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.
