SAP on the Cloud

Interesting Feedback from SAP Customers About Hybrid Cloud in Recent Webinar

October 25, 2012 by Greg Chase

Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at an SAP webinar covering IT strategy for cloud computing and how customers are evolving a hybrid approach. This is a topic I’ve been working on since SAPPHIRE NOW Orlando this May, and I am gratified to find there is still a lot of interest in the subject. Since you can watch the recording of the webinar yourself I won’t repeat too much here.  However, the attendees were very generous with their participation by asking several good questions and sharing their opinions in two interesting polls.

Adoption of Cloud Computing

In the first poll we asked attendees a multiple answer question about which ways their company has adopted cloud computing. As a result, some responders answered in more than one category, so each answer is a % of total respondents clicking that category, and percentages to the question will add up to more than 100%. To my surprise almost 30% of respondents said their company is not leveraging cloud computing. That seems very high for me, even for the most conservative SAP customers. I suspect if the IT department did an audit of the different systems their lines of business used, they’d find at least a few software services – and this doesn’t include services brought in virally by employees on their own. Also interesting is that 15% of attendees reported that they are already supporting their developers through a platform as a service. This isn’t far off from a recent IBM survey that finds 16% of their respondents use PaaS and see strategic potential, while an additional 33% use PaaS incidentally. Not included in either poll is any indication as to what each respondent considers to be the definition of “platform as a service.”

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Adding on New Capabilities with SaaS – Part III of Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy

October 10, 2012 by Greg Chase

This blog continues the discussion started in Part I of Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy and Part II – Retreading Existing Systems to Leverage Cloud Technology.  In this blog we examine how Software as a Service fits into a hybrid IT Strategy for cloud computing.

If your company has extensive investments in on premise ERP such as SAP Business Suite, then pursuing an add-on approach with Software as a Service can be an agile way for your company’s departments to roll out new systems of engagement to users. Such a strategy should consider the business needs being solved in relation to other needs within the company such as information management and integration of business processes.

Figure 1: SAP’s vision of end-to-end business processes supported by both on premise and cloud-based applications.

[Source: SAP]

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Hybrid Cloud Computing: Is it Organic or GMO (Generally Made-up Over-complication)?

October 1, 2012 by Greg Chase

It’s already hard enough to understand what people mean when they talk about cloud computing.  Now cloud computing vendors and IT industry analysts are talking about “hybrid” cloud computing.  Is this some new trend that’s happening organically in the market, or is it “Generally Made-up Over-complication” by pundits and vendors?

Clouds converge on New York in time for the Interop conference

[IMAGE SOURCE]

These vendors and analysts don’t even mean the same thing when using the term “hybrid.” They can be referring to at least one of three different concepts:

1)      IT infrastructures made up of on premise and cloud deployments.

2)      Multi-cloud deployments , especially multiple Software as a Service or platform as a service clouds.

3)      An IT strategy that makes use of multiple cloud deployment approaches.

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Sharing Research: What IT Managers and Business Managers Want in Cloud Computing

September 26, 2012 by Greg Chase

Up until last night I had this comfortable little narrative that went like this: IT executives like cloud computing because it allows them to reduce operating costs in IT. On the other hand business executives like cloud computing because it allows them to realize benefits of new capabilities much faster, sometimes allowing them to bypass IT by ordering software as a service. It’s a great narrative since it shows the ongoing gap between IT and business and suggests that IT is missing more important business benefits, and thus would be have trouble making a business case for cloud computing projects. All I needed was some provocative third party data to back this narrative up.

The death of a narrative

Then I run across this survey from PwC of CIOs and other C-level executives ranking motivations for adopting external private cloud service providers: (more…)

September Cloud Strategy Update

September 19, 2012 by Sven Denecken

As I began preparing my cloud presentation for upcoming events, I reviewed my SAPPHIRE blog to see what had changed since May.  As one would hope, the only major difference was execution.  In other words, in May we talked about developing a cloud product for financials.  In the meantime, the product has already launched!  What is it that allows us to remain so consistent?  Consider our unique competitive position in the cloud as summarized below:

  SAP has a seat in the boardroom of Fortune 2000 companies.  We are committed to the cloud and uniquely positioned to help our customers leverage the cloud without disruption. SAP in respect to cloud is now the grown up in the room.  (more…)

Retail – It is All About BIG DATA and Winning with the Cloud

September 19, 2012 by Anders Trolle-Schultz

After Cloud and SaaS, the hype is now surfacing around BIG DATA.  Moreover, as with Cloud and SaaS, many views and interpretations paint a very colorful picture – the big (J) question – how do we turn all of this into tools that can help businesses make the right decisions based upon facts and not assumptions?

In today’s world, the amount of data grows every second and we are starting to look at data in a much more “science-like” way.  Instead of the traditional data mining with our “own-created” data sets, we now reach out to the cloud to include new data sets and find new correlations, some unexpected, and use them to adjust our strategies.

No doubt, the possibilities are there and many businesses stand to gain from the new resources of data – one in particular, the retail business. (more…)

Cloud Marketing: Don’t Fear the Hype

September 19, 2012 by Alec Wagner

We’ve all been there before—trapped in a conference room during a dull marketing presentation that inspires yawns, makes your eyes glaze over, and completely tune out. Cloud marketing presentations are no exception when it comes to inspiring ennui and boredom. But have you sat through a cloud vendor’s snooze-fest and been jarred back to consciousness by your internal early-warning system? Lori Janjigian at Focus was curious about what red flags folks are seeing, so she asked: “What are the top three things that scare you in the marketing presentation of a vendor providing cloud services?”

Stop snoring, wipe the drool from your chin, and be on the lookout for these warning signs… (more…)

Cloud Guidelines: It’s Just Good Policy

August 29, 2012 by Alec Wagner

Before The Cloud, IT spending and IT policy were tightly controlled. Now end-users can whip out a credit card and acquire IT services on the fly. First there was server sprawl. Then VM sprawl. Do we need policies to prevent cloud sprawl? Lori Janjigian, VP of client marketing at Focus, got to the heart of the matter when she asked: “Is there a need for a cloud policy? What should it cover? How broad should it be in terms of what (purchasing, consumption, security) and who (IT, employees, supply-chain partners, vendors)? Who should own it, and how should it be developed (top-down, bottom-up, crowdsourced)? How often should it be reviewed?”

It’s no surprise that the experts who responded were emphatically pro-policy. But their road maps for reigning in cloud sprawl took some intriguin (more…)

Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy Part I

August 23, 2012 by Greg Chase

Yep, cloud computing is here. In fact, the cloud is probably all over the place if your company is like many.

Now, your CEO sends you an email saying, “I need you to give a presentation to the board about our corporate strategy for moving to the cloud.” You think, “Uhh, Ma’am, we’re kind of already in the cloud. I guess we need a strategy now.”Your CFO is notes a significant rise in employee expense claims for Amazon, “Wow, they sure are reading a lot of books!” Each department head has their favorite software as a service application. You have no idea what server the HR’s department’s new custom employee vacation request application is running on. Already, the marketing department is complaining about out of synch customer data again after you cleaned up the on premise CRM system last year.

Get in front of the cloud mob and turn it into a
parade. [PHOTO SOURCE]

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Why I Don’t Care About Cloud Computing

July 17, 2012 by Brad Smith

Guest Blog Post by Chris Heffer, Social CRM Strategy Developer, SAP

I am a consumer of IT. I love technology. I couldn’t imagine a world without my iPad and I will never buy another phone unless it is prefaced by the letter I.

Every day I check my Gmail account.

I work with social media and spend my life with my head in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc.

Technology is a massive part of my life I live, eat and breathe it. I love it.

But……..I don’t care about cloud computing.

To me as the end user it doesn’t matter how or where these magical services are coming from. The information could be coming from a data center or from Mark Zuckerburg’s garage for all I care. It doesn’t matter to me. As an end user of all this good stuff and in the words of the late great Steve Jobs, all I care about is that:

“It just works”

I want to know I can access whatever information I need to access from where ever I want to access it from on whatever device I want to access it on. I don’t need to know or need to care where it is coming from or where it is hosted.

SUMMARY

My advice to all you techno-geeks out there who know the different between a Platform as a Service and an Infrastructure as a Service is this:

• Think about what the user does in their job and how you make it easier for them
• Understand your end user, get to know them and try to figure out how to fix the problems they are not asking you to fix
• Don’t consider if your solution should be in the cloud until you understand what is the problem. Then decide what would serve your end user the best.

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About Chris:

Chris joined MySpace in 2004 and he has lived in social media ever since. He has set up and run his own business through social media. He now is securing his place as an up and coming thought leader/speaker within social business. His work is published amongst many industry thought leaders and analysts, across publications such as thesocialcustomer.com, mycustomer.com, business2community.com and the SAP Innovation blog, as well as on his own Social Business Blog at chrisheffer.com. He currently works at SAP to promote the use of social media in business and to help businesses build better relationships with their customers by aligning social to their business strategies.

Subscribe to his blog – http://chrisheffer.com

Follow his tweets – www.twitter.com/theotherhef

Connect with him on LinkedIn – http://uk.linkedin.com/in/chrisheffer