SAP on the Cloud

The Great Transformation – The Era of Demand Supply IT Begins

October 1, 2012 by Brad Smith

What’s the price for a talent?

August 23, 2012 by Sven Denecken

In the mid-1990s, Reinhard Sprenger published a book titled “Mythos Motivation” (The Motivation Myth). Sprenger’s analysis of the ways to escape common motivation traps quickly gained popularity and became a bestseller in no time. I’m sure anyone who has worked long enough in the HR space has read this (non-)motivation bible

This simple passage captures the core of what Sprenger was getting at: “People no longer motivate themselves, because they are so used to having someone else to motivate them…A manager’s role should be to simply resolve demotivation roadblocks”.

Sprenger had hit the nail on the head and this breakthrough idea quickly caught on in the 90s.  Though this philosophy proved popular in the 90s, does it hold true in today’s rapidly-changing environment? The work environment is increasingly populated with millennials, and before long, they will dominate the workplace. Never having experienced life without web and mobile access, this new generation of workers will approach work differently, identifying themselves with the work they do, rather than who they do it for.

With their need for mobility, flexibility and freedom in the way they work, would the same idea apply to them?  We believe not.

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The Great Cloud Secret: Fastest Time to Value

August 17, 2012 by justin

When evaluating Cloud, many people make the mistake by comparing it directly to on-premise technologies and using descriptions such as Outsourcing, or the shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure.

Yes, there are some potential savings to be had from shifting to a Cloud model from and on-premise model in that regard, but the real ROI comes from agility.

In my previous post here on the SAP blog, I mentioned that Cloud represents the fastest time to value. What do I mean by fastest time to value? To answer that you have to go back to basics and look at what IT is here for. (more…)

The Cloud of Service Things (Revisited)

August 16, 2012 by Robert Keahey

Almost one year ago today I penned a rather lengthy blog entry on the topic that is the title of this post. The premise of that entry was that the future cloud will be comprised, to a large degree, of cloud-based service objects that can be consumed as needed by applications. Whether those applications live in or out of the cloud doesn’t really matter, though there are different connectivity, security and performance aspects of each scenario.  I thought I would revisit the topic a year later and see if I still believe that to be true.

At the most basic level, the answer is “yes.” Has anything significantly changed in the last year? Not really, but I think the cloud integration space is starting to “gel” through consolidation of players and through the (ongoing) development of standards, templates and reusable models by groups such as CCIF, IEEE, OCI, ONF, CloudStack, OpenStack and the Open Data Center Alliance to name just a few of the many organizations involved in crafting them. (more…)

Things About Cloud We Take for Granted

August 16, 2012 by Alec Wagner

Crystal-ball gazing is always a fun pastime, and can make for some pithy punditry—and there’s no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks in the tech world, from sage thought-leaders to naysaying curmudgeons. When will Apple release the next iPhone? When will Google buy (fill in the blank)? When will Facebook dump Timeline? Predictions about The Cloud are especially fun to bandy about, as prognostications can take real flights of fancy. Case in point: Ben Kepes—commentator, adviser, cloud computing analyst, blogger, and CloudU curator—got said crystal ball rolling at Focus.com when he asked, “What are the top 10 things about cloud we’ll all take for granted in three years?”

Let the soothsaying begin! (more…)

Mobile Apps: What you need, When you need it – That’s What We Expect!

August 8, 2012 by Anders Trolle-Schultz

No doubt – the world is turning mobile, but don’t disappoint the users – give them what they expect and don’t just make it a mobile interface.

Confused? You should be; before you move your legacy stuff on to the various mobile platforms – from mobile phones to tablets to next generation smartphones.  Too many companies think mobility is only about mobile enabling their applications.  It is not!  It’s all about putting a specific business process in the palm of the employee’s hand when it’s needed, where it’s needed.  And only that!

The consumerization of technology has already led to plenty of cloud applications being wrapped as apps for mobile devices, rather than offered as Web-based interfaces. The boundaries between what’s a web page and what’s an application may be dissolving with the advent of HTML5 and user interfaces like Windows 8 Metro. But as more of the world start to consume services almost exclusively through mobile devices, it’s less likely that users will ever type in a URL for a site. (more…)

Three Obvious, Frequently Forgotten Axioms of Business Innovation

August 7, 2012 by Greg Chase

Innovation has become one of the most overused words in the corporate-speak lexicon. In fact, many of us have stopped understanding what it really means. Being in the IT industry or trade, you probably receive promotional content from enterprise tech companies with exciting headlines such as “Achieve Business Innovation Now!” It might seem that marketers are grasping for new adjectives to modify the world innovation to make it more impactful, but business innovation has an important meaning that many executives, product engineers, and IT folks don’t pay enough attention to in their work.

Business innovation is adding new unique abilities to a company’s business practices to deliver competitively differentiating value to customers. What follows are three obvious axioms for achieving business innovation that people often fail to remember.

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What does the IT department look like in the Cloud?

August 6, 2012 by justin

When I talk to many IT folk around the world about Cloud, more often than not, they have an underlying fear that their jobs are being taken away. Worse than that, many people are calling their babies ugly- the systems they’ve given their lives to keep running are now considered obsolete. It’s no wonder people can be skeptical about Cloud hype.

But they needn’t be.

Yes, the world is changing, but IT folk have a chance right now to seize the Cloud opportunity instead of spurning it.

Since the advent of technology, IT has constantly evolved. Mainframe. Mini. PC. Cloud. Mobile. We’re right in the middle of one those shifts in enterprise IT– from the PC era to the Cloud era. The BYOD and Smartphone era is rapidly approaching too- but that’s a topic for another day.

Just like my hard-learned Windows 98 skills aren’t much use to me now, the on-premise skills that many folk have honed over so much of their careers perhaps aren’t as relevant now as they once were. A hard fact we all have to accept working in technology as technology evolves. (more…)

Ding, Dong, The Suite is Dead! (As we know it)

August 2, 2012 by Brad Smith

Who Drives the Move to the Cloud – Business? or IT?

July 30, 2012 by Alec Wagner

It’s an age-old controversy—somewhere between the “chicken/egg” endless loop and a declaration of all-out war—and the gauntlet was thrown down again recently at Focus.com. Pitting the suits against the geeks, BrainWave Consulting’s Andrew S. Baker innocently asked: “Who drives the move to the cloud? Business or IT?”

If you want start a contentious conversation, simply do the following:

1. Bring up “The Cloud” at work (you’ll find as many definitions as there are folks who use it)
2. Make folks pick sides about ultimate ownership (fight! fight!)
3. Stir in the inherent friction between business and IT (for good measure)

Voila!—you have an engaging exchange that’s hard not to follow. Think train wreck, but not as ugly and much more insightful.

Spoiler alert: There was no absolute winner. Here’s how the passions played out. (more…)