Shai Agassi's Keynote at SAP TechEd

Finally got this up. I've got to stop being so 1.0 and taking written notes and then transcribing! Usual caveat: below is what I remembered/thought relevant/ had readable notes on from watching Shai's opening speech at TechEd. Enjoy.

Shai Agassi, President of the Product & Technology Group and member of the board at SAP gave the keynote speech yesterday at SAP TechEd 2006. Below are some of the key points he made and what I thought was particularly interesting:

Shai started out by welcoming the members of the new Business Process Experts Community. This is a group for business process pros that was officially announced yesterday.

Next he launched into the meat of his presentation. It was built around 4 "strategic IT projects" that customers should undertake.

• Solidify the Foundation
• Clean up & manage Master Data
• If you don't have this in place, nothing else matters
• This is the 1st step
• Consolidate Application Infrastructure
• Take out apps and related hardware that don't bring you value
• Asses your organizational skill repository
• Understand your peoples' skills and where they want to go
• These are the pillars of the foundation and as such you need to do all of them
• Modernize the Core
• SAP has more than 12,000 developers working on innovation
• The Core is based on MySAP ERP 2005
• Think of this as Grand Central Station
• Quoted a Fortune 1000 CIO, " you, SAP, can touch my core processes once every 5 years….but my CEO wants me to innovate every quarter."
• There's an apparent dichotomy: innovate, but don't touch the core
• SAP's answer: Enhancement Packages (this was one of the major new announcements of TechEd 2006)
• These are optional packages that are extensions to the stable core of SAP ERP 2005.
• The idea is to allow "continuous business innovation" without having to go through upgrades
• Optional: with every enhancement package you can choose to install or not
• Enhancement packages may have new functionality, industry-specific enhancements (e.g., Travel) and/or business services
• Jeff Word came on stage to demo how SAP can help the customer make the business case for installing Enhancement packages
• Demo of the MySAP ERP Solution Browser
• Shows the functional description and business benefits of each enhancement package and the delta between those and where the customer is now
• A user can export the analysis done by the browser to a Word document to build a business case for while the Enhancement packages should be installed
• Multiple upgrade paths to MySAP 2005
• Big Bang - immediate across the board (all divisions, functional areas)
• By Instance - by Business, Subsidiary
• By Function - General Ledger
• SAP offers services in this area to get you there
• Upgrade Check Services
• Systems and Landscape Optimization
• Quick Upgrade Evaluation
• Accelerated Value Assessment
• Data Expert Services
• Testing Acceleration and Optimization
• ASUG Benchmarking survery on customer upgrades
• 86% meet or exceed functional expectations
• 88% meet or exceed ROI expectations
  
• 92% on-time
• 94% within minimal variance of budget
• Optimize Business Usage
• Thrill Your Users
• Offer user experience of choice
• Not one way to use/access SAP - based on context
• Duet, Mobile, Adobe Forms, Widgets, Portal, Voice, Dashboards, SAP GUI, RSS, Embedded
• Take SAP into what users are doing
• Shai and Jeff demoed different ways for Shai to reject Jeff's leave request
• Showed the new SAP Portal which is Ajax enabled (to be launched next year)
• Project Muse - new smart client
• Same enterprise service was called for "reject leave" in both Portal and Muse
• Duet
• Rejected leave request right from Outlook mail by clicking on "reject" button in mail
• Widgets - based on Yahoo widgets
• (Check out Charlie Wood's posting on SAP widgets
• Displayed Shai's "work list," Jeff's vacation day balance and buttons for accept/reject
• Voice
• Jeff's leave request caused a call to Shai's cell phone. Shai was able to say "reject" to reject the request
• The above have shared UI services
• User roles & profiles
• Interaction model
• Navigation
• Single Sign On
• Contextualized processes
• Events & resolution
• Leverage our (SAP's) Ecosystem
• The Community wants you
• Industry Value Networks
• Place to be if "you want to affect innovation in your industry"
• Common enterprise services definitions
• Enterprise SOA best practices
• Banking ES Definition group given as example
• First delivery - 70 enterprise services specific for banks
• SDN Community
• Business Process Expert Community
• Industry Titans - "Enterprise Services Ready"
• SAP xApps Certified - Powered by NetWeaver
• Enterprise Services Communities
• Free Your Information
• Business Intelligence Accelerator
• Takes your Data Warehouse and improves price performance by 2 orders of magnitude
• Performance - 10x faster, 1 Billion records analyzed in 3 seconds
• Affordability - 10x less expensive to acquire, 20x less expensive to operate
• Simplicity - off the shelf hardware, appliance set-up - 2 hours and you're up and running
• What makes this possible now are a series of Technology and Architectural Drivers
• Technology - Substantial improvements: CPU, Memory, Addressable Memory, Network Speed
• Architecture - In memory data stores, multi-channel UI, application aware and intelligent data management
• What hasn't changed: Accesing data from the database is still slow
• Early Adopters have had success
• Brown-Forman - With 650 M records, queries are running 300x faster
• BP - 60M records and queries up to 250x faster
• SAP Enterprise Search (New Introduction)
• Business Intelligence Accelerator and SAP Enterprise Search = Ubiquitous Information Search
• Free developer version available for download now on SDN; will be commercially available in 2007
• Simplify Your Deployment
• Hybrid deployment options
• On Demand is fast
• Useful deployment option if your processes are like others in your industry
• On Premise is strategic
• This gives your business more flexibility around process
• There are customers with both deployment models
• It's not a one or the other issue, you can deploy the way you see fit
• Drive Strategic Innovation
• The role of the CIO is forking
• Chief Process Innovation Officer
• Business person who understands process
• Tasked with innovation of processes and how processes fit together
• Chief IT Officer
• Reposible to see that underlying systems are working 100% of the time
• Squeeze out inefficiencies
• Different skill sets or groupings will be needed
• Consolidators
• Look at systems and how to consolidate
• "running fast on a treadmill"
• Work for CITO
• Repository Keepers
• Charged with maintaining enterprise services repository
• Composers
• Plug language of business into services
• Disruptive innovators
• Figure out those things which can't yet be coded
• Announced 2nd version of Discovery System
• A pre-configured "sandbox" for test driving Enterprise SOA
• "ESA in a box"
• Core processors with NetWeaver and tools
• Announced NetWeaver Composition Environment
• Simplified composition environment
• Application server, compositions tool, composite framework
• Announced xApps Hub - code named Project Sidecar
• Connects community that builds composites with community that uses composites
• Lean comsumption model for composition
• Risk-free testing and development
• Plug and play tool - "Innovation without disruption" - "iTunes for xApps"

[SAPTechEd2006][SAP][TechEd][Shai+Agassi][Jeff+Word]
[MySAP+ERP][Enterprise+Software][Enterprise+Search][xApp+Hub]
[Composite+Applications][Mark+Crofton]