I spent the week in Germany as a guest of Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of Software AG at their pretty campus in Darmstdat, where the Blauregen blooms peek in and want to join your meetings.
He has asked me to help on his book idea. It’s about how enterprises in every industry can learn from “digital natives” like Apple and Google. The book will catalog more than 15 transformational opportunity areas of becoming a Digital Enterprise. Each will be supported with executive guest columns from some of the best known personalities and brands in the world, and number of use cases across industries and geographies.
Karl-Heinz has an amazing rolodex both in his wide customer base and with other technology thought leaders around the world, and many are participating in the project. In the last few weeks I have talked to customer executives and thought leaders around the world about next-gen factories with agile, individualized mass production and augmented reality worker training, advanced analytics in fraud detection, Big Data generated from the Internet of Things, social marketing, Machine to Machine, Digital Government and several other cutting edge projects.
When I was initially approached about the project, I was puzzled given it is the company long known for products like Adabas, WebMethods and Aris.
Why approach an innovation author like me?
As I researched the company, I found it had diversified with in-memory and application scalability products from Terracotta, Cloud Platform products from Long Jump, mobile enabling tech from Metismo and others. More impressively I found the AG executives extremely articulate about both business and technology futures. But the real bonus is coming from its global, blue chip customer list representing their classic and new portfolio
As with previous books I will excerpt sections on my blog as the book approaches publication. In the meantime it is going to be an invigorating summer of research and interviews.
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