levels that enable the company to create the next- generation innovations those customers will need going forward.

8) The Dinosaur Label: Acknowledge and Obliterate It. We can’t escape our pasts but we can prove that they have no role in our futures. Until recently, SAP was clinging desperately to many of the large-scale approaches it had been using since its founding 35 years ago—its software- development processes, its attitude toward acquisitions, its attitude toward on-demand platforms, and its tight-lipped and often awkward approach to communication. Just as SAP evalu- ates its customers based on the number of enterprise apps per billion dollars in revenue, so too should SAP show the world how rapidly it’s changing by highlighting how its leaner development processes are accelerating innovation and product development, how the on-premise model can be enhanced by blending in some on-demand and on-device approaches, and how feedback from customers of all sizes is being incorporated into new products and approaches. There is great potential in the company’s promise to revolutionize the flow of enterprise knowledge and insight by uniting the formerly separate realms of business applications and business intelligence via its new in-memory technology. And one specific idea I’d love to see SAP adopt is bullish and confident discussions of its Business ByDesign achievements and customer uptake, which would ensure that the entire market understands that SAP is not just dabbling in the cloud/SaaS field but is deeply committed to it.

9) Enhance Key Relationships With IBM and Microsoft. If it’s true that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then SAP ought to be cuddling close with IBM and Microsoft, whose disdain (loathing?) for Oracle is beginning to approach the level of SAP’s. I would think a three-way “Enterprise Cloud Alliance” involving SAP, Microsoft and IBM could advance the interests of each of those companies while accelerating the value for customers. For example, joint develop- ments could result in methods for optimizing Microsoft’s new Azure fleet with SAP’s key applications running on IBM’s new Power systems.

10) Keeping the Drama Out of the Three-Headed Leadership. Before taking a leading role in this year’s media/analyst call to lay out the CEO changes and disclose the company’s problems, Plattner had not spoken to those audiences in seven years—but he promised he’d be back in a deeply engaged and involved role. Since then, he’s kept a relatively low public profile, and that’s

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probably because new co-CEOs Snabe and McDermott appear to be doing such a strong job of rallying the company, reassuring customers, and reestablishing the company’s profile and author- ity in the marketplace. Plattner’s willingness to re-engage with the company he founded 35 years ago was probably a great confidence-builder for many SAP employees and customers, and since then Snabe and McDermott’s public comments have been pitch-perfect. Yes, three months is not nearly enough of a track record for the co-CEOs, but the first quarter’s numbers were very solid and the company issued confident guidance for the remainder of the year. So far, the three high- profile execs seem to be settling peacefully and collaboratively into their roles. That is incredibly important to the company’s future prospects because SAP has enough external folks gunning for it that it doesn’t need to consume valuable time and energy dealing with internal theatrics. McDermott in particular has been very effective in balancing public comments about Oracle— confidently contrasting the two companies’ strategies and approaches with brief remarks, and then leaning aggressively away from Oracle and back into discussions of why SAP’s technology and customer focus will emerge triumphant.

One thing we’ll be watching closely is whether SAP chooses to continue presenting itself to the world as more interested in adapting to the customer demands of the future than in hewing closely to the SAP traditions of the past. Those actions will tell us all a great deal about SAP’s intentions toward aiming to become the world’s leading enterprise software company.

May 24, 2010 SAP SaaS Strategy Needs to Deliver By Doug Henschen

SAP articulated three pillars of its strategy at the recent Sapphire conference: on-premises, on-demand and on-device (meaning mobile devices). Of those, the on-demand pillar looks the weakest.

The problem is that this particular pillar is currently more about plans than actual products. SAP does have its BI OnDemand software-as-a-service business that originated with BusinessObjects. But it has yet to broadly release the SMB-focused Business ByDesign ERP suite, and it has no public timetable for private-cloud virtualization on Vblock infrastructure

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through its just-announced partnership with Cisco, EMC and VMware.

SAP is promising more SaaS applications, and has set a date for the re-release of Business ByDesign. SAP will replace its SAP CRM On Demand offering later this year with an improved Sales On Demand application touted as offering Facebook- and Twitter-like collaboration capabilities. The planned Sales On Demand app looks like an answer to the Chatter collaboration capabilities Salesforce.com has been testing for its SaaS-based CRM, to be released this summer.

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe says SAP will add to its portfolio of targeted “extension” apps, which are delivered in a SaaS model but integrated with on-premises ERP deployments. SAP has SaaS extension apps for sourcing and travel and expense management. A carbon-impact app will be added in July, and Snabe mentioned sales force automation and talent management as other areas for extension apps, but without dates.

Business ByDesign will be a major proving point for how serious SAP is about SaaS. It’s been SAP’s primary SaaS offering-in-waiting for more than 18 months. Having launched it once and pulled it back, Snabe now says SAP is accepting new subscriptions for an updated version of the ERP and CRM suite aimed at small and midsize business that will launch across multiple conti- nents in late July.

SAP has 100 customers running on the original Business ByDesign, but they’re deployed in single-tenant, hosted fashion. The multitenant 2.5 edition to be released in July will incorporate ele- ments of the SAP Business Analytic Engine announced at Sapphire, so it will support real-time analysis of transactional data within the application.

May 19, 2010 How SAP Is Leading the Mobile Enterprise Revolution By Bob Evans

As SAP begins to roll out some powerful new technologies that have been gestating for multiple years, the company is simultaneously racing to position itself as the leader of the mobile business revolution by not only assembling its own related technologies and services

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but optimizing its vaunted global partner ecosystem for mobile acceleration and regional customization.

“On enterprise mobility, our customers are banging down our doors and saying, ‘We need this now,’” said Singh Mecker, global head of SAP’s Ecosystem and Partner Group. “Business users have seen the capability of mobile in their personal lives, and now, whether for use in real-time inventory optimization or pipeline management, they want constant access to actionable information, not just data.”

“Business consumers are demanding this type of information,” he added, “and the only way to achieve that is mobile.”

At the company’s Sapphire global customer and partner conference recently—with a reported 50,000 attendees at simultaneous events in Frankfurt, Germany, and Orlando, Fla.—SAP’s top executives have been relentless in describing how mobile devices are rapidly becoming the preeminent computing platform worldwide, rather than being a portable extension of some of what a PC can deliver.

Co-CEO Bill McDermott was particularly effusive about the impact of mobile applications and mobile information, particularly in combination with the delivery of real-time information that SAP says it is close to being able to deliver.

The reason McDermott’s perspective on this is so important—and the reason why I chose to use the somewhat-loaded term “Mobile Enterprise Revolution” in the headline—is that he wasn’t talking about cool little apps or longer battery life, but rather the power to turn corporate cultures upside down and drive much-needed transformations in companies that are process-centric but need to become customer-centric.

“Real-time information changes cultures,” McDermott said in his keynote talk. “So the concept of the real-time enterprise is not just about business—the big idea is that it’s about people. And so is the unwiring of the enterprise. In China, consumers are leading the way to unleash the power of mobile—they’ve skipped the PC generation altogether. So, we believe mobile is the new desktop.”

Adding that SAP has begun referring to enterprise workers as business consumers, McDermott said mobility apps and devices, powered by real-time analytics, can create enormous value for companies by “extending their end-to-end processes closer to point of action.”

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“The promise here is that real-time mobility lets executives start to manage their business differently, moving away from static models like red/yellow/green dashboards and moving away from management by exception and letting the software do the work,” McDermott said. “The convergence of mobility and real-time will create new categories of business applications, unlocking the value of major investments in the enterprise and doing so without disruption. …CEOs want to make decisions on the fly, and they will expect full transparency in real time.”

That’s a pretty tall order for any company, and while SAP feels it’s doing its part, it also realizes it will need to harness the immense resources, imaginations and innovation of independent developers and gizmo-makers from across the globe. And that’s why the mobile-driven changes Mecker is leading in his Ecosystem and Partner Group are so critical to generating the momentum to accelerate this revolution far beyond what just SAP and Sybase can do.

“There is no question that mobility is driving the evolution of the SAP ecosystem,” Mecker said. In the past, he explained, the ecosystem for a big software company like SAP would be fairly straightforward: a few hardware companies, a few services companies and that was about it.

But no more.

“Now, we need content providers in our ecosystem, and cloud operators, and mobile service providers, and widget developers and app developers, with many of those coming from guys in their garages,” Mecker said.

On top of that, SAP’s ecosystem requirements for customers in high-growth and highly mobile countries such as China, Brazil and India will be markedly different from its needs in mature markets such as the U.S. and Europe. As a result, his team is looking at the mobile ecosystem in two extensions: one axis for mobile capabilities to be used in conjunction with SAP’s on-premise and on-demand solutions and technologies, and a second axis that takes into account “the geo- graphic element of specialized requirements by country.”

And Kevin Nix, who joined SAP a year ago when it acquired his mobile-enterprise start-up and now serves as senior VP for business solutions and technology, said that his newly formed mobile team (less than six weeks old) is focused on the idea of showing “instant value” to prove the potential of mobile in helping customers remake processes, workflow and how they view growth opportunities.

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“We need to make it really easy for our customers, big and small, to reach into the SAP EcoHub and find the perfect partner,” Nix said. “We have to keep working and working to make con- sumption of SAP content easier. You’re seeing that with Business ByDesign and with Business Objects, and down the line you’ll see it with Business Suite.

“And for our customers, that presents a huge opportunity.”

May 13, 2010 SAP Must Prove Sybase Synergies By Doug Henschen

With acquisitions being a growth engine for most large technology vendors these days, the pressure is on SAP to buy. But is the planned acquisition of Sybase, a $5.8 billion deal, a good fit? The answer depends on SAP’s ability to execute.

IBM’s rule on acquisitions, recently articulated by software executive Steve Mills in announcing the purchase of Cast Iron Systems, is that the company should be in an adjacent market and offer synergistic promise. Sybase doesn’t meet the first test well in that the database and mobile platform provider is not really in an adjacent market. Indeed, that’s a key reason SAP vowed that Sybase will be run as a separate subsidiary and that it will not pressure SAP customers to switch to Sybase databases.

So the value of this deal comes down to synergies. There are plenty of opportunities, starting with mobile access to applications and extending to potential blends of SAP and Sybase data management technologies, including in-memory analysis, column-store analytic databases and complex event processing.

In announcing the deal, SAP executives put a big emphasis on Sybase mobile capabilities, which include the Sybase Unwired mobile client development platform and Sybase 365, the vendor’s mobile messaging and mobile commerce services business. Sybase 365 is an “inter- operator,” passing messages among more than 700 network customers, including popular service providers such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Vodafone.

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The Mobile business accounts for about $400 million, or about a third, of Sybase’s $1.2 billion in revenue, but it is the fastest-growing part of the company. SAP executives said Sybase will give it “first-mover advantage in delivering the real-time, unwired enterprise,” and they cited plenty of stats underscoring the growing importance of the global market—including projections that the mobile internet will be 10 times larger than the desktop internet.

Sybase and SAP already have a 14-month-old partnership whereby SAP’s mobile applications are being developed and delivered on the Sybase Unwired platform. Supported device platforms include RIM, Google Android, Apple iPhone and iPad, and Microsoft, a breadth of offerings competitors will have trouble matching.

Will buying Sybase enable SAP to go beyond what it can achieve through partnership? “The first reason for the acquisition is one of strategy,” said SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott. “We identified an addressable market that would be substantially increased if we had mobility as a serious capability.”

SAP also mentioned Sybase’s global data centers, which exchange as many as 1.4 billion messages per day. That capacity and related data-center expertise could soon figure in delivering SAP cloud computing offerings, starting with the soon-to-be-re-released Business ByDesign service.

Real-Time Analytics Sybase’s $800 million database and information management unit—the largest part of its business—sometimes gets short shrift as being staid and unglamorous. But SAP is counting on important synergies here, too, particularly with the Sybase IQ analytic database and Aleri, the recently purchased complex event processing company.

The staid part is Sybase ASE, the company’s transactional database and distant-fourth competitor to Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. SAP doesn’t even support ASE as an underlying database for its applications currently. Support will quickly be added, but SAP executives clearly stated recently that they are not interested in single-stack selling and will leave the choice of databases entirely up to the customer. A few hardcore ASE customers in the banking, insurance or government sectors might bite on database consolidation, but the majority of SAP customers run Oracle database, and SAP knows better than to mess with entrenched loyalties.

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There’s a two-way fit between SAP’s in-memory technology and Sybase IQ, which is the leading column-store product in what has become a very hot market. In the current big-data era, more than 2,500 customers are using IQ for fast analysis of huge volumes of information. That’s a nice match with SAP BusinessObjects and the closest market adjacency in the deal. Introduced by SAP in 2006 as part of BW Accelerator, in-memory technology speeds analysis by handling processing in cache rather than on disk. SAP incorporated in-memory into the BusinessObjects Explorer tool last year.

By combining IQ and in-memory analysis, Sybase customers could gain an even faster analytic database. On the SAP side, SAP customers are likely to see the same combination; and if it’s well integrated, customer analytic queries could explore real-time transactional information as well as historical information. That would enable users to make decisions based on what’s happening now rather than relying on yesterday’s data. Lots of application vendors are working on eliminating the barriers between the transactional and analytic worlds. Microsoft (Dynamics), Lawson and Epicor have made strides in blending business intelligence into apps with recent releases, and it’s a central tenant of Oracle’s coming Fusion Applications.

Another real-time wrinkle in the Sybase portfolio is Aleri, the complex event processing (CEP) vendor Sybase acquired in February. CEP is used to spot patterns in fast-moving, high-volume data streams as they course through business systems, rather than after the data is stored and becomes a matter of history. The technology was pioneered on financial trading floors, but it’s now being adopted for telecommunications network monitoring, smart power grid management, real-time Web clickstream analysis and adaptive supply-chain/shipping logistics planning. It’s a good fit for many SAP customers, and it could also be used to quickly pass data from the transactional environment into an analytic warehouse. IBM, Oracle, Tibco and Software AG all have CEP technology, and Microsoft recently added it to SQL Server with stated ambitions to pursue real-time data analysis.

Execution Counts There’s no shortage of potential in the combination of SAP and Sybase technologies. The real question is whether SAP will be able to beat its rivals in delivering innovative products and services that exploit these underlying technologies.

Oracle acquired the TimesTen in-memory database years ago, but the technology hasn’t sur-

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faced very prominently elsewhere in the portfolio. Oracle also has CEP technology, by way of the BEA acquisition, but here, too, the company hasn’t delivered much. However, that’s not to say it couldn’t answer SAP innovations.

Combinations of Sybase IQ and BusinessObjects are also a possibility, answering IBM’s bundling of Cognos software with its data warehouse offerings. On the mobile front, the question is, will on-device access to apps be truly game changing, and can rivals counter with good enough access through the dominant mobile platforms?

Mobile access to applications and the blending of historical and real-time transactional insight are very new areas that don’t have a proven market track record or known demand. In that sense, SAP is truly counting on innovation and breakthrough value for customers.

“Yes, we could work together and, yes, we could go to market through partnerships,” acknowledged SAP co-CEO McDermott during a recent conference call. “But when you put two great engineering teams together to share crown jewels, you can connect the shop floor to the corner office and help customers all over the world be real-time enterprises.”

That’s a compelling vision. Whether it pays off is a matter of timely execution.

May 24, 2010 SAP Bets on In-Memory Tech

By Doug Henschen

SAP’s executives have had a lot to say in recent weeks about in-memory and column-store database technology, part of the company’s push to make real-time analytics and business intelligence a reality. At its recent Sapphire conference, SAP got specific, with two new products: the SAP Business Analytic Engine and a related High-Performance Analytic Appliance to be built on hardware from Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Promising “real real-time analysis without risk,” SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, along with chairman Hasso Plattner, detailed an impressive promise for the technology. The Analytic

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Engine software is designed to blend up-to-the-minute transactional information from within SAP applications with historical and other external data to enable real-time planning, optimization and analysis applications. Sikka said he’s pressing for release of the appliance by the end of this year.

At the core of the SAP Business Analytic Engine is the in-memory and column-oriented database technology that the company has previously used in the Business Warehouse Accelerator and SAP Business-Objects Explorer products. On top of the engine is a data- modeling interface that’s supposed to be easy enough for business analysts to use to bring data in from multiple systems and model these real-time applications.

The High-Performance Analytic Appliance is the SAP Business Analytic Engine delivered as a pre-integrated, ready-to-run hardware/software product. HP will be the first to build it, but IBM plans to as well; the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and BW Accelerator appliances are also offered by HP and IBM. The availability of a software-only engine suggests that cloud- based and embedded deployments are also possible. In fact, the engine’s capability will likely be embedded in the release of SAP’s Business ByDesign software-as-a-service ERP suite, which SAP is promising for July. (See story on page 9.)

The SAP Business Analytic Engine and related appliance will for now supplement, rather than replace, the relational databases underlying SAP applications and data warehouses. As such, it would bring the benefits of real-time analysis without ripping and replacing systems. Plattner, however, laid out a vision whereby SAP’s new combined transactional and OLAP engine will replace both data warehouses and the relational databases running under SAP apps.

How long will that transition take? Many years. Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe says the coming release is only the first in a six-step plan for bringing the technology to market. Analytic loads will be the first to move to the engine, he says, but it will be many years before the engine can become the underlying database for SAP applications.

The technology behind the analytic engine was developed by SAP and isn’t at all dependent upon synergies with Sybase, the database vendor SAP plans to acquire. The news from Sapphire makes it that much clearer that the value of the Sybase deal hinges on Sybase’s mobile computing assets.

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The Sapphire conference was particularly important for SAP, as it was the first for Snabe and Bill McDermott as co-CEOs. It’s also a time of upheaval for the ERP industry. Instead of focusing on multiyear ERP projects, IT teams are more consumed with projects around analytics, mobilizing applications, and tapping services quickly and easily using cloud computing.

Alienating IBM? What does IBM think of SAP creeping into the database business? Throughout the conference, SAP executives emphasized the company’s open ecosystem and partnerships with other best-of-breed vendors. Addressing what those vendors think about SAP introducing a product with the ultimate ambition of replacing data warehouses and other databases, McDermott says SAP briefed IBM, HP, EMC and Cisco on its plans. They’ll find opportunities to build new products and services around the SAP engine, he says.

“As far as I know, there’s only one company that thinks they have to sell everything to every customer that would be most threatened by this,” says McDermott, in an obvious dig at Oracle. “We’re not overly concerned about this at this time.”

SAP also extended its fledgling cloud computing efforts. It’s working with customers, including Levi Strauss, to test SAP applications on the hardware/software stack from Cisco, EMC and VMware, which it calls the Vblock virtualization infrastructure. Vblock combines computing, network, storage, security, management and virtualization technologies, with the idea that it will make it easier for companies to deliver shared services in private clouds.

It could also be used by hosting partners so they can more cheaply add customers and support larger deployments, raising efficiency by maximizing the use of existing hardware and software through virtualization. Cincinnati Bell just became an SAP hosting partner and will use Vblock as its infrastructure for delivering SAP applications to businesses in private-cloud fashion.

SAP didn’t specify when or how it will formally release Vblock-based virtualization options. It’s a front on which SAP is lagging behind some of its competitors. Lawson Software, for example, recently released the technology needed for private-cloud delivery of Lawson ERP apps on virtualized infrastructures such as VMware. And it has an external cloud option that lets Lawson apps run on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud platform.

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May 19, 2010 Hasso Plattner’s Six Steps to Real-Time Database Nirvana By Bob Evans

In an engaging look at the past and into the future, SAP’s founder and chairman recently laid out the company’s development strategy behind “The ‘Real’ Enterprise 2.0 (powered by in-memory computing),” which he says will give customers phenomenally higher levels of performance and value with absolutely zero risk. He named six steps for turning that vision into reality.

Emphasizing the significance of this technology for SAP and its customers, Hasso Plattner devot- ed more than an hour to describing some of the company’s R&D history with in-memory technology, along with some intriguing demos created on an iPhone and an iPad.

“Eventually, you will be able to get rid of traditional databases altogether,” Plattner said, “because it will have become superfluous. And you will be able to do that with no risk—none—to your business, and without having to change your software at all.”

Employee mobility necessitates building a strategy to protect corporate assets.

Plattner said he previewed the technology “for the head of Stanford University,” who reportedly remarked, “If you can pull this off, it will be a technology game-changer with huge impact.”

Here are the six steps Plattner outlined:

° Install and run the in-memory database in parallel ° Re-create traditional-style BI in memory ° Introduce next-gen BI running in parallel with no materialized views ° Eliminate all the traditional BI and virtualize all BI in memory, using nonmaterialized views ° Eliminate all disk storage and run directly on the in-memory store; all traditional DB is gone ° Rapidly roll out new releases (new tables, new attributes) and new applications without disruption

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On that final point, Plattner said the in-memory technology will allow major new releases to be installed in two hours.

May 20, 2010 Oracle Hammered by SAP for Stifling Customer Choice By Bob Evans

The world’s two largest enterprise software companies are placing massive bets on radically different approaches toward their customers’ IT environments with SAP zealously promoting the power of its large and expanding partner ecosystem, while Oracle bluntly contends that the only way for CIOs to slash IT costs and complexity is to standardize end to end on Oracle hardware and software.

At SAP’s Sapphire global customer and partner conference recently in Orlando and Frankfurt, SAP execs hammered relentlessly on not only their own unconditional commitment to giving their customers unfettered choice and openness, but also the danger and short-sightedness of going the single-vendor route of “legacy lock-in,” as SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott described it.

“We’re not in this game to go it alone—we’re the absolute antithesis of other competitors in our space who want to own the whole stack,” McDermott said. “We’re the antithesis of them—we don’t ever want to be like them—we want to work more closely than ever with our partners.”

And SAP co-CEO Jim Snabe had this to say about the company’s vastly different approaches: “We fundamentally don’t believe we need to buy a hardware company to deliver world-class systems to our customers,” pointing to SAP’s partnership with HP and IBM to provide hardware for SAP’s new High-Performance Analytic Appliance.

Such partnerships with HP and IBM and other of the world’s top IT companies offer CIOs “a better proposition than someone with single ownership of stack” and lets them “get far more value from ecosystems and partners as well as SAP.”

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That ecosystem-above-all philosophy—repeated dozens of times by various SAP execs during the two days I was at the event—stands in sharp contrast with Oracle’s emerging strategy as laid out by president Charles Phillips, who said CIOs simply cannot afford to go on wasting precious time and money focusing on tedious integration and connectivity chores.

“The entertainment value or intellectual stimulation you get from tweaking every little thing up and down that stack is not the same as it once was—they’re kind of bored with doing that,” Phillips said in an interview. “And the expense of doing that is apparent now—after going through the last two years of downturn, it kind of helped us in a way because people said, ‘I’ve gotta find a way to change what I’m doing—this is not working.’”

No All-in-One Appeal? Phillips freely admitted that Oracle’s one-stop-shopping strategy is jarring to many CIOs when run against their traditional ways of thinking and their long-held approaches to IT infrastructure, whose primary tenet always seemed to be that one-stop-shopping is the absolute worst of all possible scenarios.

“Right—and look where that philosophy’s gotten us,” Phillips said with a smile.

“Today, our strategy is doable only by us because we have the applications all the way down to the storage, and so the question is, do people want that—and we’re convinced that a large enough percentage of the market will change and say this makes sense, it’s logical, it’s an evolution of the industry, a maturation, and when you talk to CIO levels, that’s just the direction I think the industry’s evolving toward,” he said.

“It just makes sense. I mean, how long are we gonna keep piecing this stuff together? It takes forever. If you compare the cost of managing the environment we’re creating to the old way of doing it—we have some of both at Oracle and we’ve been able to measure it—we’re probably about 10% of the management cost if you standardize and use the appliances we’re talking about in our on-demand business vs. doing it the old way. A lot of things are just auto- mated and self-aware now.

“The cost difference,” Phillips explained, “is just gonna be huge if you use self-managing, pre-tested and pre-configured appliances because there’s less to manage and less potential for conflict.”

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But today, in describing SAP’s new “unrelenting commitment” to “putting our customers at the center of every single thing we do,” McDermott said that a large and active and engaged ecosystem is the key to innovation and customer success. “What matters most to us is the customer relationship,” he said, “and understanding our customers’ strategy and helping them figure out how we can enable that strategy to be executable. That will include innovation from SAP as well as our partners.

“No one single company has all the R&D, and all the innovation, and all the right business knowledge and strategy to make it all come together for customers,” he said. “No one company has that—none.”

SAP CTO Vishal Sikka also emphasized the primacy of the customer relationship, and how an extensive global ecosystem of the world’s top IT companies—including Oracle, by the way, which had a prominent booth at Sapphire—enhances that relationship and generates unique customer value.

Noting that SAP has 100 customers that have been with the company for more than 30 years, Sikka said that for his company, “the customer relationship endures because of choice—customers always prefer choice.”

“For customers, it is not a landscape of one—it never is—never, ever—and the best solutions comes from the entire ecosystem, a continuously evolving, living landscape: landscapes of choice and continuity, continuing to evolve without disruption, continuously offering the best.”

Sounds like unassailable logic, doesn’t it? But I could also make the case that on the basis of pure logic, Phillips has an equally compelling and simple point that the way to reduce IT cost and complexity is to take the steps that will, well, reduce IT cost and complexity.

“We’re taking this new approach to managing because the reason you’re spending so much on maintenance is because you have such a complex infrastructure to begin with and all the diversity is part of that cost,” Phillips said.

“And trying to maintain all the different flavors and configurations and integrations and cus- tomizations—you’ve created something so complex and customized that it’s unique to you— you’ve become a technology company because what you’ve created is so unique.

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“But you don’t want to be unique, not when it comes to your technology architecture—where you want to be unique is in your strategy and the way you configure our technology to support your strategy and not the actual technology underneath it—that’s the only way you’re gonna lower your cost,” he said.

“So we’ve been preaching standardization, and now we have enough throw-weight with the stack to drive standardization. And the second thing we tell people is, we know you like having 15 suppliers for everything—but there’s a cost to that. One way you can lower that maintenance cost is taking the products you already own and consolidate—replace what you’re using. It makes no sense, for instance, to have a license from three different companies for the same func- tion, and you’re paying your support on that. So if you’re an Oracle shop—and if you’re talking to us, you probably are—let’s replace all that stuff. You already own the licenses—let’s consolidate.” (On Oracle, of course.)

Well, CIOs, if you like to have sharp and clear-cut choices, then it can’t get much better than this. Both SAP and Oracle are promising you ways out of the expensive and dangerous infrastructure swamps in which you’re stuck, but their roadmaps for those escapes couldn’t possibly be more different.

Ready to choose?

May 18, 2010 SAP Customers Get a User-Group Champion By Doug Henschen

The Americas SAP User Group (ASUG) will be a strong advocate and champion for its 85,000 members. That’s the key message ASUG CEO Bridgette Chambers tried to get across in her keynote address at SAP’s recent Sapphire event in Orlando.

Less than 12 months on the job, Chambers took over from the previous top administrator, Steven Strout, who was ousted in 2008 after encouraging ASUG members to go along with SAP’s original single-tiered support plan. ASUG, along with other user groups, has since been

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credited with winning the current two-tiered plan.

Chambers has helped lead a transformation at the user group that is not unlike the makeover at SAP itself, which ousted Leo Apotheker a few months ago and installed co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. ASUG has completely restructured its operations over the last year, according to Chambers, changing programs that weren’t effective and launching larger volunteer leadership meetings, improved SAP customer performance benchmarking, and more extensive and interactive education programs.

“It’s no longer enough to educate our members on everything they need to know,” Chambers told InformationWeek. “There are many issues that impact SAP customers, so we have to fully understand those issues, engage with SAP and make sure they are listening.”

Chambers says ASUG is now working with Altimeter, the analyst group led by Ray Wang, to survey SAP customers and better understand what they think about issues such as the new enterprise support plan. While giving SAP credit for revising its original plan, Chambers notes that some policies have yet to be worked out to customers’ satisfaction.

“We sat down with SAP with survey results on the top three things that customers thought about the maintenance portfolio,” Chambers said, noting that the concerns were aired very publically through a video that was also available to ASUG members.

Among the top complaints is that many customers didn’t want to have to use SAP’s Solution Manager software, which some described as hard to install or redundant with existing systems management software such as Tivoli.

“I was told that SAP was surprised by some of the questions that came in, but we’re going to ask those questions because that’s what’s impacting our members,” Chambers said. Improvements in the software have since been made, but Chambers said ASUG is still nego- tiating with SAP on specific software requirements.

BusinessObjects Satisfaction BusinessObjects is another area where work remains both for SAP and ASUG. On the vendor side, BusinessObjects has struggled with low customer-support satisfaction rankings—as measured by Gartner and in the annual BARC BI Survey—since SAP moved BI customers

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over to its own support programs. Chambers said ASUG is working with Altimeter to survey BusinessObjects customers to bring specific measures and recommendations to SAP.

ASUG and the vendor-sponsored Global BusinessObjects Network (GBN) agreed to a merger early this year. Seeking to win over the 21,000 North American customers who use BusinessObjects software independently from SAP products, ASUG has created a BusinessObjects-only ASUG membership. Chambers said that this new membership would be offered at no charge for up to 5,000 customers through the end of 2011.

New Board Seat In addition, the user group announced a new ASUG Board seat for a BusinessObjects-only software user. “The Board seat was created specifically because the legacy GBN members told us they wanted appropriate representation at the strategy level, and this is part of our effort to reach out and integrate that community,” Chambers said.

ASUG also announced a new demo program whereby ASUG members can try out new SAP and SAP BusinessObjects technologies and solutions without the pressure of engaging through SAP’s usual sales channels.

May 19, 2010 Quick Takes on SAP’s Sapphire Announcements By Doug Henschen

It was a hectic week at SAP’s Sapphire event in Orlando. I was generally impressed with most of what the company had announced as well as with the sheer scale and smooth operation of the event. I’ve had many interviews with SAP executives and customers alike, so here’s a roundup of key questions, impressions and takeaways.

° The SAP Business Analytic Engine looks like a game changer. The product has yet to ship, of course, but the long-term promise is compelling. Big customers I’ve talked to, like execu-

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tives from Kraft and Celestica, are excited as much by the prospect of simplifying their environments as they are by gaining real-time access to application data.

° How soon could the “New DB,” as Hasso Plattner described it, replace data warehouse infrastructure and the databases underlying applications? Hold on there, dreamer. That’s something for years down the road. The engine/appliance starts as a complementary product (as in “works with what you have,” not “complimentary” as in free). The idea is that real-time insight will be so compelling that you’ll naturally add this technology to your existing environment. It will first replace separate analytic environments (including ETL) as you gradually move load over to that new environment. Finally, according to co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, it could possibly replace databases underneath SAP apps—if that’s what you want to do. SAP execs stressed that database choices are entirely up to the customer.

° What will the technology cost? That’s what customers really want to know. Those who run the Business Warehouse Accelerator say it’s seven-figures expensive, and the cost is mainly SAP licensing, not the hardware. That’s not to say the hardware won’t be a cost factor. We’re talking about accessing vast data stores directly from memory. DRAM is much cheaper than it used to be, but it’s still not as inexpensive as spinning disks.

° Why does SAP need Sybase? The in-memory and column-store technology demonstrated at Sapphire (as part of Business ByDesign and in various lab demos) is all SAP’s. The apps vendor has even developed event-processing technology on its own, so there’s probably little need to exploit Aleri’s super-high-end CEP for SAP’s purposes. The main reason SAP needs and wants Sybase is mobility, but I’m sure there are opportunities for SAP to gain database and analytic expertise from Sybase. On the Sybase side, access to in-memory technology, BusinessObjects assets and SAP apps could give that company a big boost. And what’s good for a Sybase subsidiary will ultimately be good for SAP.

Ready for Change? Are enterprises ready for the cultural change? Assuming SAP proves the New DB, there’s a possibility that executive ambitions might run afoul of entrenched loyalties, habits, opinions and attitudes among data integration, BI, DBA and other employee constituencies. Will laggards and Luddites place roadblocks in the way of change? I wouldn’t worry. This will be a years-long transition and IT people love innovation. If the New DB is truly a better mousetrap, it will win.

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May 18, 2010 How Will Larry Ellison Counter SAP’s Mobile Offensive? By Bob Evans

SAP’s not just saying mobile will be a vital enterprise device. Rather, SAP’s insisting that mobile is well on its way to becoming the dominant mobile platform.

And SAP’s not just gum-flapping about that position—by offering Sybase almost $6 billion in a friendly takeover, SAP is boldly jumping out in front of that trend by snatching up its preeminent mobile partner with the promise that the two companies can put their “crown jewels” together to create mobile enterprise apps and analytics that no other company can touch.

For all of the philosophical differences that exist between SAP and Oracle—and those differences make President Obama and Rush Limbaugh seem like a matched pair by compari- son—the significance of mobility is emerging as perhaps the most urgent and influential.

A couple of months ago, in detailed comments about how Oracle would overtake SAP as the global leaders in enterprise applications, CEO Larry Ellison never once mentioned mobile devices or applications. On an earnings call with financial analysts, Ellison centered his comments on two key points, neither of which included mobile platforms or opportunities: He said Oracle’s applications offer more industry-specific expertise than SAP’s, and he said his company’s forthcoming Fusion applications would offer big businesses vastly superior performance, reliability and value.

Mobility Is Key But at the recent dual-keynote presentations at Sapphire by co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Snabe, both executives pounded home the significance of mobility as one of the most powerful trends in enterprise computing today and in the years to come.

McDermott cited mobility as the second of three key themes he says he hears over and over from his CEO customers: They want to operate in real-time, they want to “unwire their enterprises” and they want to build sustainable businesses.

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“By being unwired, you can transform your organization and change the game,” McDermott stated in his presentation. “You empower your people. And in today’s world, ladies and gen- tlemen, either you do that, or someone else will do it for you.”

The acquisition of Sybase, McDermott said, will make SAP “the only company in the world that can offer a full suite of applications on any device in any place at any time.” And that unwired freedom, he said, “gives companies new opportunities to transform their businesses M-commerce and M-business.”

Co-CEO Snabe offered additional unconditional support for SAP’s mobile imperative. In his talk, Snabe highlighted the significance of mobility in SAP’s inclusion of it among its three strategic pillars: on-premise, on-demand and on-device. “We must now assume that busi- nesspeople want access 24/7 to the processes and information they need to do their jobs,” Snabe said.

“The announcement of our intention to acquire Sybase makes us No. 1 in business-process software, No. 1 in analytics and now also No. 1 in mobility—and that creates some very intriguing opportunities,” he said. “We believe there will be extreme demand for mobile experiences coming from everywhere.”

Both executives said the combination of those mobile capabilities and the real-time technologies SAP is developing will let customers accelerate their transformative initiatives, get closer to customers and create new growth opportunities.

So it looks like the two major battlegrounds between SAP and Oracle are shaping up to be mobility, as described above, and the question of whether a homogeneous stack simplifies and accelerates enterprise IT (that’s Oracle’s new position), or stifles innovation by facilitating vendor lock-in, which is a point Snabe and McDermott each made on multiple occasions.

It’s certainly possible that Oracle doesn’t see mobile as such a vital and strategic play for the enterprise because the company has, quite simply, said next to nothing about it. Just as Ellison didn’t even bring it up on the recent earnings call, Oracle president Charles Phillips also didn’t raise the subject in a recent 45-minute interview.

If Oracle decides to escalate its mobile initiatives, it will certainly be through an acquisition. The question is, who’s out there that could deliver a strategic advantage?

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May 20, 2010 iPhone Sets Response Time for Enterprise Apps: Plattner By Bob Evans

Follow the logic: Enterprise apps are surging onto smartphones, particularly Apple’s iPhone. iPhone users will not wait more than 15 seconds to get a response from their device. Ergo, all enterprise apps—even down to lowly dunning reports—must be able to perform at or close to real time. For SAP founder Hasso Plattner, that 15-second maximum might as well be confirmed as a new law of physics.

At SAP’s Sapphire global customer and partner event in Orlando, Plattner used his keynote presentation to give a detailed overview of the company’s new in-memory technology about which chairman Plattner said, “We can do things now that are absolutely amazing.”

Plattner added that the application of that new technology within SAP’s products will be dictated not by any SAP technology or product strategy, but by the real-world experiences of the company’s customers for whom mobile access and decision-making is becoming indispensable.

“People at SAP ask me, ‘Why do you insist on running a dunning program in seconds instead of two minutes? No one is asking for that type of speed for a dunning program,’” Plattner said. “And I tell them, ‘You are asking the wrong question. The right question is, how long will someone with an iPhone wait for an answer? And the answer is that 15 seconds is the absolute maximum amount of time people will wait before they start doing something else—check voicemail, send text messages, check e-mail, send text messages to themselves. This is the new reality!”

And while the SAP founder was unquestionably proud of the technology innovation and development work behind its two new in-memory products, he also was wise enough to divine that in these new times, the real IT gating factor has shifted from the IT tools themselves to the human experience of engaging with the information those applications and infrastructure provide.

“The simple reality is that 15 seconds is the longest anyone will wait for an answer on an iPhone,” Plattner said. “So the real key is not so much the speed of our technology, but how we apply the speed to business.”

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May 13, 2010 SAP Smart to Snare Sybase’s Mobile Mojo By Alexander Wolfe

SAP’s $5.8-billion acquisition of Sybase should finally put some momentum behind the movement of business-critical enterprise software apps onto smartphones. That’s something today’s increasingly mobile corporate workforces need. However, deployment has proceeded at a snail’s pace, probably because the enabling expertise has been centered in pockets outside of the mainstream of the enterprise software-development community.

What SAP realized a little over a year ago is that Sybase is one those pockets, and it’s a big one. In March 2009, SAP signed up Sybase to help put SAP’s enterprise apps onto mobile platforms. With the acquisition, SAP is making that marriage permanent and perhaps firing a shot across the bow of competitor Oracle, which has partnered with Antenna Software to get its apps smartphone-enabled.

It’s notable to me that SAP emphasized the mobile angle so prominently in its recent press release announcing the planned Sybase acquisition: “Sybase’s innovative mobile platform can connect all applications and data (SAP and non-SAP) and enable them on mobile devices. SAP, Sybase and their customers will be able to tap into Sybase’s messaging network to reach four billion mobile subscribers through 850+ operator relationships worldwide and engage their consumers via alerts, transactions and promotions on their mobile devices.”

I’m what I’d classify as an extreme proponent of mobile apps becoming the dominant mode in which we work. That was perhaps a radical idea in October 2008, when I wrote the InformationWeek story, “Is the Smartphone Your Next Computer?” Now, since the release of the iPad, probably not so much.

Yet I remain aghast that there are so many folks who belittle any form of work that isn’t tied to a overblown, PC-bound document or PowerPoint presentation. People, the work of the future is simply not going to be text-based. It will be lightweight—those mobile apps, again—video (unified communications) or numerical (spreadsheets). Those who don’t get this are doomed to be reading dead-tree content while subsisting on their Social Security checks.