Why 2015/2020 wasn’t discussed at SAPPHIRE
SAP had a great message at SAPPHIRE this year. I watched parts of the keynotes, read blogs and followed some great tweets. I think everyone is rightfully excited about HANA, Cloud, and Mobility. I mean it looks great and minus a few wounded kittens along the way, these areas should provide a great benefit to everyone involved.
But what about 2015/2020?
Let’s face it unless you are end of mainstream for the business suite cult follower who believed that the world really ended on 12/31/2015 instead of 2012, you may have not cared. However last fall SAP extended mainstream maintenance for the business suite to 2020(nice to have five more years left on this planet) and it honestly left me more confused than anything
- What replaces the business suite and ERP after 2020?
- When does the next version of ERP come out?
- Are there no more chances to innovate in the heart of the business applications, beyond just expanding out and replacing the mechanicals?
If you are an existing customer perhaps these questions really don’t matter, but personally like me I really don’t think there is a clear public answer on the long term direction of where things are going go. Given that an ERP upgrade could take 1 to 5 years depending on much you made it your own, the answer probably needs to appear in 2015. So here some predictions for SAPPHIRE 2015
SAPPHIRE 2015 Future Headlines
– SAP, wholly owned subsidary of facebook announces the next generation of ERP based on the HANA DB. Besides the obvious improvements, the entire application is a fully object oriented design and all business objects in the system can be liked, friended, shared accross the system. To entice the legions of old-school ABAP developers, the ABAP language has been ported over to facebook site to allow people to develop backend processing engines. A popular new game called Financeville emerges on facebookthat is cross between SAP FI, farmville and mint.
– All new applications will be delivered as cloud based with private or public options. The default user interface will be for mobile access with the on-premise version delivered in the next release. Tablet versions of all applications replace all desktop interfaces
Could this happen?
Well maybe not everything, but yes I would really like to see what a next generation business suite powered by HANA would look like. I don’t think I need the answer now, but by 2015 it would be great to see most of my predictions above happen.
Hi Stephen,
funny, I noticed that too ! While 2015/2020 was all the talk at SAP Insider HR2012 in Vegas in March, it was barely uttered at SAPPHIRE.
But while the move to cloud and 'everything will be in the cloud' was a clear take-away from the week.... this 'the future is right here right now' message has a familiar ring to it.... from the R/2 to R/3 days and the immediate and flame-out expected end to the mainframe era, which took a little longer than planned.... and for some existing R/2 customers.... still hasn't. Demand for support from the customers will drive that timeline, as well as the massive SAP on-prem install base generating license revenues, which for the time being is paying for all this new development.
Check out my experience and thoughts on last time we faced this big change and 'end of the support world'....
http://scn.sap.com/people/fiona.morris/blog/2012/05/17/why-i-am-excited-about-the-sap-roadmap-or-how-i-learned-to-love-the-unknown
I love watching old sci-fi movies where we should all have been wearing silver suits and driving hovercrafts right now.... they got it so wrong. But then there are some, such as 'Minority Report' where touch-screens are the norm, predictive shopping per consumer following you everywhere you go and predictive analytics can have dire consequences..... that all got here maybe a little sooner than we expected.
So maybe by the time FB stock nudges back up to $50 we will know if 2015 will be moved to 2020, or 2025, or .....who knows.
But hey.... it will be my kid's problem by then !
Just to bump and update this...
- Well I got another year for facebook to buy SAP 😈
- SAP already announced part of SimpleSuite, my guess is that in 2015 we might see the rest.
- SAP Extended maintenance to 2025 (oh my!)
Not exactly right here.. but in general I'm right so far.
Well not exactly, but the approach of Fiori shows I was right about mobile first approach(HTML5). Then again I predicted this at the end of 2011.
Take care,
Stephen