SAP Chief Technology Officer Dr. Vishal Sikka

An SAP View of Enterprise Apps

Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, and Jeff Nolan report on a meeting with SAP CTO Vishal Sikka at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event in Pasadena, July 2009

Blog entries edited by Andy Ross

Vishal is amazed to hear people spend an hour or more a day on Facebook. But clearly something is happening here and SAP needs to leverage these emerging social graphs with more enterprise-robust tools. He says SAP runs the iTunes administrative backbone. As Apple, RIM, and other apps explode, he see similar opportunities for SAP engines. SAP is building a contractor management solution, not so much because that functionality is new or challenging but to see how various communities of all kinds can be federated.

Vishal was most animated when talking about in-memory databases and multicore architectures, repeating what Hasso Plattner presented at Sapphire. There is a huge opportunity still in helping customers cross-leverage transaction data and analytics. The average customer is not ready for advanced analytics, but Vishal is excited by the visualization opportunity around large data sets.

— Vinnie Mirchandani, Deal Architect

Vishal tried to explain the economics of SAP Business ByDesign. He said that SAP is attempting to go well beyond competitive offerings. Analytics are baked into the application, but the computational requirements for analytics are an order of magnitude more demanding than transactional systems.

— Dennis Howlett, ZDNet

Vishal is responsible for charting the technology roadmap for a company that prides itself on being innovative yet has customers who want stability and continuity. SAP customers don't want SAP to chase every new trend that emerges and foist upon them disruptive and expensive changes for benefits that are still largely promises. They want the company to be like a night watchman who ensures that everything is safe and secure when no one else is watching.

Vishal said that global trade is a great human equalizer. When nations intertwine economically, they are inherently less prone to making war with each other. Whatever damage any bad actors can do with technology, the benefits far outweigh the downsides. SAP is at the center of more global trade than any other company on earth, but with that realization comes significant responsibility that goes well beyond the legal dance called compliance.

— Jeff Nolan, Venture Chronicles
 

SAP Cloud Strategy

Interview by Thomas Wailgum
Computerwoche, August 4, 2009

Translated and edited by Andy Ross

SAP Chief Technical Officer Vishal Sikka works out new ideas for enterprise applications. Sikka has a doctorate in computer science from Stanford and has been CTO since 2007 with the retirement of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, who had been the SAP tech-head for decades. The Office of the CTO is in SAP Labs, Palo Alto, California, and has over a thousand employees.

The delayed launch of SAP Business ByDesign, its suite of on-demand apps for small and mid-sized companies, puts SAP under attack from small providers of on-demand apps. Operating costs are under increasing scrutiny. And the buzz around next-generation cloud computing is putting pressure on the SAP business model.

Big changes are under way in the enterprise software market. Is it hard to present the SAP product portfolio when customers are uncertain?

VS: It's hard because of the wide spectrum we offer, not only the different branches and countries but also within the solution portfolios. Ensuring integrity and enabling continuous development while offering innovation is a big challenge. We have a technology strategy that I call timeless software, which is a set of tenets to make sure that we are always evolving our products to bring the best innovation without incoherence.

How much timeless software do you sell?

VS: Many of our customers use all our products, so we have to offer two things. We must offer the best innovation for mobile user interfaces, analytic solutions, or business user products. Then we need integrity in the platform for running the protected business processes, such as finance, procurement, or supply chain management. We need to offer products across this spectrum that minimize both the costs for our customers and our own operating costs. It used to be thought that you could have either innovation or integrity but not both at once. In the last few years we have created a software architecture that accepts innovation and puts it quickly into products without compromising integrity.

How do you balance the customers who are always two steps behind and those who always want the latest?

VS: Some customers need innovation and others see innovation as adding comfort. For those who need it, we deliver innovation as soon as it comes. For those who just want comfort, we deliver it when they're ready. There are also customers who strive for technical leadership where we don't have products. We work with them on things that are not yet products or will never become products. We can do this on a one-off basis.

What's the SAP approach to cloud computing?

VS: Our cloud strategy has four parts:
1. Make sure our software is ready to be consumed by our customers.
2. Augment this cloud offering with new services that we can deliver ourselves in the cloud.
3. SAP Business ByDesign is an integrated suite for running an entire midmarket company.
4. We are working with customers to bridge the public-private cloud divide that has emerged.

Are you bothered by the hype and confusion around cloud computing?

VS: I sometimes find it amusing. To be honest, it bothers me when vendors call their little automated sales application a platform.

Some say SAP has not yet delivered on the cloud, mainly because of delays with SAP Business ByDesign. Does that bother you?

VS: SAP has offered a subscription model for over 15 years. And our software offers a multitenancy model where instances of a product run as a service on the provider's servers. Almost everything in our suite is set up for this, and we have customers who run all their software in this mode.

What should we think about SAP Business ByDesign?

VS: That it's a protected, integrated application suite. To let customers use it as a service, it must offer integrity and stability. We can't accept hours of downtime in a service or a security system. We're dealing with data about finances and salary payments and customer data. If things go wrong, people can go to jail. We will get it right, and we will take our time.
 

AR  Vinnie's reference to what Hasso said at Sapphire interests me especially. Professor Dr. h.c. Plattner is one of the co-founders of SAP and the billionaire founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam. A few weeks ago, just after the Sapphire event, he addressed the assembled multitude at SAP in Walldorf with a peroration singing the praises of the technology that the TREX team — of which I am a humble member — have developed in the years since 2003 when I joined the team. This is very gratifying to me, of course, but more significantly it provides a launch point for my next great enterprise of the spirit.