$156 billion reasons why Lars and SAP were never meant to be
Lars leaving so quickly symbolizes SAP’s struggle, in my mind, to change its culture and approach to disruptive business models. The economics of the cloud cannot print anywhere near as much money for our German friends as the current legacy ecosystem of clunky enterprises, whose IT managers simply do not want to invite change or disruption. If your clients don’t want to change, why should you?
Sapphire 2012: The Softer, Greater SAP…I Hope
Let me start this with a strange and seemingly incoherent (but truly more inchoate) statement. “If SAP marketed to the rest of the world, the way they produce conferences, they could arguably become the best technology company on the planet.” I’m not going to say anything more about this until considerably later in this post. […]
SAP Energizes Its Cloud Strategy – The Lars Dalgaard Era Begins
One of the most amazing cross-country flights I ever took found me over the center of the country at night, flying through an unbelievable electric storm, with an almost constant arcing of lightning illuminating vast canyons and mountains of clouds. As the pilot maneuvered us through this unforgettable vision of nature’s wonder, he came on […]
SAP internal memo names top cloud competitors
Photo credit: iStockphoto Who does SAP view as it’s primary competitors in the cloud? Software vendors are not always willing to be clear on this topic, but an internal memo from the company’s cloud boss, Lars Dalgaard, tells the story: # 1 – HCM + Finance with Workday as no. 1 competitor, and Netsuite, Oracle/Taleo, […]
Pinch me. SAP is Dreaming up Social for the Enterprise.
With Patel’s new position, SAP recently moved “social” into its cloud group where it will support all SAP suites and concentrations (CRM, for example) in a new social platform that will be structured to support the business horizontally and seamlessly across on-premise and cloud offerings. The group is building what they’re calling, “Project Robus.” (Latin for resolve or purpose.)
SAP Assembles Powerful Cloud Portfolio with Ariba, SuccesFactors Acquisitions
Emphasis on “assemble”, as opposed to develop. For years SAP and Oracle fought a religious war of acquire/assemble vs develop in-house. SAP’s view was (even under the current Co-CEOs) that you can only get to a coherent, seamlessly integrated suite by development. Apparently they have changed religion, borrowing a chapter or two from Larry Ellison’s […]
Cloud dancing: CIO perspective on SAP’s cloud strategy
SAP has made important strides in building a cloud strategy. Here’s what you need to know.
The idiot guide to multi book accounting
Is SuccessFactors operating multi book accounting across its parallel NetSuite and ByDesign instances? Or is it just pantomime?
SuccessFactors swaps NetSuite for ByDesign
There was a great piece of theatre on stage at SuiteWorld in San Francisco this morning when NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson revealed that the company had signed an important new customer from the computing world: its archrival SAP. The software behemoth’s newly acquired subsidiary, SuccessFactors, remains a NetSuite customer, Nelson revealed: “They just renewed their […]
Lars From Mars, The Wookey, Carmen Miranda And Me
Island Of Lost Souls — 1932 When Ron and I moved near DC in 1977, there was a late night TV program, called “Creature Features,” that we loved. It was hosted by Dick Dyszel who, for reasons lost in the mists of marital life, I nicknamed Lars from Mars. Dick played rarely shown early SciFi films, many […]
