My musings on the event:
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation:
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HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) doing well – After HCP had been in a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ stage at SAP – only to be ‘kissed’ (aka mentioned in and getting keynote time) at Sapphire this year, it is making fast progress. The need for a PaaS platform for SAP customers is at hand – not only for the Integrate and Extend scenarios, but also for the Build Scenario. I had the opportunity to be on a panel with SAP customer Owens-Illinois, who use HCP as an extension tool enabling local compliance, a good use case. Generally the experienced European audience knows what to do and what to ask around integration and extension scenarios, as they have lived and worked through them for the past decades. At the same time basic questions on cloud, PaaS and security are still very common, underling the basic evangelism work SAP (and other vendors) have to do in order to get the average European enterprise comofortable on running in the cloud and using development tools that operate in and from the cloud.
Business Objects is back – As communicated at SapphireNow in Orlando (read here), SAP has brought back the venerable Business Object brand, as an umbrella brand for the many SAP BI offerings. And BI products were obviously top of mind in regards of a sales push in Europe in 2016, as most of the technology keynote was dedicated to business intelligence, and there mostly dashboards. The idea of the keynote to have a conversation of a CEO with its respective LOB leaders was a good idea, but was at times challenged as the LOB ‘leaders’ had to jump back between doing LoB work and doing the marketing / sales pitch. What I left with was that SAP has a lot of BI products, has created a lot of dashboards and now needs to harmonize the user experience across them. While it is fair to point out that many users will only work with the respective BI offering of their functional silo, the cross function insight and oversight is one of the key value propositions that SAP (as a suite vendor) brings to the table. It is going to be key for SAP to harmonize the user experience soon, but to be fair the umbrella brand “Business Objects” was only launched a few weeks ago.
SuccessFactors with local expertise – Not many news from SuccessFactors from my side, as we come back from an in depth 2 day analyst day (takeaways and more are here). SAP played though the local expertise and content card with the launch of Apprentice Management. The European apprentice system is something unique to a number of European countries and is a key HR activity that is under automated. Good to see that SAP realized the opportunity and has now the first offering of Apprentice Management, natively integrated into a HR Core product (here of course EmployeeCentral). It’s a good start for SuccessFactors and if SAP can provide a handful more of these local, region relevant offerings, while the competition may blink on providing them, it could create a solid differentiator for the product, thus creating more of a ‘HCM Fortress Europe’ vs. the usual North American based competitors.
MyPOV
A good event for SAP that has used an event organizer to handle an independent agenda, that nonetheless is very SAP dominated in both message and delivery. It is a good event for customers to check out and understand the new SAP offerings, with a decent size expo, so the ecosystem is present and attending, too. Given Vienna as the location, the attendees were not surprisingly Central / Eastern European.
On the concern side it is also clear that SAP has a long way to go in regards of getting its experienced customer base to adopt new products. Customers are highly skeptical, ask tough questions and have the average European concern towards cloud. On the flipside it is a healthy reality check for a US based analyst (like yours truly) to see and learn why European customers are still ‘clinging to their data centers’, thus having SAP do the split between cloud and on premises offerings.
But overall a good, informative event, SAP customers and prospects should use these events to come up to speed on the latest SAP offerings. With a Sapphire like presence of SAP executives and employees, it is also a good opportunity for SAP customers (and prospects) to build the relationships that often are the key success factor for a successful enterprise application implementation…
Also checkout this video on Facebook when Emily Mui of SAP, Eric Kavangh of The Bloor Group and me chatted about SAP HCP, use cases, cloud adoption and more here.
Find more coverage on Holger Mueller's website here, checkout his magazine on Flipboard here, his Storify collections here, his Slideshare account here and his YouTube channel here.