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Tag: SAP

  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    “We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space,” says SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, discusses SAP’s amazing growth over the last quarter, especially in cloud, in an interview on CNBC:

    Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    This is a good start to the year. It’s what the capital markets have been waiting for. They’ve been getting all kinds of revenue growth. We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space. They wanted to see the multiples on the margin. As we raised our full-year guidance we committed to improving the operating margins by one point per year for the next five years. Now after a $75 billion investment in innovation for our customers, our shareholders are saying wow, this is the moment I get the multiples on the margin and therefore the leverage in the share price.

    Our cloud gross margins can improve to 75% between now and 2023. We’re hiring the absolute very best people in the world in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, all the areas that our customers want us to go. It’s not the number of people, it’s getting the absolute very best people. If you hire right, you manage your cloud gross margins right, and you have a highly inspired customer base where you’re growing with high renewal rates, you get tremendous leverage on the operating margin.

    The Company Really Is On a Roll

    What we’re doing is when we did restructure, and that was announced in Q4 and we executed it in Q1, we basically said we’re going to take about 4,400 people from areas that were not part of the new economy and hire to those tremendous standards. We’re bringing in the best data scientists in the world, best machine learning individuals out there, best enterprise application software coders around the world, and we’re developing in China, Israel, the United States, and in Europe. The company really is on a roll.

    We’re almost done (with the restructuring) in the sense that we accounted for most all of it in Q1. We are finishing it up in the next quarter right now. For example, it’s being executed in Germany, but the majority of it has been handled. The stock today (is way up). We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce.com, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023, I think that’s why the shareholders have the stock up 8%.

    What’s On My Mind is Where the Customer Needs Us To Go

    All competition is on my mind. But what’s really on my mind is where the customer needs us to go. We weren’t losing to them. What the shareholders wanted, and we surveyed them, we had a capital market stay in New York and we used Qualtrics to survey them, they said we love your revenue growth we know you’re gaining share we just want more operating margin leverage out of the company. That’s what we gave them this quarter. It took us ten years and $75 billion in R&D and M&A to get to the point now where we have everything we need. We don’t need to do any more big M&A, we just need to perform well and spin-off margin and free cash flow for our shareholders and the stock goes on a run.

    They (our customers) know we’ve given them so much innovation. It’s coming at them so fast that now they’re saying help me integrate it, help me fully leverage it across the enterprise and get the value from it. Interestingly, the customers and the shareholders are both in the same place. They’re saying you’ve done unreal things, now let’s dig in and drive real value from all the things that you’ve done. We bought an $8.3 billion dollar company called Qualtrics. We now took over a new category called experience management where we can actually tell the consumer experience inside or outside the company in real time. We have data now.

    So think about this, if you’re running a company and you want to recruit to retire process in your company, how do my people feel when I recruit them? How did I feel when I trained them? Am I coaching them? Am I teaching them? Am I giving them everything they need in their compensation plan? We know this all now in real time with the Hana database built into the human capital management process. We do things that no other company can do.

    SAP CEO: Were the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space


  • We’ve Gotten Enormous Benefits From the Digital World, But Trust Has Really Suffered, Says SAP CEO

    We’ve Gotten Enormous Benefits From the Digital World, But Trust Has Really Suffered, Says SAP CEO

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott released a video message on Twitter saying that “trust has really suffered” despite the “enormous benefits from the digital world.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, discussed his concerns about trust in the digital world in a Twitter video:

    I think trust has really suffered. In many ways, we’ve gotten enormous benefits from the digital world. In fact, you can stay connected to everybody, almost every place, by just picking up your device in the morning and never leaving your house.

    But the reality is the human contact, the interdependence that comes with trust, and that trust is formed one person, one conversation, one relationship, and in my way of thinking it still has to be a live conversation.

    There is nothing that replaces the person to person relationship that gets developed looking at somebody, being in that space, being in that moment, and conveying how you really feel from the heart.

  • SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP announced the completion of its $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics which brings critical real-time customer experience data to its customers. SAP CEO Bill McDermott explains how the combination of Qualtrics’ Experience Management (XM) Platform with SAP’s enterprise software and cloud services is not only a game changer for companies, but solidifies SAP as the world’s business software leader:

    “Where did we leave them in the dust? We basically out innovated everybody in terms of how you run your business better. Now the idea is how you create an unbelievable human experience so you inspire your people to take care of your customer and create a loyalty effect that’s unlike any other company in the industry. That’s what we do.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, talks about how the integration of Qualtrics into SAPs enterprise solutions will help businesses know their customers with real-time sentiment analysis, in an interview with Fox Business at Davos 2019:

    With Qualtrics Your Brand Will Become a Religion

    I think it’s really important that you focus on the business of your customer and stay obsessed with that and not get caught up in a lot of tech jargon. That’s why I’m glad we’re the business software market leader.

    There is a huge trust deficit in the economy. Customers aren’t necessarily getting what they paid for which is why there is a $1.6 trillion deficit from customers that defect from companies that are out there in the marketplace today. So how do you keep a loyal customer? Today’s systems create operating data. You know your customers, you know your people, you know your suppliers. But we need to know what are consumers saying in real time, in the moment? We need that sentiment analysis.

    Qualtrics is the number one experience management company in the world. From now on, your customers, if you are CEO, will love your products. In fact, they will be obsessed with them. Your brand will become a religion because every employee is an ambassador that’s connected inextricably to the customer experience. That’s Qualtrics.

    If you are a customer of SAP, now you have all the experience data. I call this X-data. This is data from all the consumers that are experiencing your product and your brand. You combine that with the O-data which is all the operational aspects of how you run your company, from your demand all the way through to your supply. You know everything. You take X plus O and you have the winning formula.

    The Enterprise Has Been Redefined by SAP

    We surveyed, with Qualtrics and SAP, along with the World Economic Forum here, we surveyed 10,000 individuals on a random sample in 29 different countries. Once of the questions was, “What are you really worried about out there?” Most humans said we are worried about being replaced by robots. We said, “Is tech for good or is tech for bad?” What’s happening in your world with the perception of technology? They said, “A little bit better than negative, but somewhat ambivalent.” That’s a concern.

    They said that they are basically trusting the people that run their companies, even more than the people that run government. There is a trust deficit out there. It’s really important that we close that trust deficit at the leadership level. It’s also important that companies get the human experience going with their own employees and their customers. That’s why I think that this experience management positioning for SAP is fundamentally going to be a moment in time where the enterprise has been redefined by SAP.

    Over 77 percent of the world’s transactions run through an SAP system. We manage everything from the customer relationship to how you manage your people to how you build great products and how you ship on time and deliver. Now we have experience management which is the ultimate touchpoint for customers, and we put it all in the cloud. So you can be nimble, you can be agile, and you can upgrade quickly. You don’t need a whole lot of resources to maintain these systems. We are moving faster than anyone in 25 industries and in 193 countries around the world.

    About the S/4HANA Upgrade

    S/4HANA is now the system from the demand signal of your consumer in any channel including ecommerce. We know your consumer. We align the product in the proper configuration, at the proper price based on the customers history and all the loyalty that they should earn in their business with you. We ship. We take care of the whole supply chain. You get what you want at the price you procured for anyplace in real-time in the world. That whole value chain is SAP.

    4HANA is now in a cloud. So you can run your entire company from end-to-end on top of SAP’s 4HANA platform in the cloud. Game change. Again, I go back to, that’s all the operational data and all the operational processes. Now, if you can add experiences to this with Qualtrics you’ve got an unbeatable competitive advantage.

    I’m signing up customers left and right on this idea in Davos because this has been the number one thing that businesses have forgotten. You have to have the experience under control with your consumer and it has to be real-time sentiment analysis. Just think, it’s five times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the one you have. Don’t you want to know how they’re doing?

    No Signs That There is This Global Slowdown

    We have a very strong business. There are no signs in our business that there is this global slowdown. Because we serve the best run businesses in the world we are usually an early indicator of what’s going on out there. We see a very optimistic future. Our pipelines and our business model have not changed one iota. I think there is this disjoint between the consumer companies and the consumer world and the enterprise.

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott: “We out innovated everybody.”
    SAP Bill McDermott: “No signs that there is this global slowdown.”


  • SAP CEO: We’re Doubling Down in China

    SAP CEO: We’re Doubling Down in China

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott remains very optimistic about doing business in China. He says that SAP has a fundamental belief in China and continues to invest in China. “We’re not having challenges in China,” says McDermott. “We’re doubling down in China. China has been very kind to SAP and we have been very kind to China. It’s a win-win.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, discussed their continued belief in China in an interview on CNBC International:

    We’re Doubling Down in China

    We have really a fundamental belief in China. China is the jewel in the crown for SAP. We actually defined it as a second home many years ago. We continue to invest in China and China continues to invest in SAP. It’s the fastest growing market we have in the world. As you know I spend quite a bit of time in China. When I was there last year we formed a very strategic partnership with several firms including the Alibaba Group, partnering with Jack Ma and Daniel Zhang and the Alicloud.

    When you think about the infrastructure as a service of Alicloud with SAP’s business software market leadership you have a business model that generates incredible growth for both companies, but also serves customers beautifully. We’re not having challenges in China. We’re doubling down in China. China has been very kind to SAP and we have been very kind to China. It’s a win-win.

    I Think a Trade Deal is on the Horizon

    I remain optimistic on that front. Optimism is probably the only free stimulus any of us can get our hands on these days. Look, it’s an uncertain world. If there’s not the US-China tariff and global uncertainty on trade, it’ll be Brexit. If it’s not Brexit, it’ll be something else. What we do is we manage a portfolio of businesses geographically and through our industry domain expertise. When you go to market in 193 countries you’re going to have dislocations.

    In an uncertain world, steady leadership always prevails. Our numbers said that in 2018 and they’ll say that again in 2019 and beyond. I do hope that it comes to terms in a positive way. I actually believe it will because business sense tends to prevail and you’ve got the number one and two economy in the world that both could benefit greatly from a deal. So I think a deal is on the horizon. I’m actually very optimistic.

    SAP CEO: We’re Doubling Down in China


  • SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    “We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world,” says Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President of the SAP Cloud Platform. “We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.”

    Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President SAP Cloud Platform, recently discussed the future of the SAP Cloud Platform in an interview with Ray Wang, the Founder & Chairman of Constellation Research:

    Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World

    We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world. We strongly believe that hybrid clouds will play a major role in the coming years. If you also follow what the hyper scalars are doing, Amazon was the last one to announce an on-premises hybrid support model. We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.

    We announced partnerships with IBM and ANSYS already and there will be more coming. We’re totally committed to the multi-cloud strategy driving the kind of choice for customers that they demand. But then what we’re more and more focusing on is business services and business capabilities. It’s about micro services as well. It’s really about business functionality that customers expect from SAP. We are an enterprise solutions company.

    It’s Really About No Code and Low Code Environments

    With our broad spectrum of 25 industries we support all the lines of business within a corporation from core finance to HR to procurement, you name it. We are focused on a high level of functionality that we can expose via APIs and micro services on a cloud platform to allow customers to quickly reassemble and orchestrate customer specific differentiating solutions.

    There is no other company out there in the market that has the opportunity to really deliver that on a broad scale worldwide to our corporate customers.

    That’s where we’re heading and that’s where we’re investing. We’re working on simplifying the consumption of all of this. It’s really about no code and low code environments. You need to be able to plug and play and not always force people to really go down into the trenches and start heavy coding.

    SAP Embedding Machine Learning Into Applications

    Beyond that machine learning is all over and on everybody’s mind. What we’re doing is making sure that we can embed machine learning capabilities deep into the application solutions. It can’t be that every customer needs to hire dozens and even hundreds of data scientists to figure these things out.

    The very unique opportunity that SAP has is to take our knowledge in business processes, take the large data sets we have with our customers, and bring machine learning right into the application for customers to consume out of the box.

    RPA is a big topic as well of course. We believe that 50 percent of ERP processes you can potentially automate to the largest part within the next few years. We are heavily investing in those areas as well.

    Focused on Security, Data Protection, and Privacy

    Especially if you think about the level of connectivity and companies opening up their corporate environments more and more, clouds being on everybody’s mind, and the whole idea to make access to information processes available to everybody in the company and in the larger ecosystem at any point in time from anywhere, of course, that raises the bar that security has to deliver. So it’s a top of mind topic for everybody.

    There are a lot of new challenges also from an architectural perspective with how these things are built and how you communicate, We have a long-standing history as an enterprise solution provider to know exactly what’s going on there. There’s security, there are data protection and privacy that companies have to comply with these days. I think we’re well positioned to serve our customers needs there.

    https://youtu.be/JwXU89MrdaA


  • SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP released a compilation video (below) featuring SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith that really sums up well why SAP is acquiring Qualtrics:

    Bill McDermott: First it’s an honor to team up with Brian Smith, a great CEO, and an inspirational leader. We couldn’t be prouder of our relationship with Qualtrics.

    Ryan Smith: This is a once in a generation opportunity and we’re gonna change the whole face of enterprise technology with this combination.

    Bill McDermott: SAP is the fastest growing cloud company in the large-scale business software industry while Qualtrics is the fastest growing business software company in the experience management space. If you combine those two forces you have a juggernaut of cloud growth.

    Ryan Smith: There are two types of data. You have operational data which is telling you what’s going on and what just happened. These are your analytics, this is your CRM product, this is your HCM product. Then you have experienced staff which allows us to get human sentiment in the moment to understand the why, how someone feels. SAP owns the operation systems from end-to-end, we own the experience systems from end-to-end. The ability to combine those and have one single view will transform the way we even think about CRM as we know it.

    Bill McDermott: We want to be the jet fuel that propels them to 193 countries with the biggest business software sales go-to-market force in the world in 25 industries, small, mid, and large alike. Every customer should know that X-Data and O-Data are together now.

    Ryan Smith: We are fired up today is a new beginning and with all the resources from SAP, we’re super excited for that.

    Bill McDermott: And the loyalty effect is what the experienced management of Qualtrics and the operational data of SAP drive. So X-Data, experience, and O-Data, what’s going on in the operations, put that together, you could inspire everyone in the company to take care of everyone outside the company.

    Ryan Smith: I could not be more excited to work with SAP, McDermott, all of the SAP family. The Qualtrics family is excited and we’re going to go do something legendary.

  • SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott says that buying Qualtrics creates a “global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world.” McDermott says that he’s here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days and that this is a fundamentally transformational deal, one that will reshape the entire industry.

    Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith says that combining forces with SAP will change the experience economy forever. “This is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever,” said Smith. “Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that?”

    Both SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith talked about the acquisition on CNBC Squawk Box this morning (Watch Video Below):

    SAP CEO: If You Can Combine X-Data and O-Data You Can Change the World

    We’re reshaping the enterprise application software industry. What led us to this deal is that all CEOs you talk to want to run their companies on an end-to-end basis. They want to deal with their customers in every channel, they want to fulfill, and that requires operational data. SAP touches 77 percent of the world’s transactions, but the operational data doesn’t ask the right question. It doesn’t say, why does the customer feel a certain way about your brand, about your products, and about their experience. This new category called experience management is all about x-data and if you can combine o-data and x-data you can change the world.

    Ryan I have known each other about three months. We spent a lot of time together, a lot of text, a lot of phone calls, and we fundamentally wanted a transformational deal, one that would reshape the entire industry and here we are.

    SAP CEO: If You Want to Survey Somebody You Hire Survey Monkey…

    Have you looked at acquiring SurveyMonkey? No, they do surveys we reinvent customer experiences in a whole new category called experience management. If you want to survey somebody you hire Survey Monkey, if you want to fundamentally change the way an enterprise thinks about its culture, its brand, its products, and its people, now you’re talking Qualtrics, the leader in the marketplace by a factor of 10x. We’ve always bought the biggest and the best one and thankfully with the high trust that Ryan and I developed and our companies developed we’re ready to go.

    SAP CEO: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    When you’re talking about this particular company, Qualtrics, they’re growing at 40 percent on a year-over-year basis in the cloud. They have a very serious go-to-market strategy, but it’s modest in size. We’re growing at 41 percent year-over-year in the cloud and we have a very large go-to-market machine, more than 15,000 people touching the customer every day. If you combine that rate of growth you have a global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world. So digest that dear shareholders.

    We’re saying and we’re very clear on this, we’re going to grow total revenue in double-digit, operating income in double-digit, not to mention being the fastest growing cloud company in the world. So today this will be digested. Now they’ll know, why did he do a big one when he said he was more likely gonna do tuck-ins? Because I never thought I would get Qualtrics and it takes some skill to pull deals like this off and convince a great entrepreneur like Ryan that he’s better off with SAP than going it alone when he’s 13x oversubscribed in his IPO.

    SAP CEO: I’m Here to Build a Company for the Generations

    So that’s what took a little bit of time and when we pulled it off together this weekend we were literally crossing each other in the air at 39,000 feet, so this was high-stakes. Now that we’re here, we’re doing all-hands meetings, we’re talking to the media, we’re talking to the bankers, and I expect the stock to do extremely well as the day progresses, and more importantly in the mid and the long term. I’m here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days.

    Qualtrics CEO: We Created the Experience Management Category

    We were planning on ringing the bell on Thursday. I was home this weekend just to kind of take a little break after a week on the road it was going really well. We were 13 times oversubscribed with the best still ahead of us and then we had an opportunity to combine forces with SAP and change the experience economy forever. I think in my conversations with Bill it’s something that we only dreamed of that we could make this happen. It’s pretty special.

    We’ve been doing this for 16 years. We transformed the entire experience management category, we’ve created it. We’re powering the feedback for 14 different airlines, 200 financial institutions, and we’ve really created this category to go do something big, that was the goal. We never had a financial reason to go public, we bootstrapped our company longer than anyone and we had no investor pressure. We’re one of the only companies that has been cashflow positive and high growth since its inception. The reason why we were going public was to create this massive new category.

    Qualtrics CEO: A Once in a Generational Opportunity

    When Bill approached us with a once in a generational opportunity that we could take all the power of Qualtrics and our 9,000 brands and have that sit alongside SAP and have every ounce of customer feedback go into the entire product process with an ERP system, reshape how the world thinks about CRM, and everything that we’re doing to power all the employee experience of the whole world that’s all available overnight. That’s something that we couldn’t turn down and we chose to be here.

    Our IPO was already way oversubscribed, it was gonna take off and everyone was looking at us saying, hey this is the next $20 or $30 billion dollar standalone company. But we want to win and this is what winning looks like and we’re going to reshape the entire industry and Bill’s on board and we’re excited.

    We were pretty set on going public and so it wasn’t till this opportunity came through this weekend where we said, hey look, this is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever. Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that? We couldn’t be more excited and like I said this is a pretty special team with Bill and me.

  • SAP: Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    SAP: Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    SAP Chief Strategy Officer Deepak Krishnamurthy said at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, “Imagine if we can work together and make inclusion a fact.” Additionally, Alexa Gorman, who is SVP, Head of SAP.iO Foundries Europe announced the creation of a dedicated accelerator program for women and diverse-led enterprises in Berlin, Germany.

    SAP Chief Strategy Officer Deepak Krishnamurthy discussed enterprise inclusion strategies at the Web Summit:

    Inclusive Entrepreneurship Across Everything We Do

    Over the last 20 months, SAP.IO has worked with nearly a hundred companies across the spectrum of both the fund and the foundry. That’s a big number given that we have been around only for 20 months. But what I’m really proud of is the fact that over 40 percent of these companies were either founded or have a CEO who’s a diverse entrepreneur or women entrepreneur. That is something that you probably don’t see in the industry much where the average number of startups that are either women or diverse entrepreneur founded is probably around 20-25 percent.

    Why is this important for us? It’s important because we want to be able to have an inclusive entrepreneurship across everything that we do. The statistics are there, so you know that less than 10 percent of venture capital funding goes to women, less than 2 percent goes to black and Latino founders, and less than 0.2 percent goes to black and Latino women founders. The statistics are pretty horrible and we need to make a difference and the difference needs to be made at three levels. It’s got to be at the financing level, it’s got to be about creating the right community, and it’s got to also be in terms of how you set up your team.

    Women and Diverse Entrepreneurs Driving Impact

    What SAP.IO decided to do was the first foundry cohort that we ran in San Francisco we said it’s going to be a women cohort. We had seven amazing startups founded by women, that is the first thing that we did in the US. This was so successful that we said why run just a cohort? Why don’t we just go and run a whole location focused on women and diverse entrepreneurs? So in the summer of 2018, we had ten great startups with women-led founders that came in and worked on B2B SAAS products and solutions jointly with us. That’s what New York is all about. New York is going to be about women and diverse entrepreneurs driving impact with our customers.

    This is making a huge difference. You cannot go and say that I’m just going to run a women-only program or a minority program for startups. You have to rethink how you do this fundamentally as a company. One of the things that we did was that our entire management of SAP.IO that’s running the foundry, over 80 percent, five out of the six accelerators are run by women. That means that you take the cognitive bias out of the equation.

    Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    So you’re starting to invest in women and minority entrepreneurs in a much more proactive way. The industry average is more like 25 percent. Having 80 percent of the accelerators led by them makes an enormous difference, not just in terms of recruiting and attracting the right level of women entrepreneurs but also in terms of how you work with them, how you support them. and how you help them scale. If you look at the entire team more than 60 percent of a team is diverse. Again, this makes a huge difference in terms of how you take diversity not just as an afterthought, but keep it front and center.

    We all know that diverse teams have better outcomes in terms of startup exits. Typically startups with diverse teams have a 10-15 percent higher exits and higher returns and the idea of having a diverse team that’s managing both investment and acceleration enables a culture of diversity that goes from the top down. That’s the idea of enabling inclusiveness and diversity from the get-go.

    We all know that diversity is a fact. We also probably know that inclusion is a choice, but imagine if we can work together and make inclusion a fact, where It’s no longer a choice. Every company comes together and makes inclusion in terms of how we work with startups a priority and make this a real thing rather than doing something as a one-off basis.

    Alexa Gorman – SVP, Head of SAP.iO Foundries Europe at SAP, announced accelerator program in Berlin at the Web Summit:

    Launching the First Accelerator Program in Berlin

    We started the foundry journey in Europe just over a year and a half ago with the foundry in Berlin that we opened. I’m really proud to say by the end of this year we will have accelerated just over 30 startups in areas such as machine learning, AI, but also industry 4.0 and the manufacturing space. What we offer the startups that come to us is to really be able to accelerate through integrating into SAP’s product portfolio, but then also access to the 400,000 plus customers that we bring. We started in Berlin last year where we’ve run three programs and are currently in our third program there. We just opened Paris in October and are accelerating six French startups. In general, we like to call the startups that we accelerate the rising stars.

    I’m thrilled to be here today, of the 30 startups that we have accelerated I think we have about eight that are actually at Web Summit and are seeing phenomenal interest both from investors and from B2B companies that are interested in using their solutions. I’m also thrilled to be here today because we have an announcement. In line with what Deepak was mentioning, we’re actually launching the first accelerator program in Berlin, kicking off in March and running until June for the underrepresented minority. We will have a cohort there that will get the access and the mentorship that Deepak mentioned in the B2B SAAS spaces. It’s something that hasn’t been done or one of the first of its kind anyway in Europe and we’re basically opening applications today here at Web Summit. If there are startups here who are in that space we’d love to hear from you. Please go to SAP.IO and you’ll see all the details and the opportunity to apply.

    Deepak Krishnamurthy: We Would Love to Hear Your Dreams

    This is something that’s very important for us and we are confident that it’s going to make a big impact on the European ecosystem. If you are a startup we would love to hear your dreams, we’d love to understand how we can work with you and help you. If you’re a women or a diverse founder applications are open for Berlin, so please let us know how you can work with us. If you’re in the B2B space we can do things together that are going to be magical.

  • SAP CEO: It’s All About the Customer Experience

    SAP CEO: It’s All About the Customer Experience

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott, in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg talked about enterprises moving to the cloud, competing with Oracle’s new autonomous database, competing with Salesforce, and its huge business in China:

    SAP Has Taken Over the Enterprise Database Market

    Do you have a major move to the cloud? If legacy companies haven’t fully invested themselves in the cloud where they’ve converted their revenue streams more to cloud than on-premise I think you will see them make bold moves to get cloud-ready. No choice, that’s where the customer wants us.

    We obviously have taken over the enterprise database market with HANA. HANA has many of the characteristics that you mentioned (referencing Oracle). HANA can take data from any source, everything that is either structured or unstructured and data from any source in the enterprise. HANA is running the biggest enterprises in the world now with 25,000 customers at mass scale. We like our HANA database very much.

    It’s All About the Customer Experience

    We see a fourth-generation of CRM where we go beyond the current market participants. Basically, they focus on sales, marketing campaigns, things that essentially take money out of the customers pocket. What we want to do is focus on an omnichannel ecommerce world where we connect the demand chain because our customers are social, mobile and on the run. They shop in every channel, direct to consumer, wholesale, retail. We want to connect that demand chain to the supply chain so that we have a complete end-to-end business.

    Why is this so important? We are not just talking about CRM, we are talking about customer experience. The way CEOs think about their brand, their products, their human capital, their customers. All of the people inside of the company have to be completely committed to the customers outside the company. This is what we call fourth-generation CRM. It’s all about the customer experience.

    We’d Like to See China and the US Cooperate

    The most important thing is that we get paid to run businesses and work in an environment where we let government do what government does. All government leaders have to do what’s best for their country and best for their constituents. These tariffs are obviously a serious situation. You have the two largest economies in the world with $30 trillion in combined economic firepower that right now are at a little bit at odds with each other.

    It’s good, as we saw in today’s tweet, it was stated that at the G20 President Xi and President Trump will sit down and talk. That’s very encouraging to the market. Markets like certainty. So certainly we would like to see China and the US cooperate. It’s good for supply chain, it’s good for business.

    China is Regarded as SAP’s Second Home

    Germain engineering is highly regarding in China, as it is in the United States and around the world, but we do particularly well in China. China is our fastest growing market. We think that China is easily regarded as SAP’s second home in terms of market receptivity, ecosystem growth in China, and our long-term prospects. We think China will end up being the biggest market in the world soon.

    We have the most sophisticated data privacy in the world. We acquired a company called Gigya where we have billions and billions of customer records. We protect your privacy, we don’t let customers actually engage you unless you agree that you want to opt-in on various offerings from our customers and they serve their customers. We follow the same reference architecture, the same high-security standards and cloud standards in China that we do in Europe, the United States, and every other theater in the world.

    We are very confident in China in the way enterprises can serve their customers in China with high-security standards. We recently announced a very important partnership with Alibaba and that is a cloud partnership that will not only impact our growth in one of the fastest growing regions in the world.

    We Are Very Diverse and Highly Inclusive

    We actually have appointed in the last 12 months two women to our Executive Board, not just because they are women, but because they are great leaders. That would be Adaire Fox-Martin and Jennifer Morgan. If you look at our company we have a third of our workforce that is female and we also have a third of our leaders that are female.

    We are very diverse and highly inclusive. One of the things we really enjoy is what we have done with Autism at Work and now we have dedicated one percent of our hiring to autistic folks, at least on the spectrum somewhere, to help our workforce be highly productive and diverse. That extends also to the solutions that we have. If you look at success factors, the number one human capital solution in the world, we have a business without bias mentality.

    Computers don’t have bias. In the way we build the algorithms in the software they eliminate bias from the hiring process. The computer doesn’t have a bias. It looks for the best candidates and it fills an algorithm or model that the company is trying to get at. If you want 40 percent of your workforce to be diverse and inclusive, the model is built to do that for you. You don’t leave it up to humans, you let the software do the work and then the human judgment comes in at the final phase of hiring. It’s changing companies everywhere.

  • Nick Tzitzon of SAP on the Changing Role of the CIO

    Nick Tzitzon of SAP on the Changing Role of the CIO

    Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications for SAP, recently was interviewed on CXOTalk where he talked about the changing role of the CIO:

    Every CXO Became a Technology Buyer

    If you think about how enterprise technology has evolved… if you think 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you had the Chief Information Officer which was the single dominant point of contact inside most businesses for how a business uses technology. And then what happened? Every CXO became a technology buyer and the CXO technology buyer was interested in very specific business outcomes.

    If you’re a Chief Human Resources Officer you buy human capital management software because you want to inspire and retain and train your workforce. If you’re a Chief Marketing or Sales Officer you want to grow your business, you want to attract customers, you want to deliver new customer experiences.

    The CIO and CXO Conversations Must Be the Same

    The CIO in many cases, because of their long-term relationships was stuck in one conversation while the CXOs went into a different conversation. We want to push them together because that’s where they belong. The CIO is an incredible resource in companies to be able to tell you here’s a business problem and a technology that can help. As technology is maturing so quickly with AI and all the other breakthroughs you need the CIO to be a leader in these companies. But the CIO conversation and the CXO conversation have got to be the same conversation.

    What opportunity are we trying to seize? What problem are we trying to solve? It can’t be technology for technology sake because if it’s that then a technology vendor like SAP is not relevant. What are we trying to do for the business? That’s the question and a conversation that we need to be part of and that our peers want to be part of as well.

  • Larry Ellison: Amazon uses Oracle, not Amazon to Run Their Business… Because AWS is Not Good Enough

    Larry Ellison: Amazon uses Oracle, not Amazon to Run Their Business… Because AWS is Not Good Enough

    Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison says that Amazon does not even use their own database to run their business. “Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database,” Ellison said. “They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough.”

    Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, discussed why Oracle is still the best database in the world and why it’s significantly better than Amazon and SAP databases in an interview this morning:

    Amazon Does Not Use AWS to Run Their Business

    Sometimes I liken the computer industry to the fashion industry. Certain brands get popular, certain brands get unpopular. IBM when I first came into the industry was the ultimate brand. It was not a company against whom you would compete, it was the environment which you would compete. Amazon now is the number one brand in infrastructure cloud computing.

    Let me tell you an interesting fact. Amazon does not use AWS to run their business. Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database. They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough. I keep saying this because they just spent another 50 million dollars last year buying still more Oracle Database. I keep saying this because well maybe our database is better than Amazon’s databases. Why else would Amazon keep buying our database?

    Last year they bravely said that they are sick of these comments of mine and they are going to move off of Oracle. They said they are going to move off of Oracle by 2020. Well guess what, they took their first step, they just moved a bunch of their warehouses off of Oracle and guess what happened. I will send you a copy of Amazon’s internal memo. It went down. It failed. They had a huge outage. They said that if they would have stayed with the Oracle Database this wouldn’t have happened.

    All of the World’s Most Valuable Data Runs on Oracle, Not Amazon

    The Oracle Database manages most of the world’s data, today and ten years ago. Nothing has changed. All of the world’s important valuable data is in an Oracle Database. They’re not in Amazon’s database. Amazon won’t use its own database to run its business.

    So if our database is so great what have we done wrong? We didn’t get our database to the cloud quickly enough. If you wanted a cloud database, you had to go to Amazon for a database. Then you were able to go to Microsoft for a database. It took a while for us to build a secure cloud. It’s really hard to build a secure cloud. We think we are there now.

    We have by far and away the best database in the world. Nothing is close. We show a series of benchmarks where we are ten times faster than Amazon. More importantly, we are ten times cheaper to run the same exact thing on Amazon on our database. So if you want all that security and want all that reliability, you have to be able to spend less. That’s what we’ve shown in a series of benchmarks. Even Amazon can’t move.

    People say that Oracle has no chance in database and Amazon’s going to dominate everything, well you would think that one of the early customers that Amazon would move, how about Amazon. No, Amazon picked Oracle.

    We Have a 10-20 Year Lead on Amazon

    We think we have a 10-20 year lead on Amazon on databases. Let me prove it. Another thing, Amazon uses Oracle not Amazon. Amazon’s transaction processing database that they have is called Aurora. Aurora is an open source database. They just it picked up and made it closed source on Amazon. They didn’t write any of that. They picked up Aurora, put it on Amazon and made it available on their cloud. Well, so who owns Aurora? Who develops Aurora? That would be Oracle. It’s called MySQL. That’s our small open source database which they claim is their big transaction processing database that’s going to replace Oracle. It’s just preposterous that Amazon didn’t even develop the Amazon database. It’s just a chunk of open source that we are responsible for called MySQL. MySQL does not compare to the Oracle Database. There is a reason Amazon uses Oracle.

    SAP Also Uses Oracle Everywhere

    You know who else uses Oracle? Another company that hates us, SAP uses Oracle everywhere. SAP ten years ago said I hate Oracle, I’m getting off of Oracle, I can’t stand these guys, especially this guy that goes on TV and makes fun of us. They say we have this great new database called Hanna. It’s awesome. Well, they have all of these cloud services such as SuccessFactors. Does it run on Hanna? But oh no, it runs on Oracle. Actually, 98 percent of everything SAP does runs on Oracle. A decade later, they still use Oracle, can’t get to Hanna.

    The Oracle Database beat IBM in the database business and beat Microsoft in the database business. We’ve been in this business for 20 years constantly making our database better. Now it’s the world’s first autonomous system.

    The Oracle Database is Much Better Than Anyone Else Has

    The EU actually did a study, of the top hundred SAP customers in Europe how many of them run the Oracle Database? Only 99 percent. One actually ran IBM DB2. All of their cloud services, whether it’s SuccessFactors, Ariba, all of these things which they’ve been trying to get off of Oracle and onto Hanna for a decade still all run Oracle. The reason is that Oracle is just a much better database than anyone else has.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked if I can have any other piece of software in the world what would it be? Everyone thought he was going to say Google Search. He said the Oracle Database because it’s the information age and all of the world’s most valuable information is stored in an Oracle Database.

  • SAP CEO: We Are the Fastest Growing Business Software Company in the World

    SAP CEO: We Are the Fastest Growing Business Software Company in the World

    “We grew 41 percent in the cloud and SAP has now become the fastest growing enterprise application software company in the world,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in an interview on CNBC. “For business software, we are the fastest growing company in the world. It’s amazing how fast the growth is in the cloud.”

    Bill McDermott, SAP CEO:

    Our cloud business is growing faster than anyone else’s, but we are also partnering. If you look at Microsoft and the Azure Cloud, of which Microsoft has been a great partner of ours for four decades now. If you look at AWS with Amazon or if you look at the Google Cloud platform or if you look at Alibaba in China, we have partnerships with all of these hyperscalers.

    It’s All About an Open Initiative For Customers

    Our reference architecture, our software, can also run in there cloud which gives us another set of distribution channels around the world to expand our market-leading software. They’re all going to grow fast and we’re going to grow fast.

    It’s all about an open initiative for customers. Customers really need to manage their business in real time and the cloud is a great way to do it. It’s lower cost, faster innovation, easier to consume, it’s a winning formula.

    Bill McDermott On the Economy

    It’s really amazing. I’ve been obviously all over the world and if you go to China right now, things for us and all solution oriented tech companies are very strong. The Asian region is outstanding.

    John Kerry and I hosted a meeting in Bankok and we met with 35 CEOs that simply could not possibly be more positive about the economic scenario.

    Shortly thereafter, I was in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chancellor Angela Merkel talking about Industry 4.0, venture capital, and tech investment. Yesterday, in Canada with Prime Minister Trudeau where there is a huge AI opportunity with great young people highly skilled in AI. Everyplace you go there’s nothing but optimism.

    McDermott tweeted:

    “Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues!”

    Trade Tensions Have No Impact on the Tech Industry

    The trade tensions are something that is obviously concerning, business people don’t like uncertainty, but in terms of the real impact of the business volume, new orders, global pipeline, I don’t see any impact at this stage for the tech industry.

  • CEO’s of Adobe, Microsoft, SAP Announce the Launch of the Open Data Initiative

    CEO’s of Adobe, Microsoft, SAP Announce the Launch of the Open Data Initiative

    CEO’s of Adobe, Microsoft, SAP announced the launch of the Open Data Initiative, a new data repository in the cloud dedicated to facilitating collaboration across the global research community. This is an initiative squarely aimed at Facebook and Google, in effect challenging them to provide all customer related data back to the customer. Here is Microsoft’s portal to the Open Data Initiative.

    Below are key highlights from a discussion the three tech CEO’s had on CNBC…

    Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft:

    The insight that all three of us had based on the work we’re doing with many customers, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Walmart, today as customers they’re all excited about this open data initiative. It’s their real insight that led us to do this, how do we work to put them in control of their own customer data, because that’s the real currency.

    Any brand out there cares deeply about the continuous improvement of their own customer data understanding. The three of us coming together is going to be central to them feeling in control of their own customer data.

    Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP:

    There isn’t a CEO in the world that does not want to have a single view of their customer and they have to connect their demand chain to their supply chain and do so in real time. If you think about the consumer whose social, mobile, they’re geospatial, they’re always on the fly, they’re going to shop different companies in all channels, direct to consumer and retail, and you have to make sure that connection point with that consumer is really intimate.

    These companies need to be intelligent enterprises because more and more AI and predictive analytics is going to rule how you engage with that customer. Ultimately, what you have to do is fulfill, so now you’re going to see the demand and the supply chain completely integrated and that data will be shared evenly among our companies so the customer is the major benefactor of the Open Data Initiative we announced today.

    Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe:

    All three of us shared this vision of how do we enable enterprises to put customers at the front of the digital journey. Getting behavioral data, getting transactional data, and getting customer engagement to be the front and center is the most important thing that enterprises can do so that digital is actually a tailwind rather than a headwind.

    What Marketo does is add to our offerings in the Experience Cloud of being able to create this unified profile for all customers. The thing that every customer will tell you today is that they want an engaging experience with whoever they’re doing business with, whether it’s financial services, automotive, or retail. Adobe focused a lot more on B2C customers, but the same requirements that were true for B2C customers are now true for B2B customers and that’s what Marketo provides.

    Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft:

    The name itself should tell everything, it’s an open data initiative. It’s about really unlocking the data that is our customers’ data about their own customers. I think what is foundational here is trust. In other words, ultimately customers will decide.

    Also, compliance with their own customers trust in them is also going to be very key, because if you think about it one of the top considerations for anything around customer data is privacy and regulation around privacy. So the most important thing here would be for each vendor to think through how they participate here and ensure that there is more trust in the entirety of the value chain, starting with the end consumer to the brand and to us as software vendors or tech companies.

    I think the real challenge is going to be for some who may want to join but their business model is probably not going to allow them to join. I think overall though what we have all anchored on is if we can create an architecture and an incentive system that turns the tide to put customers in control of their own customer data I think the overall economy will be better off.

  • Why You’re Probably Not Doing Personalization Well Enough

    Why You’re Probably Not Doing Personalization Well Enough

    SAP’s hybris released some interesting findings about how companies use personalization. In short, the company found that brands are failing at personalization at the expense of customer experience.

    Is personalization a significant part of your efforts? How do you personalize the customer experience effectively? Discuss.

    Hybris commissioned the study, which was conducted by Forrester. It polled 1,200 consumers and 200 advertising and marketing professionals at organizations with 500 or more employees.

    It found that while 66% of marketers rate their personalization efforts as “very good” or “excellent,” but only 31% of consumers think companies are consistently delivering personalized, cross-channel experiences.

    It also found that 40% of consumers say most promotions don’t deliver anything of interest. Meanwhile, 40% also say they receive too many offers and promotions.

    So in other words, people are getting too many marketing messages that they find meaningless. That’s not good. 37% of consumers say they delete most email offers and promotions without even reading them. 40% of consumers have unsubscribed or opted-out because they feel overwhelmed.

    Of those reporting less than satisfactory personalization experiences, 61% said they were somewhat or much less likely to take advantage of future offers.

    “Because consumers are sharing so much personal data with brands, they expect value in return – in the form of transactional perks and improved customer experience,” hybris says. “While most marketers seek to improve personalized customer experiences from this customer data, their strategies are immature and their marketing efforts are falling short in this regard. Many still rely on segmentation methods that target certain demographics, such as a specific age group, which is not nearly enough to engage customers.”

    The survey found that 70% of consumers say they’re aware that companies use personal info to send them targeted offers, and 74% are “somewhat” or “very comfortable” with companies using data about them to provide personalized experiences.

    66% of marketers use demographics to create targeted content offers, and 44% say they use demographic categories to create personalization for unidentified prospective customers, but half are using more sophisticated methods like leveraging data extracted from loyalty programs (52%) or behavior-based data (48%).

    91% of marketers are prioritizing improving customer experience through personalization over the next year.

    “Consumers today are bombarded with more marketing messages across more channels than ever before, and the vast majority of these communications are irrelevant,” says Charles Nicholls, SVP Product Strategy, Marketing Solutions at SAP Hybris. “For this reason, it’s paramount that organizations are able to break through the noise and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis. To make this a reality, marketers must go beyond traditional personalization and towards contextualization by leveraging real-time signals of customer intent at the moment when the customer chooses to interact with the brand.”

    Just 16% of marketers have the capability to capture customer intent and deliver real-time, behavior-based marketing across all channels, but more sophisticated marketers are starting to get it right, the study suggests.

    You can find the full study here.

    What makes you think you’re doing personalization right? Let our readers know in the comments.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA Extended To Open Hybrid Cloud

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA Extended To Open Hybrid Cloud

    Red Hat announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the SAP HANA platform is now available to be deployed across the open hybrid cloud. This of course includes via those public cloud providers certified by Red Hat.

    Red Hat says the additions of new cloud provider partners through its Certified Cloud Provider program and new SAP-certified hardware from Hitachi gives Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA customers more choice in deployment options for big data apps.

    “By extending Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA to the public cloud, we are providing a stable, secure and reliable platform for deployments of SAP HANA across the breadth of the open hybrid cloud,” says Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat. “These cloud-based offerings, combined with additional certified providers and configurations of hardware for SAP HANA as well as the scale-up and scale-out certifications of our launch partners, deliver a set of solutions to help meet the growing enterprise demand for big data applications, all standardized on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.”

    Greg McStravick, general manager and global head, Database & Technology at SAP adds, “SAP HANA enables enterprises to focus on innovation while providing IT simplicity and customer choice. With the expanded support from new hardware providers and cloud partners for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, customers have even greater choice upon which to deploy their SAP solutions – whether on premises or in cloud environments, including public, private or hybrid services.”

    “The powerful combination of the robust Hitachi Unified Compute Platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA addresses enterprise requirements and delivers desired business outcomes for even the most demanding, mission-critical data management use cases,” says Jim Beckman, vice president, global alliances at Hitachi Data Systems. “It provides the predictable results; enterprise-class scalability; persistent, high-performance data storage; and high availability that partners and customers have come to expect.”

    Customers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA can utilize Red Hat certified cloud partners, including Virtustream and Secure-24.

    More on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA here. More on certified hardware partners here.

    Image via

  • IBM Partners With SAP To Get Enterprise Apps On SoftLayer Cloud

    IBM Partners With SAP To Get Enterprise Apps On SoftLayer Cloud

    IBM and SAP have expanded a global partnership, which will see the latter deliver its SAP Hana platform, SAP Hana One service and other applications on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform, which has been verified to run SAP Business Suite software and SAP BusinessObjects solutions.

    Businesses will have access to 40 data centers in five continents for running SAP enterprise apps. According to IBM, they’ll be able to more quickly expand their businesses into new geographies with more consistent global deployments. These will improve security and improve compliance with local laws, the company says.

    “Businesses today are looking for ways to lower the cost of deployment and greater efficiency in addressing new market opportunity,” said IBM General Manager of Cloud Services James Comfort. “By delivering SAP applications via IBM cloud technologies, companies will have consistent access to a global infrastructure that will assist them in tackling business needs with the speed and efficiency needed in today’s business climate.”

    “Delivering SAP applications via the IBM cloud provides customers the choice they desire to respond in real time to changing industry dynamics that impact their business,” added Robert Enslin, president of Global Customer Operations at SAP. “We anticipate that this approach will prove valuable to enable customers to easily scale to constantly increasing business requirements.”

    The companies say that businesses will see reduced support costs as a result of the partnership, and also that they’ll be able to speed up development and test instantly.

    IBM is also working with Virtustream on a new option for managing environments running SAP solutions on the SoftLayer platform. IBM will use Virtustream’s xStream cloud management platform software, and Virtustream will use SoftLayer to expand its own services into additional locations.

    Image via SoftLayer

  • Software Revenue Rose 4.8% Last Year

    Software Revenue Rose 4.8% Last Year

    The PC market is in a funk, with PC manufacturers scrambling to find a way to make desktop and notebook PCs relevant within the new reality of mobile tablets and smartphones. That doesn’t mean, however, that the software companies providing the applications for the PC market are headed the same way. As businesses and consumers push forward with their already-capable PCs, software sales are still growing.

    Market research firm Gartner today released a new report showing that global software revenue hit $407.3 billion during 2013. This is up 4.8% from the $388.5 billion the industry earned during 2012.

    Though it is clear that the software industry is enduring the hardware shift of the past few years, software itself is also undergoing a major transition. According to Gartner this shift involves companies that are both supporting existing traditional software infrastructures while rolling out new cloud-based solutions and pioneering other subscription-based services. Even many of those PC hardware companies that are struggling to hold back the rising tide of mobile devices are re-configuring their business models to rely more on enterprise software and security services.

    “The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the internet of things (IoT) movement,” said Joanne Correia, research VP at Gartner. “A clear indicator of this is that for the first time we have a pure cloud vendor in the top 10.”

    The cloud vendor Correia referenced is Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management (CRM) company that provides businesses with cloud-based CRM solutions. Salesforce ranks tenth on Gartner’s list of the top ten software vendors of 2013 ranked by revenue. The company saw its revenues increase by over 33% year-over-year in 2013, up to $3.8 billion.

    The list is led by the perennial heavyweight of the software business, Microsoft, which grew software revenue 6% to hit $65.7 billion in 2013. They are led by Oracle ($29.6 billion), IBM ($29.1%), SAP ($18.5 billion), and Symantec ($6.4 billion). Another heavily cloud-based business, VMware, rose to eighth place on Gartner’s list by increasing revenue 14.1% to $4.8 billion in 2013.

  • SAP Launches ERP Foundation Extension

    SAP Launches ERP Foundation Extension

    SAP recently announced the SAP ERP Foundation Extension, which it describes as “an integrated and comprehensive modering offering” that lets companies new to SAP implement a system optimized for their specific needs.

    The company made the announcement at a customer conference in Sao Paulo.

    The extension is based on its established ERP application, which is optimized for use with SAP HANA.

    “Powered by SAP HANA and enhanced with application innovations in mobile, analytics and cloud, SAP ERP Foundation Extension spans mission-critical core processes — such as finance, human resources, IT management, manufacturing, procurement, sales and service and compliance — and can be deployed flexibly on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid model,” the company says. “To help accelerate business productivity and efficiency, it offers industry best practices, unparalleled integration tools, role-based controlled access and extensions for basic business processes via cloud, analytics and mobile solutions.”

    There’s a new report out from ZDnet indicating that organizations are increasingly integrating CRM and ERP product, looking at more hybrid environments.

    “In the new business economy, innovation matters,” says Chakib Bouhdary, executive vice president, Industry Solutions and Customer Value at SAP. “SAP ERP Foundation Extension is an extended offering designed with the power of SAP HANA, the beautiful usability of SAP Fiori and analytics and mobile integrated into one platform — a complete rapid-deployment solution.”

    “This is one of the most sophisticated ERP offerings in the market run by SAP and its partners across the world,” he adds. “This is another example of SAP innovating and driving high value for our customers as never seen before.”

    SAP’s offering comes with the SAP Business Objects, SAP Access Control, SAP Fiori, SAP Cloud for Sales, SAP NetWeaver, SAP NetWeaver Single Sign-On and SAP Hana apps.

  • SAP Launches Set Of Of New ERP Rapid-Deployment Solutions

    SAP Launches Set Of Of New ERP Rapid-Deployment Solutions

    SAP announced the launch of some new ERP rapid-deployment apps this week. These would be the SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, SAP ERP for Manufacturing and SAP ERP for Trading solutions.

    The company says they will deliver speed and simplicity to enterprises considering the adoption of adoption of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.

    The solutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, best-practices content and “end-user enablement.” Each comes with a fixed price.

    “The promise of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP 360 Customer is to enable businesses to run faster, simpler and smarter,” said Steven Birdsall, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions. “Now, through rapid-deployment, we have wrapped this innovation into an easily accessible package as well. We have helped reduce implementation barriers for a non-disruptive and practical transformation into real-time business. Rapid-deployment solutions are offering customers game-changing innovation with controlled risk.”

    “These new rapid-deployment solutions support IDC’s findings that emerging technology implementations are becoming shorter, and require fewer consulting and integration services,” said Gard Little, research director, at IDC for IT consulting and systems integration research. “Delivered as a complete package with a modular approach, SAP Rapid Deployment solutions allow customers to incrementally address business needs at their own pace in a simple and pre-integrated framework that can help them unlock value quickly.”

    More on SAP Rapid Deployment solutions here.

  • Britehouse SSD Reaches Gold Partner in 8 Months

    Britehouse SSD Reaches Gold Partner in 8 Months

    Britehouse SSD, SAP’s South African Alliance Partner, announced that it has reached “Gold Partner” status as a value-added reseller of SAP software in only eight months. The new status will entitle Britehouse to benefits from SAP, including discounts. Britehouse is the only company on the African continent to offer the full spectrum of SAP products.

    “We’re not just resellers,” said Paolo Masselli, CEO of Britehouse. “We offer an end-to-end SAP service that supports SAP’s strategic focus areas: cloud, mobile, analytics, database and technology services.

    “The significance of this to our customers is that SAP invests more than any other business solutions company in researching market trends and business requirements, designing its solutions to fully optimise the way organisations operate – today and tomorrow. So, by aligning ourselves with SAP’s focus areas, we’re best positioned to make our own customers best-run, future-proofed organisations.”

    Masselli also stated that Britehouse’s close relationship with SAP will help its customers get the most relevant solutions for the growth and agility of their businesses. In addition to being an SAP Africa service alliance partner, Britehouse is also Africa’s only-SAP-certified cloud partner and South Africa’s largest SAP Analytics partner.

    “Everything we do is aimed at enabling organisations to spend less money running the past and free up the money they need to spend on the future,” Masselli says. “In the future business environment, organisations’ IT spend[ing] needs to shift away from a maintenance focus – which limits them to trying to reduce complexity, cost, time and risk – towards making themselves more competitive, by having the capacity to innovate, change and collaborate – at speed.”