I started writing trip reports when the kids were young and would embed photos and all kinds of trivia from the visits, print them and store them in giant file folders. Even now, they will occasionally flip through the write-ups. As the pandemic started couple of years ago, I started jotting bullets about every day and started taking even more photos. With a new iPhone 12 Pro, the photo collection accelerated. We have had mild lockdowns in FL so my wife and I did lots of day trips and I shared them in an Instagram series called “West Coast on the East Coast”. Someday, I will contribute the hundreds of pages of bullets and thousands of photos to a time capsule about the pandemic. Hopefully, people will see a positive side to the plague.
Google Photos, Facebook and other places where the photos are shared have allowed me to develop collages. I have become pretty good at my own pattern recognition. Here are some from the Sapphire event last week.
An evergreen SAP
I have heard from a couple of customer execs how nice it is to deal with a Millennial CEO like Christian Klein. I saw him up close in a couple of sessions and was impressed how confident he sounds. Jan Gilg had to replace a COVID-affected Thomas Saueressig at short notice and he handled that admirably. This was Julia White’s first in-person Sapphire and I was impressed by her energy and positivity. Dr Hasso Plattner told me a couple of years ago, he was impressed with how young SAP felt. I did not understand what he meant. After last week, I do.
But not just youth, when Scott Russell shared a photo with the ageless football GOAT Tom Brady it hit me age is a state of mind. Scott brings an incredible career from around the world. Peter Maier does the same with his vertical knowledge.
We had a fascinating conversation with Eva Zauke about localization services for all the countries and local governments SAP supports. It is a endless journey – it used to be languages, payroll and tax support (SAP was born global with MNC customers from Day 1), now it is about data domicile, new ESG regulations and so much more.
Last month, I saw Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce present a slide at an analyst event. It nicely captured how they have grown through major crises and supported their customers for the last 17 years since their IPO. It hit me that SAP has helped its customers for 50 years through many more transitions – mainframe to client/server to cloud architectures, relational to columnar databases, now it is helping them move to industry networks, low carbon energy, new vaccines and so much else new. And helped customers through a number of recessions and other challenges.
“A Category of One”
Scott Russell said when they segment the market effectively, they are essentially a category of one, onto themselves. I could not agree more. “Vinnie Vertical” was especially thrilled about several one-on-one conversations about Industry trends and technologies with
- Achim Schneider about customer experiences, reverse logistics and other retail trends
- Matthew Reymann about computational chemistry and the opportunity for the Chemical sector with new molecules in energy, food and so many other sectors
- Falk Rieker and trends in fintech
- Benjamin Beberness and energy transition to low carbon in oil and gas and utilities and the dramatically shifting global energy landscape
- E.J. Kenney and the Direct to Consumer trend in CPG, health care and other consumer industries
I will be honest I cannot have such conversations with execs at too many other tech vendors. Having said that I wish the show floor would have not emphasized traditional functional silos – HCM, SCM etc.
I partly blame my side of the aisle – analysts - for reinforcing acronyms which encourage such silos. Easier said than done, but hope SAP starts speaking a different language not just reinforcing this 30-year-old taxonomy. When they compete at a higher level of abstraction, SAP has little competition. Us analysts will eventually catch up.
“The future of everything”
Andre Bechtold and Anita Riegel arranged a personalized tour of the Trilogy fashion/apparel demo company on the show floor which showcased next-gen tech for product innovation, sustainability, robotic manufacturing and retail experiences
I have seen videos of other SAP showcases. It would be nice for SAP to similarly show off the bank branch of the future, the clinic of the future etc. at its events. It would be a logistical challenge to move the giant devices around the world but there is a wow factor in bringing together the physical and virtual worlds.
More adjectives for the enterprise
Christian Klein ended his keynote by raising the bar. It is no longer sufficient to think about an intelligent enterprise. It also needs to be resilient and sustainable. I wish he had added "profitable". We risk largely talking about sustainability as a compliance mandate. We have been growing a number of case studies around the circular economy, low carbon transition which are allowing for new revenue streams and cost savings. We need to highlight that a lot more of that,
Relativity theory and ecosystems
During a visit to Joshua Tree NP. Margaret and I got to spend some time with some astronomers in the desert night and they talked about how much more we know about our celestial skies since they were at school and how the universe keeps “expanding”
At Sapphire, for a change it was nice to see a compact set of partner booths, but at breakfast with Frank Ruland we discussed the expanding ecosystem around SAP. Strategy consulting firms, warehouse and other bot vendors, digital agencies, SAP.iO Foundries startups, low-code communities, App Stores – it’s not your grandpa’s ecosystem
With these fresh voices, we will hopefully see much more automation of services, new business models and a lot more change.
Business Model Innovation
In an exchange with Christian Klein, I mentioned that the software industry led customers into new business models like subscriptions starting in the late 90s. Now, many customers are ahead experimenting with outcome-based models, platforms and “everything as service.”
I was pleasantly surprised to hear of the uptake of RISE with SAP, especially with net-new customers. I would love to see SAP and its partners align their economics with those of their customer experiments.
Sapphire was a whirlwind and as you can see I took hundreds of photos and created tons of collages.
I have been asking every vendor what have you done to take advantage of the last two or three years since your last in-person event? More importantly, what have you done to help your customers through all the shocks and chaos?
I got a pretty convincing set of answers and yet came away with several new questions. As Emerson famously said “It’s not the destination, It's the journey.” As we move to new everything, I would say most customers look forward to lots more of SAP-enabled evolution.
Comments