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Friday, August 31, 2012

Expecting a billion users by 2015 Says Mr.Bill McDermott, Co-CEO of SAP

Our company wants to reach 1 billion users by 2015 says SAP's Bill McDermott the time interviewed by author, management guru and venture capitalist Geoff Moore at a Churchill Club event Wednesday night in Palo Alto.He added "We're giving the customers what they want...", when asked how SAP is doing so well in the midst of a financial crisis.


Here are some of the highlights from the conversation and about SAP Giant Mr.Bill McDermott Powered by forbes. The below points copied from Forbes.com for SAP Techno users:

  • More notes that SAP is thriving at a time of disruptive change – unlike many other leading technology companies.
  • At Moore’s prompting, McDermott starts by talking about his background. He was born in New York, and grew up on Long Island. At age 16, he bought a delicatessen for $5,500 in notes. He said he had to convince kids to walk past the 7-11 and come into his store. He also gave them credit when no one else would. And he did deliveries for seniors who did not like to leave home. McDermott also set up a separate room with video games, and split the cash with the video game company; in a few months they paid off the store.
  • Eventually he sold the store and bought his parents a beach house.
  • His first real job was at Xerox. He was there 17 years. Then Gartner and Siebel. He’s been at SAP since 2002.
  • In 2010, he and Jim Snabe became co-CEOs of SAP; Moore notes that the co-CEO arrangement is rare. But McDermott says the co-CEO approach has a long history at SAP. McDermott says what makes it work is trust.
  • He says their mission was to give the company a mission and a strategy. Moore asked what bets they decided to make.
  • McDermott says he got a call from Hasso Plattner, who asked him to be the co-CEO of the company. So he asked who the co- would be. He called up Jim. He was flying to Hawaii that day for a sales recognition event. He says he had a long conversation with Snabe from outside a hotel on the big island of Hawaii, standing near a dumpster surrounded by a swarm of bees.
  • Anyway, he says there was a lack of connection between R&D and the value chain. The company needed leadership, a vision, a strategy, he says. McDermott says they spent two weeks recasting the company’s strategy.
  • McDermott says they try to focus on “keeping the main thing the main thing.” At SAP that’s being the market leader in business software and analytics. They targeted “innovation without disruption.” He says they could have tried a different strategy.
  • They saw three turbo engine. Mobility. Mobile was the new desktop. There are mobile devices than toothbrushes. He says they saw what was going on, the “i-economy and all that.” He knew people needed to manage and secure those devices.
  • The second thing is they knew cloud was going to be big, not just in virtualizing and private clouds; companies did not want to buy hardware. They want solutions that might have hardware attached to it. Solution bundled with a service is what you need to get their attention. The cloud as a force we cared a lot about, he says. What we learned is that small and mid-sized companies don’t have lots of users; thought we had to focus on larger companies.
  • We also had a conversation around software-as-a-service, and the only asset they had was Business By Design. “If I take off my shirt, I have so many stretch marks,” he says.
  • He also says they knew they had to go after database in technology; he knew HANA would be the innovation of the last 30 years. High Performance Application Network Appliance (and a city on Maui). The idea was to create a way to Google your own data in main memory, to create much faster decision making cycle. 100,000x faster than any other technology in the world, he says.
  • So cloud, mobile, database technology in HANA led to early moves in the strategy.
  • In less than a year, HANA will be close to a $500 million market. Banking industry is a customer for cash management.
  • Within the first 100 days, they bought Sybase. He notes that they had a partnership with Sybase to move CRM application to the iPad. McDermott says SAP called Apple to order a few thousand iPads. Steve Jobs called him and said, what are you doing. The same night, they called John Chen, the CEO of Sybase; he says they agreed to do a deal in 16 days.
  • On the company’s SuccessFactors acquisition; he says they wanted to add talent management. Now they’ve bought Ariba, which has a real time marketplace to connect buyers and sellers on a live platform. With HANA, that gives you a real-time trading network for every industry, he says.
  • McDermott says companies depend on SAP more than ever to innovate; CEOs look into my eye and say I need you to help me improve my business.
  • The company wants to reach 1 billion users by 2015.
  • SAP will invest $2 billion in China by 2015; to do that they need a complex ecosystem with partners.
  • They will hire 6,000 people this year out of universities; some of them at SAP, some placed with partners.
  • There are 61,000 people at SAP right now.
  • Moore says that change management was the heaviest burden for all of McDermott’s predecessors, that it was deeply anchored in its heritage; but he adds that he does not see that at all in McDermott. He says the results actually show the company is changing.
  • McDermott responds that none of us is as smart as all of us. He says you need to use them and get them in the game. Have managers that make the news, not report the news. I despite bureaucracy, he says. People in management need to be on the front lines, he says. With HANA, he says, everyone has the same set of facts. It’s all in HANA, all in real time. He says they decided they will run the company on their own software. Even in the boardroom, he says…technology can change the name. You need a culture focused on the right things.
  • On how they changed the culture: He says people will do the good work if you have the right strategy. If you give them a bad strategy, they will dig all night and the ditch will just get deeper. You also have to have a bias toward innovation. If you aren’t going to innovate, go home. And some of that innovation has to be through M&A. He says you need to nail it in 60-90-120 days if you are going to make changes. Everybody starts moving in a solid direction in terms of strategy.
  • On what students need to have coming out of school: STEM – sciences, technology, engineering and math – and also designers. (Very interesting answer; SAP needs designers…)
  • On growth strategy, he says they are primarily an organic growth company; you can’t grow only via M&A. (Which is not to say they’re finished doing acquisitions, of course.)
  • Our relationship with Oracle is “a complex one,” he says. Heh. McDermott says it is not in SAP’s interest in spending a lot of time worrying about what Oracle and others are doing. He says they are a step or two behind where SAP is right now. He says they don’t do that locker room talk anymore. “As a company, we’re in a whole new place.” He says they “warmly would welcome them using HANA.”
  • Who are the future competitors? Amazon is a partner. Would love to have Facebook and Google as a partner. All could compete with part of the SAP business model. You have to change your attitude and be more accepting of other people’s business models, as opposed to taking a military stance, “we will crush you.” We’d like to partner with Facebook and Google, and we look forward to that.
  • What’s one user from Salesforce.com? User experience. He says they are really going for “user force,” making beautiful applications, and provide a service, to customize something just the way you want it. Give it to you your way. Design things that are pleasing to the user. That is something we have learned.
  • One lesson from IBM: They really do keep the main thing the main thing, and then innovate around it. They have a big software business, and we do, but a different type. They have kept their main culture and values for 100 years. But they changed when they had to. And they really understand an ecosystem approach. And they are very good at account management.
 
Thanks Forbes - The above points impressed me personally as well(USERS: Like SAP Techno please keep watching Forbes also)



Tuesday, August 21, 2012

openHPI - "In-Memory Data Management"




To realize the value of One milliseconds, Ask the person/company who is running HANA.


Times waits for No One.  HANA waits for No Seconds. 



openHPI is the educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam. On openHPI you take part in a worldwide social learning network based on interactive online courses covering different subjects in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

openHPI starts on Monday September 3rd with the online course "In-Memory Data Management" taught by Prof. Hasso Plattner, founder of HPI, co-founder of the software giant SAP and chairman of its supervisory board.

The subject of the online course is the new in-memory data management technology researched at Plattner's chair.


Register :: Right Here..! Right Now..!

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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Sybase, an SAP Company, Wins Consecutive Waters Rankings Awards

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that for multiple consecutive years the readers of WatersTechnology have voted Sybase, an SAP company, "Best Complex Event Processing (CEP) Solution Provider" and "Best Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Systems Provider.
 
 
 

Discussion Between IBD and Bill McDermott about SAP Growth and Ongoing Battles with Oracle



McDermott recently spoke with IBD about SAP's growth strategy and its ongoing battles with Oracle.

IBD: This was SAP's best quarter in terms of software revenue growth. Is that significant?
McDermott: We delivered double-digit growth across all regions, including Europe, in spite of a pretty volatile global economy. It's a validation that our broad portfolio of industry-specific solutions and services is really differentiating SAP. Software sales (as opposed to services and support) is the greatest predictor of future demand because it pulls along the services revenue with it.

IBD: Is the slow global economy affecting SAP?
McDermott: No. This is (my) 10th consecutive quarter as a co-CEO of SAP where we achieved our double-digit growth objectives.
We are well on our way to being a 20 billion euro ($24 billion) software company by 2015 (vs. $19.5 billion last year).
Information technology needs to (be thought of as) business technology, because executives have to get results. (Companies) are not going to get any better results by buying somebody's hardware or adding another services contract. They have to change the way they run their business.
We think that we can make (businesses) run like never before. Strategic investments are going to business software and not to some of the commodities of the past.

IBD: Which parts of your software business are growing fastest?
McDermott: The biggest growth area is clearly SAP HANA (for high performance analytic appliance), which is our in-memory database (a data analytics tool that puts data to be processed in random access memory, which can be accessed and processed more quickly).
Also, we acquired Sybase (a mobile database provider, for $5.8 billion in 2010) and that business is now growing at 60% year over year. You get a mature business like a database growing at 60%, that's exciting. Our mobile business is growing in triple digits and our cloud business is growing in triple digits.

IBD: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said this year that SAP has no cloud strategy. How do you respond?
McDermott: I think we responded very handily with our business results (on July 24). Our customers have voted with their wallets. (Sales show that) HANA beats the Oracle database front, left and center. We are two times larger in applications, nearly two times larger in analytics and we have millions more users in the cloud than Oracle does.
If you are on the defensive and on the run, you'll say almost anything to discredit your rival. We take all of our rivals seriously. We just keep out-innovating them. We let our results and our customers' success do the talking.
IBD: Did SAP have a cloud business before buying SuccessFactors?
McDermott: Yes. It was small. Business ByDesign was our flagship (cloud) product for small and medium-sized companies.
The cloud developed quickly. We really needed to scale it up, and M&A was a very good move for us. Not only did we get a No. 1 company (SuccessFactors) in terms of users in the cloud, with 15 million, but that number is five times that of (cloud rival) Salesforce.com (CRM), so you can imagine how many more it is than Oracle. It also gave us some size and scale and the leader we needed to run our cloud business.

IBD: How much of SAP's revenue is cloud-based?
McDermott: It's still a single-digit business (less than 10% of total revenue). It's growing in triple digits and we are on track to be a 2 billion euro ($2.4 billion) cloud business by 2015. We are close to closing our (business-to-business cloud platform) Ariba acquisition and now we will control the business network between buyers and sellers on a global basis. They are really excited about partnering with SAP.
We also have a lot of organic innovation around Business BuyDesign, and we have a sales-on-demand product and a financials product coming out.
Combine that with our talent and our supplier products and you have got yourself a real cloud powerhouse. All of our software is cloud-ready. It's about what our customers want.

IBD: Was acquiring SuccessFactors and Ariba a faster way to build the cloud business faster than trying to do it organically?
McDermott: That's exactly right. Because the cloud was moving so fast, you had to get yourself in the game at scale as fast as you could. Then you put the cloud into the SAP channel network and it will scale even faster than it did on its own. Timing is everything in life.

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