SAP on the Cloud

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…)

Cloud and the Reseller: Death or Glory?

July 26, 2012 by Anders Trolle-Schultz

I firmly believe that the emerging hosted services distribution channel will be broadly analogous to the distribution models found in established retail supermarket businesses. This model is highly attractive due to an ever-increasing number of small to mid-size (SMB) customers who want to reap the benefits of enterprise-class software without being burdened by their associated hardware, software, and maintenance costs.

This new model offers huge market potential for resellers of hosted services. To continue with the supermarket analogy, it is the technology and software vendors (the “farmer”) who deliver the production elements (“raw milk”) to hosting service providers (white label service providers), who in turn build services (“cheese”) and also act as wholesalers to distribute the “cheese” for SMB customers to use in their businesses. Resellers provide the “supermarket” where their customers can choose among the array of services (“cheeses”) that the reseller offers. The only difference is that hosted services don’t have to be physically delivered through the reseller, whereas cheese must be delivered to the supermarket. The end customer’s perception is the same in either case: the reseller provides both cheese and hosted services. (more…)

Implementing SAP ByDesign in 1 Hour a Day: Episode 1

January 17, 2012 by Carolyn Brock

Excerpt by Keith Klesh, Director of Marketing, EntryPoint

Episode 1 - The Current State of the Systems

Have you ever wondered if you have the same business issues or the same common fears and concerns as other companies when it comes to making a major change in the way you run your business?  Maybe you have wondered how the implementation process works, what the steps are, which areas may cause problems and how you would get past them. Or, maybe you have heard that an ERP system is only for larger companies and you want to see how it can work for a small-midsize business.

This blog/video series will provide you with direct insight into the thought process of the executive team as they acknowledge the issues they have with their current business systems, describe the decision process to make this change, explain why they chose ByD, how they worked through their fears and concerns, and how this new system fits into their long-term plans.

Read the full post.

How to gain competitive advantage by using Cloud Computing

January 5, 2012 by Peter Laemmer

Competitive advantage occurs when an organization acquires or develops an attribute or combination of attributes that allows it to outperform its competitors. Within the context of cloud computing I would see competitive advantage

-if a company can grow revenue, e.g. through a faster product development cycle

-if a company can improve their cash flow, e.g. through cost savings

-if a company can improve effectiveness, e.g. through speeding up processes.

Managers can use Cloud Computing to outperform their competitors in different areas:

#1: Productivity

Companies often use allocated development in different areas, e.g. for the development of new products. Let´s assume you have to consider design features and technical features. For that you have a design office in Berlin and the technical department is based in Shanghai. In this case you have to share a lot of information between both facilities. If companies want to offer this service internally they have to invest in hardware and manpower in order to maintain the service.

There exist cloud-based services, where a company can share all sorts of files and information in order to accelerate the time to bring the product to the market. They do not need to set-up such a time and cost intensive environment. They buy the required service and according to Christensen´s law they gain competitive advantage with a faster product launch.

#2: Information

Companies need to select the right data that deliver the right information to make decisions, evaluate investments, support actions and a lot more.  There exist cloud services that deliver the appropriate hardware and algorithms that have the capacity to exactly do that. Companies can focus on their business while choosing the required service in the cloud to support it.

Often these services are used to select and analyze a huge amount of customer data. SAP currently announced the partnership with C2B Company NetBase. This company specialized on the analysis of social media data that is produced from customers. With these insights companies can gain “socialknowledge” and at the end can outperform their competitors (see Blog from Sven Denecken)

#3: Platform as a Service (PaaS) as development framework

Companies need to standardize their processes and applications even more when they decide to transfer parts of their IT in the cloud. They should do that to use cloud services with a maximum benefit. But nevertheless, they have to develop own applications for their business.  They can do that on their own infrastructure, set-up the required servers, configure it, and maintain it. Or they can use cloud based development frameworks. The developed applications are deployed by the owner of the PaaS and made available via a store. The SAP Business ByDesign Studio is an example where a developer community can work on a cloud-based PaaS in order to deploy and distribute their software – even  via a portal called SAP Store. Customers get access to the store in order to download the required services.

“SaaS and Multitierd ERP Strategy” or how we would call it – get your subsidiary linked in fast…

December 5, 2011 by Sven Denecken

With our latest blog posts about the subject of Two Tier ERP strategies in mind, a recent Aberdeen Analyst Insight Paper (see below) [1] names some interesting figures, confirming the growing trend of companies deploying a two-tier ERP strategy. Such a strategy is becoming increasingly attractive, especially to so-called Best-of-Class organizations (meaning the top 20% of survey respondents by performance). According to their research, those organizations are 2.54 times as likely as all others to adopt such an ERP strategy, for exactly the reasons we already explored in our Two Tier ERP blog post series.

Image via Wikipedia

Moreover, those multi-tiered strategies often consist of an on premise solution for the headquarters, while Software as a Service (SaaS) is more and more used as a deployment model to quickly get new business units and subsidiaries up and running.[2][3]

But is SaaS so attractive to organizations with multi-tiered ERP stratgies?

(more…)

Part 1 of a series on 2 Tier ERP

October 28, 2011 by Sven Denecken

With SAPPHIRE Madrid just around the corner, we have begun thinking about the upcoming sessions on Two-Tier ERP.  What are the drivers for companies to arm their subsidiaries with a solution?  What percentage of the market does this apply to?

After a brief search on the web, we found the answers to many of these questions on Ray Wang’s blog ( http://ow.ly/7bSdH ).  With this as a starting point, we began doing my own research on examples for the following drivers.  Some commented “…this is yesterdays news”, I tell you it is hotter than ever. We just had some major clients signing up for our proposed subsidiary solution scenario, 2Tier ERP with a OnPremise and OnDemand combination. But let us start looking into the topic from a business perspective first – and highlight some of the criteria companies should look at based on real examples.

Working on this with my colleague John Hunt, the following is what we came up with…

(more…)

SMEs Still Struggle but there is a Solution

July 6, 2011 by Jim D'Addario

Though the Nation Bureau of Economic Research declared the recession over in 2009, many SMEs would beg to differ. Since the crash of 2007, SMEs have been struggling to recover due to their inability to obtain bank financiing and their typical lack of pricing power in the markets in which they compete prevent them from passing their costs on to customers.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “For Small Businesses, Recession Isn’t Over” drives home that point. In the US, SMEs are treading water: they’re not hiring, few are making capital investments and their business sentiment has been “flat lined” for the 4^th year in a row. In spite of official pronouncements, many believe we’re still in a recession—regardless of what government statistics say about positive GDP.  The data presented in the article underscores the point, the only industries that are in expansion mode are Educational Services and Health Care. This isn’t just confined to the US. In Germany, the  Mittelstand (the small business sector that dominates their economy) enjoys fairly decent economic conditions but a recent reading of the Euro Zone manufacturing index is flashing caution signs.

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