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Posts from the ‘SAP’ Category

Apr 28

LinkedIn Best Companies To Work For In 2021 Dominated By Tech

  • Four of LinkedIn’s top ten companies to grow your career in 2021 are tech leaders.
  • Amazon is the highest rated company, followed by Alphabet (2nd), IBM (6th), and Apple (8th).
  • 15 of the 50 top companies in the U.S. are in the tech industry, including Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.

These and many other insights are from the LinkedIn Top Companies 2021: The 50 best workplaces to grow your career in the U.S. published today. All 50 companies are currently hiring and have over 300,000 jobs available right now. LinkedIn’s analysis of the best companies to grow your career spans 20 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Qatar, the UAE, and the U.K. 

LinkedIn is relying on a new methodology for the 2021 Top Companies Report. They’re basing the methodology has seven key pillars, each revealing an important element of career progression: the ability to advance, skills growth, company stability, external opportunity, company affinity, gender diversity, and educational background. LinkedIn provides an in-depth description of how they built their methodology here.

The 10 Best Companies To Grow Your Career In 2021

  1. Amazon – According to LinkedIn, Amazon has built an innovative remote-onboarding system, and it has more than 30,000 openings now. The fastest-growing skills in demand at Amazon include User Experience Design (UED), Digital Illustration, and Interaction Design. LinkedIn’s analysis shows the most in-demand jobs are Health And Safety Specialist, Station Operations Manager, Learning Manager.
  1. Alphabet, Inc – Planning to add at least 10,000 jobs in the U.S. alone and investing $7B in data centers and offices across 19 states, Alphabet grew revenue 47% last year, reaching $13B.  According to LinkedIn, the most in-demand jobs are Digital Specialist, Field Sales Specialist, and Business Systems Analyst.
  1. JPMorgan Chase & Co. – JPMorgan now offers 300 accredited skills and education programs to its workers, and the bank has been boosting wages for thousands of customer-facing roles to $16-$20 an hour. The most in-demand jobs include Market Specialist, Software Engineering Specialist, and Mortgage Underwriter.
  1. AT&T – 2020 was a tough year for AT&T, increasing the urgency the company has to grow its wireless and WarnerMedia businesses. Due to the pandemic, the company had to close hundreds of stores. Fortunately, AT&T was able to help the employees affected by the closures to find new jobs. The most in-demand jobs are Service Analyst, Trading Analyst, and Investment Specialist.
  1. Bank of America – Bank of America rose to the challenges of 2020, quickly redeploying almost 30,000 employees to assist in its role facilitating the government-backed Paycheck Protection Program. The most in-demand jobs are Trading Analyst, Investment Specialist, and Financial Management Analyst.
  1. IBM – More than one-third of IBM’s revenue now comes from work related to cloud computing. The company’s Red Hat unit is a leading contributor to that growth, prizing skills such as Linux, Java, Python, and agile methodologies. IBM also is a leader in hiring autistic people through its Neurodiversity program. Most in-demand jobs include Back End Developer, Enterprise Account Executive, and Technical Writer.
  1. Deloitte –  Deloitte’s key activities span audit, assurance, tax, risk, and financial advisory work, as well as management consulting. It’s aiming to hire 19,000 people in the year ending May 29. Top recruiting priorities currently include cybersecurity, cloud computing, and analytics specialists.
  1. Apple – LinkedIn finds that Apple is committed to building an inclusive culture. Over half of its new hires in the U.S. represent historically underrepresented groups in tech — and the company claims to have achieved pay equity in every country where it operates—looking for an in? Apple has nearly 3,000 open jobs in the U.S. right now, ranging from its “genius” role at its retail stores to executive assistants and software engineers. 
  1. Walmart –  In February, the retail giant promised further raises to over 400,000 of its people and months later announced it would increase the share of its hourly store employees who work full-time to over 66% (up from 53% five years ago). Meanwhile, Walmart continues to think beyond the store as it ventures deeper into the e-commerce realm. Most in-demand jobs include Operational Specialist, Fulfillment Associate, and Replenishment Manager.
  1. EY – The accounting firm spent $450 million on employee training in 2020. And it is planning to hire over 15,000 people in the next year. With that much talent coming in, EY is focused on bringing in workers with diverse backgrounds, focusing on gender identity, race, and ethnicity, disability, LGBT+, and veterans. The most in-demand jobs include Strategy Director, Business Transformation Consultant, and Information Technology Consulting Manager.

Dec 16

CPQ Needs To Scale And Support Smarter, More Connected Products

  • For smart, connected product strategies to succeed they require a product lifecycle view of configurations, best attained by integrating PLM, CAD, CRM, and ERP systems.
  • Capgemini estimates that the size of the connected products market will be $519B to $685B by 2020.
  • In 2018, $985B will be spent on IoT-enabled smart consumer devices, soaring to $1.49B in 2020, attaining a 23.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) according to Statista.
  • Industrial manufacturers will spend on average $121M a year on smart, connected products according to Statista.

Succeeding with a smart, connected product strategy is requiring manufacturers to accelerate their IoT & software development expertise faster than they expected. By 2020, 50% of manufacturers will generate the majority of their revenues from smart, connected products according to Capgemini’s recent study. Manufacturers see 2019 as the breakout year for smart, connected products and the new revenue opportunities they provide.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms has the potential of providing a single, unified data model across an entire manufacturing operation, giving manufacturers a single unified view of product configurations across their lifecycles. Producing smart, connected products at scale also requires a system capable of presenting a unified view of configurations in the linguistics each department can understand. Engineering, production, marketing, sales, and service all need a unique view of product configurations to keep producing new products. Leaders in this field include Configit and their Configuration Lifecycle Management approach to CPQ and product configuration.

Please see McKinsey’s article IIoT platforms: The technology stack as a value driver in industrial equipment and machinery which explores how the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is redefining industrial equipment and machinery manufacturing. The following graphic from the McKinsey explains why smart, connected product strategies are accelerating across all industries. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

CPQ Needs To Scale Further To Sell Smart, Connected Products

Smart, connected products are redefining the principles of product design, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and service. CPQ systems need to grow beyond their current limitations by capitalizing on these new principles while scaling to support new business models that are services and subscription-based.

The following are the key areas where CPQ systems are innovating today, making progress towards enabling the custom configuration of smart, connected products:

  • For smart, connected product strategies to succeed they require a product lifecycle view of configurations, best attained by integrating PLM, CAD, CRM, and ERP systems. Smart, connected product strategies require real-time integration between front-end and back-end systems to optimize production performance. And they also require advanced visualization that provides prospects with an accurate, 3D-rendered view that can be accurately translated to a Bill of Materials (BOM) and into production. The following graphic is based on conversations with Configit customers, illustrating how they are combining PLM, CAD, CRM and ERP systems to support smart, connected products related to automotive manufacturing. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

  • CPQ and product configuration systems need to reflect the products they’re specifying are part of a broader ecosystem, not stand-alone. The essence of smart, connected products is their contributions to broader, more complex networks and ecosystems. CPQ systems need to flex and support much greater system interoperability of products than they do today. Additional design principles include designing in connected service options, evergreen or long-term focus on the product-as-a-platform and designed in support for entirely new pricing models.
  • Smart, connected products need CPQ systems to reduce physical complexity while scaling device intelligence through cross-sells, up-sells and upgrades. Minimizing the physical options to allow for greater scale and support for device intelligence-based ones are needed in CPQ systems today. For many CPQ providers, that’s going to require different data models and taxonomies of product definitions. Smart, connected products will be modified after purchase as well, evolving to customers’ unique requirements.
  • After-sales service for smart, connected products will redefine pricing and profit models for the better in 2019, and CPQ needs to keep up to make it happen. Giving products the ability to send back their usage rates and patterns, reliability and performance data along with their current condition opens up lucrative pricing and services models. CPQ applications need to be able to provide quotes for remote diagnostics, price breaks on subscriptions for sharing data, product-as-a-service and subscription-based options for additional services. Many CPQ systems will need to be updated to support entirely new services-driven business models manufacturers are quickly adopting today.

Jul 27

Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012: Sales Turns to the Cloud for Quick Relief

Sales VPs for years have been test-driving SaaS-based CRM systems, piloting them with sales teams to see if using them leads to higher sales and greater customer retention.  Marketing VPs and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) also continue to pilot SaaS-based web analytics and marketing automation applications.

What’s been missing from these pilots is the ability to bring CRM, marketing automation, sales management and web analytics systems into existing enterprise IT architectures just as fast.  This is changing quickly.  CRM vendors have been quick to respond to the challenge, offering Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), integration adapters, connectors and from larger vendors, integrated bus architectures.

What the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012 Means

CRM’s real value is in unifying an entire enterprise based on its ability to sell, serve and retain customers better than before. Gartner shows this is a high priority for its CRM clients by underscoring which technology and application areas of the hype cycle are responding to his market dynamic, and which aren’t.

This Hype Cycle also reflects the urgency I hear from Sales VPs who want to get in control of the complex compensation, quota, territory management, job appraisal and sales coaching responsibilities they have.  While each of these areas is essential, many companies, even those in enterprise software, have ignored these areas, allowing them to stay manually based. Gartner calls this area Sales Performance Management (SPM) and shows it has the highest benefit of all SaaS-based sales management applications in the next two years. Gartner’s analysis captures the time shortage that Sales VPs I know are facing; they have to get to high quota levels while also managing a diverse set of leadership responsibilities as well. The Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012 (G00234919) is shown below:

 

  • Gartner estimates 35% of all CRM implementations today use SaaS, growing to over 50% by 2020 according to their projections. In 2011, more than $5 billion was invested in sales applications.
  • Cloud adoption varies significantly across CRM software categories with Web analytics achieving 95% adoption, Sales Force Automation achieving just over 50%, and Configure Price Quote (CPQ) achieving 40%.  Cloud-based Sales Performance Management has the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of any CRM category according to inquiry and client calls.
  • Sales, Customer Service, Social CRM and Marketing are the four fastest-growing areas of enterprise Sales applications on SaaS.  Campaign Management is increasingly quickly, up from 19% using SaaS in 2010 to 29% in 2011.
  • Gartner sees significant growth in Configure Price Quote (CPQ), projecting a market of $300M in 2012, up from $240M in 2011.  Gartner is due out with a MarketScope on CPQ shortly, where the 15 major vendors it tracks in this area will be ranked.  40% of existing implementations are on SaaS, and that proportion is increasing relative to licensed versions.  Of the 15 vendors in this market, 12 have announced SaaS-based versions of their applications.
  • There are 3.8M Sales Force Automation SaaS users globally today.
  • By 2017, 25% of companies adopting CRM will have extended their customer service contact centers to include social media including Facebook, Twitter and other emerging online communities.  As of 2012, Gartner is seeing only 1% of companies integrate social media into their companies’ departments and workflows to ensure a consistent customer experience.
  • Price Optimization will experience transformational growth in two to five years. Gartner sees this area as one of the most promising across all CRM Sales as can be seen in the Priority Matrix for CRM Sales 2012 below from the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012.  The research firm has defined this market as including price analysis, price optimization and price execution.  Gartner estimates this market was $180M to $190M in 2010.  Vendor competing in this market include Accenture, Deloitte, Pros, Vendavo, Vistaar Technologies and Zilliant.

  • Social CRM (SCRM) for Sales is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, with 90% of spending for these applications being generated from B2C companies.  Gartner expects B2B companies to lead the growth of these applications through 2015, increasing spending from 5% of total SCRM sales in 2011 to 30% by 2015.
  • SaaS-based CRM sales within enterprises are expected to reach $4.48B in 2012, growing to $6.3B in 2015.  The following table from the report Forecast: Software as a Service, Worldwide 2010-2015, 2H11 Update provides a frame of reference for SaaS-based CRM growth overall.

  • Salesforce leads all CRM vendors in market share growth, advancing 2.8% from 2010 to 2011 according to Gartner’s’ global market share analysis shown below. Salesforce attained 26.9% revenue growth from 2010 to 2011 ($1.3B to $1.6B) and 36.7% growth from 2011 to 2012 ($1.6B to $2.27B).  The future momentum of Salesforce is in unifying the enterprise, redefining corporate IT in the context of the customer. Their recent acquisitions show analytics, marketing automation and development platforms are key priorities.  The following table is from the report Market Share Snapshot: CRM Software, 2011 (G00233998).

Bottom line:  Making CRM strategies successful has to start with a common vision and urgency for results.  Both are happening quicker in CRM than ever before, driven by a much clearer understanding of what enterprises need and an impatience for results.

Oct 7

3 Comments

Transactions and Complex Selling: Strong Catalysts of Cloud Computing Growth

Enterprise software vendors need to challenge themselves to deliver significantly more value if the potential for cloud computing is going to be achieved .

Instead of just going for the low-end, easily customized processes within analytics, CRM, supply chain management, ERP, pricing or service, vendors need to take on the more challenging, complex hard-to-solve problems enterprises have.

As I am completing more research on personas, I’m finding what CIOs really look for in SaaS apps.  Flexibility and ease of workflow support, intuitive user interface design without sacrificing functionality, and support for analytics, business intelligence and knowledge management systems integration are all mentioned often.

Nearly all of them also mention that the existing generation SaaS applications on the sell-side, from CRM to order capture and order management aren’t taking on the more challenging areas of their strategies.  The result is the CIOs are still relying on legacy, on-premise apps in areas of their companies that are ready for change to SaaS-based applications.  Cloud platforms are taking on these more complex, challenging problem areas, yet innovation still lags the needs in the market.

Transactions Are The Fuel of Cloud Infrastructure Growth  

CIOs are focusing on how to exceed the expectations of their internal customers at the workflow and interface level while infusing SaaS apps with analytics, business intelligence and knowledge management support.  What’s missing is the killer transaction platform layer and transaction-based applications.  Gartner’s report, A Workforce Without Humans: Three Ways Technology Will Eliminate Skilled Jobs in the U.S. Through 2020 by Kenneth F. Brant by Johan Jacobs has the following graphic which shows CIO’s estimates of migration to cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications which supports this point.

Source: Maverick Research: A Workforce Without Humans: Three Ways Technology Will Eliminate Skilled Jobs in the U.S. Through 2020 by Kenneth F. Brant by Johan Jacobs

Much of the report is based on the results of Gartner’s 2011 survey of U.S. CIOs. Additional insights from the survey include the following:

  • Virtualization and cloud computing are the two top-ranked U.S. CIO technology priorities for 2011.
  • 83% of U.S. CIOs estimated that more than half of their transactions would be conducted on a cloud infrastructure by 2020.
  • 79% of the respondents predicted that more than half of their transactions would be completed on applications leased using the SaaS platform by 2020.

For cloud infrastructure platforms and SaaS applications to deliver that level of transaction volume and support, there needs to be a major shift in how enterprise vendors develop software. Making better use of analytics, business intelligence and knowledge in the enterprise is key. Designing applications that make information and knowledge sharing intuitive is critical.

The following figure from the same report cited earlier shows the relationship of technologies to potential business value.  Many CRM and sell-side vendors tend to focus on being a substitute or just barely delivering increases in human productivity.

Going after the hard work of optimizing pricing strategies, call centers, making multichannel selling strategies profitable and getting the most out of social networks to make the customer experience exceptional will deliver major gains in productivity.  It’s been my experience during the persona interviews that for any SaaS vendor to really excel here they need to get beyond human productivity and make it possible for enterprises to deliver exceptional customer experiences daily.

Creating SaaS applications that take on real complexity earns trust too, which no amount of pure efficiency can compete with.

Source: Maverick Research: A Workforce Without Humans: Three Ways Technology Will Eliminate Skilled Jobs in the U.S. Through 2020 by Kenneth F. Brant by Johan Jacobs

An Example: SaaS in Manufacturing

The following table compares the strategies and systems used in a typical manufacturing company.  Enterprise apps vendors for the most part are focused on make-to-stock and assemble-to-order automation and efficiency (SAP ByDesign for example).

As the continuums move from left to right, the process, systems and strategy challenges exponentially increase.  As a result there are only a few vendors who can manage the more complex engineer-to-order requirements in manufacturing for example. Transactions there are very small in number, yet orders of magnitude more profitable.  This is just an example of many areas in enterprises that need major improvement.

Instead of just focusing on the easy processes and strategies on the left, vendors need to go after the more difficult, complex selling and transaction challenges on the right.  This is why CIOs want SaaS applications that are easy to customize from a user interface and workflow standpoint, while at the same time supporting analytics, BI and knowledge management.  The goal is to slot them into these more challenging areas of their business and transform their company’s intelligence and expertise into profitable growth.

Bottom line: The true catalyst of cloud computing growth isn’t just SaaS economics; it’s how effectively enterprise software vendors address the very difficult transaction, order management and selling challenges their potential customers face all the time. When that happens, the many optimistic forecasts of cloud adoption in the enterprise will take a step closer to being fulfilled.

Aug 13

1 Comment

SaaS-based Analytics and Business Intelligence Market Update, August 2011

Challenging, uncertain economic times accelerate sales cycles and lead to more closed deals for business intelligence software providers.  Companies get an urgency to reduce costs and risks, relying on the insights gained from these applications.

There’s an interesting dichotomy starting to emerge in how experts and analysts define just how these markets will mature however.  Both agree that economic uncertainty are growth catalysts yet they diverge on adoption rates, roadblocks, and which analytics and BI technology will dominate in the years ahead.

This week I read Balancing Custom And Packaged Apps In Your Application Portfolio Strategy by George Lawrie, Mike Gilpin and Adam Knoll from Forrester and the latest Hype Cycle of Business Intelligence, 2011 by a collection of Gartner authors led by Andreas Bitterer.  I’ve summarized the key points of each below.

Forrester Sees SaaS Applications Overtaking Custom Application Development

Forrester sees SaaS-based applications starting to replace in-house custom application development, gathering momentum through 2013.  Gartner, with their Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence, 2011 just released this week, shows BI platforms having greater near-term benefit than SaaS-based analytics and BI.  Custom application development projects are going to face continued pressure to keep up with business requirements that SaaS applications are proving able to handle more effectively and economically than ever before.

In-house development makes more sense for specific analytics and reporting requirements,  yet will continually be eroded by SaaS-based applications that can meet most requirements at a lower cost.  Forrester has in the past said SaaS-based adoption of analytics applications in general and predictive applications specifically would be very slow due to data integration challenges.  This study points to a potential shift in their mindset, as the data shows SaaS-based analytics beginning to replace custom in-house developed applications.

Here are the key take-aways from the report:

  • Analytics processes are supported 79% of the time with custom application development.  Procure-to-pay (33%) and record-to-report (33%) are the second-most supported.  Multiple responses were allowed in the survey.
  • When asked which process areas they are automating with SaaS, analytics (33%), record-to-report (18%), order-to-cash  (15%), and purchase-to-pay (12%) were the most common responses.  There was a small sample size on the Forrester report and the most startling insight was how quickly respondent companies plan to migrate from custom application development to SaaS-based analytics and BI.
  • Nearly 50% of the respondents to the Forrester survey have between five and 19 SaaS-based applications today with 18% expecting to have 35 or more by 2013.  In addition 63% of respondents expect to deploy between five and 34 SaaS-based applications by 2013, a significant shift in just two years.
  • 36% of survey respondents say their  SaaS applications run completely standalone.  Another 36% mention they use a combination of on-premises Master Data Management (MDM) and process integration tools.  Ironically only 3% are deploying their applications on cloud-based MDM or process integration-based platforms.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence, 2011

Unlike the hype cycle for cloud computing, this hype cycle has fewer technology categories (25), a narrative firmly grounded in business process and strategy, and more practical and pragmatic insights versus just theoretical.  At 50 pages it’s  quick read and while there are many excellent points made, I have summarized the key take-aways pertaining to the highest hype points and SaaS adoption below:

  • Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) is the latest entry to the Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence based on the massive hype around analyzing locational and application data.  The hype surrounding the Apple iPad Series, Google Android and other tablet and smartphone platforms has made this one of the most hyped areas of the last year according to the analysis.
  • Consumerization, Decision Support, analysis of non-traditional data and “Big Data” are the areas of the greatest innovation today.  The hype cycle points to search, mobile, visualization and data discovery being the catalyst of Consumerization.  Predictive analytics, which is on the Slope of Enlightenment on this latest hype cycle, is critical to decision support.  The non-traditional and “Big Data” area of innovation is further supported by content, text analytics, in-memory DBMSs and columnar DBMSs.
  • SaaS-based Business Intelligence is at the apex of the Peak of Inflated Expectations yet will continue to have low adoption rates.  Gartner believes that the  lack of trust in third parties managing confidential data, and the inertia and fear many companies have in moving to a new architecture are slowing adoption.  This is in contrast to the survey Forrester released this week showing analytics being one of the most popular SaaS-based applications planned by 2013 in their base of respondents.
  • Gartner sees SaaS-based Business Intelligence of the most value to midsize and smaller organizations who lack IT staff yet have very specific, targeted information needs.  Website analytics, social media monitoring, dashboards, predictive analytics and Excel as a BI front-end all apply.  Both Forrester and Gartner agree on this point and see this type of custom development going away quickly internally.
  • There is a massive amount of hype surrounding in-memory computing, particularly from SAP at its Sapphire conferences .  Gartner believes that SAP’s vision of in-memory computing exceeds  in-memory analytics to include analytical and transactional processing.  As a result, In-Memory Database Management Systems are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.


Source: Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence, 2011, Published 12 August 2011 | ID:G00216086 By Andreas Bitterer.  Gartner, Inc.

What Both Agree On

Forrester’s survey shows SaaS eventually replacing custom application development while Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence shows the practical, pragmatic technologies including dashboards, predictive analytics combined with the more complex Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Business Intelligence Platforms, and Data-Mining Workbenches delivering the most value.  Despite these differences, both agree on the following:

  • The overall market for BI, Analytics and Performance Management continues to grow at between 8 to 12% per year depending on the forecast used.  The following forecast is from the report  Market Trends: Business Intelligence, Worldwide, 2011-2014, 7 June 2011 | ID:G00213483 by Dan Sommer and James Richardson.
Source: Market Trends: Business Intelligence, Worldwide, 2011-2014, 7 June 2011 | ID:G00213483 by Dan Sommer and James Richardson
  • 2011 continues to see large, strategic deals for analytics and BI closing more rapidly than they have in the past.
  • SaaS-based analytics and BI continues to gain a greater share of spending in midsize and smaller companies.  Both also agree that the proliferation of smaller SaaS-based analytics and Bi vendors concentrating on a specific niche have successfully displaced in-house custom development of competitive applications.  Trust in the smaller vendor, their track record, customer references and financial viability are what are winning deals for SaaS-based analytics and BI software providers today.
  • The market transition from build to buy is now in full force as budgets become available again.  This is key assumption of both analyses and means that smaller, more niche-oriented SaaS-based analytics and BI vendors stand a chance to get new reference accounts and grow, despite a challenging economy.

Jun 12

15 Comments

Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service (PaaS) Inquiries in 2011

Trends of search terms from user accounts and topics of their inquiries form the catalyst of research agendas in many IT advisory firms.  At Gartner these two factors and others like them are commonly regarded as leading indicators of future IT spending.

Gartner has been delivering short analyses of these subject areas to clients in the form of reports, with the latest being Search Analytics Trends: Platform as a Service published on June 9, 2011.  This report covers user search activity from April, 2009 to March, 2011. For purposes of the report, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is defined as cloud application infrastructure services delivered as a service.  Gartner makes the point that PaaS includes no traditional software license and is expensed on a metered or utility basis.  Presented below is the time series of searches by month from the report.

A few key take-aways emerge from the report, and they are presented below:

  • Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients.  As a result this area is seen with skepticism by many of their clients.  In studies of PaaS adoption from other analysts at Gartner and Forrester, it is evident that internal software development will make or break the credibility of PaaS initiatives for the long-term.
  • When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%).  Clearly Gartner IT user clients are looking to define their own technology stack in this area and looking for a framework of reference of where PaaS fits into their own IT plans and architectures.  The competitive intensity across the analyst community will most likely go up as a result of the uncertainty many IT buyers have over PaaS.
  • The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%).  Additional vendors include IBM (11%), Salesforce.com (11%), SAP (7%), Google and Oracle (4%).

Bottom line: The key to PaaS adoption in larger enterprises, many of which are IT user clients of Gartner, is how successfully Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clarify their value proposition and how their apps add value to the platform layer.

Dec 23

SAP Using Humor To Sell SaaS In Latest Business ByDesign Video

[tweetmeme source=@LouisColumbus only_single=false]

In July, SAP bravely broke ranks with the “big is better and ERP is VERY serious business ” messaging the company had seemingly been frozen in for years with a break-out marketing video they produced with Epipheo Studios.  If you have not checked out Ephipheo, be sure to.  They are doing excellent work across a range of clients.

Earlier this week SAP released their second Epipheo Studios video of the year, SAP Business ByDesign — SaaS Made Simple!

This video attacks the perception many small businesses have of ERP systems being large, unresponsive, complex, difficult to use, and costly.  All of this is done with self-deprecating humor, while showing how Business ByDesign can scale to the needs of a small, quickly growing business.  It is very well done and worth checking out.

Sep 27

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SAP Struggling To Get Business ByDesign Off the Ground According to the Wall Street Journal

"It was not as successful as expected," says Rainer Zinow, SAP's senior vice president for Business ByDesign. "You can do everything you want under lab conditions, but when you are in the real world, sometimes things look a bit different."

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Jul 30

SAP On How SaaS Can Tame the ERP Beast for Small Business

So when the following video came out with its relaxed, casual narration voice, devoid of vendor-speak and the torrent of acronyms the majority of ERP marketing videos have, many took notice. With over 6,400 views on YouTube as of today (July 30th) the message is resonating. The self-deprecating humor about ERP systems is hilarious.

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