The recent Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architecture Forum, engineered by SAP community impresario Paul Kurchina and hosted by SAP in Newtown Square, was one of those rare events that’s so rich and varied I know I’ll be mining it for ideas and inspiration for months to come. So bear with me as I try to […]
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Can Zoho’s History and Culture Redefine the Business of Enterprise Software?
(Editor’s note: I have heard that some readers felt I was papering over the East India Company’s utterly horrific rule and not according it the condemnation it deserves. I apologize for giving that impression. I also may have made it more clear why I mentioned the East India Company at all. I’ve made some changes […]
Salesforce.com’s Rendezvous with Margins, Activist Investors, and a Sale to Workday?
It’s been a storied ride for Marc Benioff since the founding of Salesforce.com, and for the most part the story has been seen as all upside. Category creation, leadership, and dominance have all been Salesforce.com’s birthright in the CRM industry, and Benioff has been the chief architect of this unparalleled ride up the enterprise software […]
Getting Permission to Break Out of the Enterprise Software Silo Trap: Buyer, Buy-in, Budget – Bingo.
Episode 1: Firstup When I wrote about silo-busting last time, it was clear that vendors, systems integrators, and customers have a lot of work to do if they hope to fix their silo problems and the endemic dysfunction silos bring to the enterprise. It’s not going to be easy, as the negative culture and economics […]
No More Customer Successing: Can Zoho Be the Antidote to the Great Customer Success Cover-up?
One of the best things about the enterprise software market is a little upstart called Zoho. This is a company that aspires to be the purveyor of the “operating system of business,” and to a certain extent they’re well on their way to building out a portfolio of enterprise and productivity software that could, at […]
Scandal and Redemption in Trade Finance: SAP’s Business Network Gets an Improbable Boost
It was one of those made-for-the-tabloids scandals: a tale of financial misdeeds that included a former British Prime Minister; one of Switzerland’s largest banks; a major industrial company with dealings in the UK, Australia, and South Africa; the venerable and increasingly unlucky tech investor Softbank; and a high-flying and hard-crashing boutique bank, Greensill Capital, with […]
To RISE or not to RISE: Ten Questions you should ask SAP about RISE
It’s really hard to have a conversation with or about SAP without hearing something about RISE with SAP. Its dominant position in the marketing and sales efforts of the company has made it inescapable, whether you’re a customer listening to yet another keynote presentation or sales exec’s pitch, or you’re a partner trying to understand […]
Vendor Bake-off Reports and Professional Discourtesy: Why These Analyst Reports Can Cause More Harm than Good.
There’s a play on words I like to use whenever someone is publicly disparaging another member of their own profession: “professional discourtesy.” It can be seen as a form of revenge, and like revenge it’s often best served cold. Sour grapes are also best served cold, and jealousy and spite are often behind expressions of […]
Quality Hell in SaaS-Land: Is the SaaS Business Model Based on a False Need for Continuous Upgrades?
Last year I wrote a post complaining how Teams has become a perfect example of bloatware, and was gratified to see the response: basically a concurring pile-on of messages and comments, with literally only one or two people trying to defend it. Lots of horror stories to share. But as I wade through some recent […]
The Problem with Microsoft Teams and Enterprise Collaboration. With Jokes and Sociobiology
I think there is a terrible irony in Microsoft kicking off this week’s Ignite event – one dedicated in large part to the concept that Microsoft’s vision of collaboration will be a core component of the transition to a hybrid workforce – with a bunch of analysts unable to join in the Day 0 analyst […]
Attention Customers: You’re Responsible for Vendors’ Customer Success Efforts Too. With Proof Points
I admit I’m shamelessly drafting on Jon Reed’s excellent post on customer success proof points by posting this a little ahead of my original schedule, but the timeliness was too good to ignore. The fact that we were both working on this issue from slightly different perspectives was also too good not to acknowledge and […]
Choking on Innovation: Customizations and the Cloud, With Entertainment
Here’s the deal: customization is everywhere in enterprise software, and most of it sucks. Sucks like a tattoo that looked good for one wild night in Vegas, sucks like that best friend you invited over for a weekend who’s still there a month later, sucks like that cute puppy you adopted who’s now using your […]
Death to All Silos, With Aphorisms*
I’m serious. The more I look into the problems of technology in service of the enterprise, the more I see the insidious hand of siloed technology, siloed business processes, and siloed employees wreaking havoc across the business world. We dream of the heterogeneous enterprise creating new and differentiating end-to-end processes that drive digital transformation at the edge and in the core, making user experiences universally superior and boosting tech-driven efficiency like never before. That sure is a mouthful of jargon, but that’s pretty much how the industry sees its future. But these are just dreams: What we usually get the same old adherence to a status quo limited by the reality of silos yesterday, silos today, and more silos tomorrow.
What is Innovation at SAP and How Far Can it Go?
The starting point for this post was a conversation with an industry veteran about innovation, in which he opined: “SAP doesn’t innovate anymore. How come they don’t have something like HoloLens?”
I’ve been pondering that declaration for a while. I agree that HoloLens is immensely cool, and that most of the feature/function bloat in the nth rev of an established enterprise software product is more ‘meh’ than magical, at least to me. But SAP doesn’t innovate? They really don’t have anything like HoloLens – true enough.
Informatica Hits the Heterogeneity High Notes: Hybrids, Hairballs, and All That Implies (with Cocktails)
One of my beefs with the enterprise software industry is the pretense that a particular app vendor “owns” a customer and, by implication, has a footprint at said customer all the way from the C-suite to cubicle-land. Reality, for the most part, is quite different. Most companies in the upper midmarket and above have large portfolios of products run by distinct groups that have little or no interconnection. While there may be a first among equals vendor at the company, it’s more common that vendors have special relationships with the CIO or a line of business exec, but no one “owns” a customer any more than the local grocery store owns you or me.
SAPPHIRE 2021 Watch: SAP’s Business Network Initiative
This week’s keynote for SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference was intended as a teaser for several ensuing weeks of content, an embarrassment of riches that will be hard for any single individual to navigate successfully. So with all due respect to the many initiatives being touted in the coming sessions, here’s a quick viewpoint on what I think will be the most important part of SAPPHIRE: Business Networks. What follows here is a preview of the main challenges that I think SAP has to overcome in order to make good on the promise of what is genuinely a potential paradigm shift in enterprise software and the global economy.
Laggards, Logos, and Licenses: Inside The Enterprise Software Industry’s Upgrade Dilemma
The yin/yang dichotomy between problem and opportunity has never been more apparent in looking at the quandary enterprise software vendors face in the race to encourage their customers to upgrade to the latest version of their flagship products. It’s a strange place where Hobson’s Choice meets Schrödinger’s cat, and where, as a result, sales strategies […]
Pitching ERP Upgrades to The Cloud is the Wrong Way to Upgrade ERP to the Cloud
The part of the enterprise software industry that is struggling to move a legacy customer base to the cloud is finding itself in a bit of a pickle. While there’s a host of compelling reasons why their legacy ERP customers need an upgrade, an upgrade that will add significant new features as well as move […]