SAP packaged implementations: Status, history, challenges
During SAP’s Sapphire user conference, held recently in Orlando, the company emphasized in-memory computing, analytics, and mobile devices. However, I examined SAP’s efforts to improve implementation consistency and success. This post summarizes the status of SAP’s latest initiative to create successful implementations, called Rapid Deployment solutions, and places that work into context. The SAP brand [...]
Big Data and the New Face of Commerce
Here’s a simple task, let’s say you have an antique that you want to sell on eBay and you need to figure out what it’s worth, what would you do? I’ve sold a few things on eBay and to work…
Executive Profiles: Disruptive Tech Leaders In Social Business And Cloud Computing
Executive Profile Series Delivers The Inside View On Disruptive Technologies Starting this week, we’ll be kicking off an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing and Social Business. The interviews should provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective. The transcript of the 30 minute [...]
SAP’s SAPPHIRENOW: Women’s Leadership Summit
Since 2007 I have had the pleasure of participating in SAP’s Influencer Program. This group of digital influencers are invited to attend events like SAPPHIRENOW (SAP’s huge annual ecosystem conference – think MacWorld, but SAP) and TechEd (smaller, regional events with a more geeky bent) to see new products, speak 1:1 with senior executives and [...]
Why I abandoned Twitpic for photo-sharing
I take many photographs and post them online, often on Twitpic. People like the photos and often request that I post more. Twitpic works well because it’s flexible, easy to use, and integrates with major Twitter clients. Despite my respect for Twitpic and its obvious value, I will no longer use the service due to [...]
It’s hard to be CSC
It’s hard to be CSC. A perennial subject of acquisition chatter, it has built in poison pills in the form of gnarly government contracts with lots of limitations on who can own them and what can be done with them. This represents a disproportionate part of their revenue when compared to their competitors.
Cloud and the reshaping of business
Even though much of the discussion of cloud computing is focused on technology, I believe that the most important innovations on cloud platforms are going to happen at a business level. So here at the SIIA All About the Cloud conference today in San Francisco, one of the sessions I’d been especially looking forward to [...]
Analyzing The Real News Stories of Sapphire Now 2011, Part One: The Impact Of HANA
It’s becoming a tradition: a reporter pulls me aside at the end of an SAP show and asks, “There wasn’t really much news, was there?” No, and yes. BI 4.0 excepted, the most compelling SAP software releases of 2011 are looking like fall/winter timeframes. But there was plenty of “real news” to be found at [...]
Stifling growth? Challenge some assumptions!
McKinsey Quarterly has an article in their May edition – “Preparing your organization for growth” – that yet again reminds me about the total inability to ask the right question. Or question any assumptions at all. If you live in a small apartment with one bedroom and your wife becomes pregnant with triplets, what will [...]
Global Trade Increases Despite Inflation in China/Elsewhere — Yet We Predict Reversal Later in 2011
Earlier this month, Panjiva reported that its global trade tracking index was up, showing solid seasonal growth. According to their analysis, April saw a “healthy bump” in global trade activity with the “number of waterborne shipm…
