SAP on the Cloud

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?” – Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs

In my first post for SAP, I observed that an orchestra seems to play Morgenstimmung every time someone utters the phrase “cloud computing.” This jargon presents a serious risk for business leaders who haven’t caught on yet since the symphonic score for the change we’re in the middle of is actually much more like O Fortuna. (I’m not trying to be hoity-toity. Click the links. You’ll know the songs.)

Before I go further, let me acknowledge that the title of this post may seem like a bait-and-switch. If you expected me to say that it’s all much ado about nothing, here’s my point: this topic is infected with cliché, buzzwords, and hollow language. Anyone who watches cable news can attest that language affords and constrains the thoughts that underpin a given subject. As jargon is the second biggest obstacle to meaningful business discussion (the first being PowerPoint), let us explore what actually makes so-called cloud computing a topic of such interest. Panels, presentations, and papers abound that discuss the importance of “the cloud,” but I have yet to see any that succinctly summarizes its nature for a general audience.

“The cloud” = Using a network connection to do things and store things on computers that you don’t directly control.

This is what the cloud physically looks like:

From the perspective of most individuals, business computing has been “in the cloud” for decades. End users do things on devices with monitors, keyboards, and mice (you can add in cameras, microphones, and touchscreens these days) and corporate IT departments maintain all of the big machines in the noisy rooms at the back of the office that no one but them usually goes into. Long ago, the language used was “terminal & mainframe.” It then became “PC & server.”

If this is the case, then why all the fuss? We must consider the current revolution at the corporate level, because the same thing that has long been true individually is finally true organizationally. Thanks to increasing computing power, increasing network capacity, and falling equipment costs, there are now whole companies that take care of the big machines and noisy rooms and allow others to use that power over the Internet. Although some will get fussy about the semantics – which is why we’re peeling away linguistic layers here – “the cloud” is to information technology as offshore contract manufacturing has been to supply chains.

The beautiful images of bright horizons mask another word that once was empty jargon. That word, especially in these tough economic times, has now become infused with meaning.

Outsourcing.

Attitude — you know: sass! Er, uh…SaaS!

HA!!! I made a funny!!! (Yes…you can take a moment to groan and roll your eyes at that one.)

Thus far in my posts we have discussed how cloud computing will allow startups to crush large businesses that fail to adapt, and how part of what large companies will have to do to adapt is partially or entirely outsource their information technology functions. The cloud has become an incredible accelerator of Shumpeterian creative destruction.

Based on the comments that have come in, the most impactful idea I’ve introduced is this simple visual:

In one sense, this is an image of danger. When you think about it from a different perspective, though, it also is an image of incalculable power.

With that in mind, this post will be the first in a series that I’m calling Lightning Bolts.

Arguably the most important aspect of cloud computing is that it enables the easy and affordable deployment of an amazing variety of software tools for almost any process or productivity need imaginable. These tools have collectively become known as “Software as a Service” or “SaaS” for short. (I believe that within the next two years, we’ll all just go back to calling it “software” since cloud-based services will become the standard delivery model.) It is in this area where the energy unleashed by the cloud is most visible to end users. For me, a “Lightning Bolt” is a cloud-based application that has genuine potential to electrify your business. (Yes, I am going to ride the metaphor until I fully sap it of its charge.)

Amongst other musings I post here on “SAP on the Cloud,” I will share my personal thoughts on a range of Lightning Bolts that I like. I’ve got about 10 on my list at the moment so if there’s a cloud-based solution that you’d like me to discuss, feel free to suggest them below — or use the Facebook Page or LinkedIn Group to directly advocate things you find useful for the benefit of the community. After all, that is what those venues are for!

As a ceremonial kick-off to the series, I offer my first tip-of-the-hat to none other than SAP Business ByDesign. What can I say? When you’re a guest in someone’s house, it’s polite to compliment the cooking — especially when it’s good! I obviously think highly of the system and like the folks behind it or else I wouldn’t be blogging underneath the blue and white logo in the upper left corner of your browser window.

What follows is the highly abridged version of how I came to be a friend to the ByDesign team. One of my startup clients, where I was functionally serving as Director of Operations, had a physical product component and aspirations of very high order volume. At a very bare minimum we were going to need the ability to buy stuff from other parties, keep track of the stuff we had, sell that stuff to customers, and then do all the math necessary on lots of transactions to make sure that we were earning more money than we spent. (Do those needs sound familiar?) We’ve already established that a cloud-based solution is the obvious way to go for a startup, so I personally took a look at nine different ERP and Financials offerings and compared them against our assessed needs* to make sure that we made the best possible decision. Since you know who won out, here are the three biggest reasons why I ultimately selected SAP Business ByDesign:

1. SAP’s track record of supporting some of the strongest companies in the world — and the knowledge and experience that comes with having served those winners.
2. Highly competitive pricing. Click here to see for yourself.
3. The caliber of the people supporting the technology. The key part of “SaaS” is the final letter “S” — which stands for service. Service = people. When you select a SaaS solution, you aren’t just selecting a tool set or a workflow or a slick interface; you’re also enlisting a team of living, breathing human beings who will be maintaining the system, improving the product over time, and dealing with whatever issues arise. With respect to the other candidates I met with, I was most impressed by the SAP Business ByDesign Sales Team, Support Team, and the Channel Partner** we were connected with to best meet our implementation needs.

As there are plenty of folks in the SAP family whose job it is to listen to prospective customers and figure out how to best convert their challenges into opportunities, I’ll draw to a close. My specific business needs are most likely different then yours and your needs deserve personal attention. Before I go, though, I will offer this last thought on selecting a cloud-based ERP solution: look ahead in your mind 3 to 5 years and ask yourself, “If I make this particular choice today, how likely is it that I’m going to want to change to something else in the foreseeable future?” For each solution I considered, I used that test as a sharp blade to peel away the possibilities that wouldn’t hold up. I was left with only one real choice.

Like I said before, you already know how this particular story ends.

To refresh us all: a Lightning Bolt is an online application or service that spectacularly reflects to end users the power of the cloud. For all the discussion about the benefits of cloud computing in venues like this, we need to remember that the majority of technology users – in both casual and business settings – don’t give a second thought to where computing occurs and how servers are deployed. (Servers = things that seem to be broken when my computer or phone yells at me about being ”not connected.”)

Evaluation of a cloud service all generally comes down to:

1. How does it make my life better?
2. How much will I have to spend on it?
3. How does it make me feel?

One very common way that many people think of “the cloud” is as “that thing that allows me to get my stuff wherever I am.” Storage is a pretty basic computing function, so it is an understandable personal benefit. It is also highly familiar as a feature that “might happen in a place that is not actually my computer” due to the longtime use of remote network drives. As such, a number of services have emerged that allow people to store and access their files wherever and whenever they want them. In a business context, however, file storage and synchronization is not enough. There is one more crucial feature and – as a result – one service that stands out from a very competitive pack.

The key feature is sharing.

Today’s Lightning Bolt is Box.net.

In terms of storage services, Box.net’s most notable direct competitor is Dropbox. You can also count technology heavyweights Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Adobe amongst other companies offering the ability to remotely store and manage files. What sets Box.net apart for use in business?

1. They offer desktop-synced folders and mobile apps so that you are not dependent on a web browser. This puts the service right at the top of the leaderboard in terms of file accessibility and simplicity.
2. They have a well-supported API which allows Box to easily connect to other online services.
3. Their content sharing features are both flexible and powerful. You can share specific files or whole trees of folders. You can make things publicly viewable or require password sign-in. There is a lot of range and control.
4. Their Enterprise service offering is really impressive and the sales team is very aggressive on pricing.
5. They’ve clearly worked through the user experience so that doing whatever it is you want to do with your files is as easy as possible. This is especially important with any business collaboration application since no one will use it – thus undercutting its value – if it creates more headaches than it relieves. Compared to other offerings, the thought and effort that Box.net put into usability really shows.

You can contact Box.net to ask for details on Enterprise plans. Business plans have a 14-day trial period and 5GB Personal plans are completely free. Box.net is a huge and welcome step up from the of old days of networked storage, and definitely worth a look to see if it meets your company’s needs.

I’ll be profiling more Lightning Bolts in the weeks to come. Suggestions are welcome!

In this post, I will be discussing a direct commercial interest of mine. Some of you may throw up your arms that I would do such a thing. If that’s how you feel, then I’ve got just the thing to make the gesture all the more emphatic! (Stick with me on this.)

This is my friend Jason.

When we were in college, Jason had a very late night working on a project and in a fit of giddy exhaustion he duct-taped his shoes onto a couple of art stools and started constructing a suit of armor out of scrap cardboard. That would’ve been enough for most people — but not Jason. Being the type of person he is, he couldn’t help but continue to refine the design. He’d wear it out to special events, brought it to Burning Man, or he’d put it on whenever the mood struck him. Then, in fall 2009, three particularly interesting things happened. Someone recorded a video of him in an epic battle at the Burning Man Decompression event and posted it to YouTube, he won a costume contest at San Francisco dance club, and then he got covered in notable blog Laughing Squid. Between these three things, he suddenly started getting press inquiries — first from assorted US blogs, and then from random tabloids in the UK and Asia. That would be the point where, having watched his project evolve, I stepped forward and strongly encouraged Jason to find a way to capitalize on the attention that his work over the years was garnering. We shook hands and a friendship became a partnership.

We decided that the full suit was too big and bulky to sell at a reasonable price, so we narrowed the focus to just selling the arms. (Yes, yes — that does indeed make the two of us arms dealers.) We did a pilot run in 2010, and have been working on a larger pool of inventory this year. To get to the point — in case you didn’t see this coming — our business efforts have been fully enabled by social media, online communities, and cloud-based services. We have close to no fixed operating costs; everything we use is either free or takes a small fee based on transactions.

We’ve built up a community of about 2400 fans (as of the post) on our free Facebook page. We run our store on Etsy, a wonderful community that supports people who sell handmade crafts. (It’s a great place to do your holiday shopping, by the way!) We take all of our payments through PayPal. We use the free cloud-based Google Apps for e-mail, spreadsheets, and other documents. As we build up news to share with our fans and customers, we’re set up to use MailChimp for e-mail outreach. We use a free-for-two-users cloud-based ERP to manage our inventory and accounting — and although the solution isn’t SAP itself, they are indeed a part of the SAP community. We prepare US shipments using FedEx’s online portal, and international shipments (yes, our arms have global reach) using the US Postal Service‘s online portal.

If the cloud can enable our fledgling company, think of what will happen to your market… assuming it isn’t happening already. The playing field is now level and you should imagine the terrifying scene of your competitors running at you down that field wearing a pair of Giant Cardboard Robot arms.

Happy Halloween!

I generally focus on consumer facing companies when I work as a for-hire project manager. In that role, I often have to deal with a crushing load of creative material. Concept art, design documents, flow charts, illustrations, logos, web graphics, packaging, instructions, teaser videos, trade circulars, press materials… the list could go on and on. As much fun as creative work can be, the mechanics have a way of becoming BEASTLY.

First, a full platoon of assorted stakeholders with different agendas all need to weigh in by 5 pm today. Then Manager A needs to check before Director B can see it so that you can ultimately present to Executive C at a 6:15 am meeting on a Saturday.

The next step is for you to reconcile all of those comments, because I promise you that some of them will directly conflict with one another. Two junior associates will have opposing opinions about the phrasing of something — which won’t matter anyway since Legal will trump them both. With the dueling notes from your Product Development and Brand leads, you’d think that one of them was named Hatfield and the other was a member of the McCoy family. Someone in PR will take serious issue with the usage of a certain shade of fuschia… which happens to be Executive C’s absolute favorite color.

You then need to relay the reconciled comments to the writers / illustrators / graphic designers / photographers / etc. on the team so that they can make the changes. Before that happens, though, you need to transfer all the directives to a clean copy because the artwork that went for routing is incomprehensible by the time everyone has marked all over it. (It is naturally a day-for-hour schedule slip if the notes aren’t transmitted by noon.)

At long last the first round of work is complete and you get to go through the whole process all over again on the new revision! Hurrah! Of course as the second round circulates, everyone is going to want to check back on the notes from the first round to make sure that their comments were fully addressed.

Today’s Lightning Bolt offers a magnificent method to manage this madness. It’s a cloud-based online proofing service called ProofHQ. It allows you to post content and send out for highly collaborative, realtime review. People can comment on comments and ask one another questions without having to be called into a meeting. The UI is clean and well thought through, it supports a range of file formats, and there are very affordable price tiers for businesses of all sizes. (A quick note about the price grid: a user is someone who is able to create and manage a proof. They allow you as many reviewers on a given proof as you want!)

You can find a number of helpful videos on their “Features” page. They also have a good general demo video – so I’m just going to embed that here so you can see ProofHQ in action for yourself.

Whether you’re a freelance designer, work for a high-traffic advertising agency, or are part of an internal team in a corporation, ProofHQ is a wonderful tool to make the review and revision of any piece of content infinitely easier. It is way more convenient for every member of the team. And, yes, project and traffic managers… the dashboard does show which reviewers have actually looked at the online proof, and having it in the cloud means that the key stakeholder who is about to leave the country can review things while they’re travelling.

If that last sentence doesn’t make you smile, then I’ve got a manila folder full of artwork for you that needs the approval of fourteen people. It’s due five minutes ago. You’d better move lightning quick.

It has been 27 days since my last post. After endless wrangling with concepts and angles for posts about legacy, I surrender.

I had one idea that would have built off of a quote from Mick Jagger, and had another idea that was going to pay homage to Back to the Future. (A lightning bolt is a key plot element in that film after all.) Those ideas both felt gimmicky and hollow to me.

In earlier posts I danced around the issue through teasing & taunting, issuing ominous warnings, and sharing a silly story. But it’s time for me to tackle it head-on.

And here I am. Stuck.

But….now that I think about it…maybe that’s okay. Maybe you’re stuck too. The first thing I usually do when I’m stuck is try to pull apart the situation and see what pieces emerge. Let us therefore tug at the bindings of legacy as it pertains to cloud technologies.

For established (non IT-providing) businesses there are only two good reasons I can think of not to change over to cloud-based services:

You have a product or service that everyone wants and you have no competitors in your space. (If this is you, send me a message and tell me everything about your business so that I can…uh….er…um….<cough>. Nevermind – just let me know what you do.) Your enterprise is so enormous that it’s more cost-effective to simply run your own data center and host your own applications. If your business fits that description, congratulations! (In your math, you are counting the salaries and benefits of the people who maintain those systems – right?)

In various hemmings and hawings on how to approach this, here are the “stick with the status quo” excuses I came up with that I don’t think really much sense:

You think you should more fully amortize sunk costs, even when operating costs with a newer system are dramatically lower. You’re worried about disrupting established corporate processes at the staff level. You want to avoid dealing with possible concerns and resistance from other corporate leadership.

To illuminate the common issue with those three statements, I’ll go ahead and put that Mick Jagger quote to use.

The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it or to regret it, but I don’t want to be its prisoner either.

Future expenses can be affected, but past ones can’t. People can either deal with the challenges of change or endure the challenges of the world changing around them.

Do these “reasons” to stay stuck sound familiar? Please post comments on any similar ones you can think of! Dealing with legacy has become and will continue as a recurring theme throughout my posts. Maybe in discussing it some as a community, we can all get unstuck together.

This post is about a Lightning Bolt that ought to be very exciting to people that build things out of atoms (versus people who build things out of bits). My posts about file storage & sharing and the collaborative review of creative materials build nicely to this one. Those tools are great for development; now we’re going to talk about what needs to happen when work being done on desks has to transition to a factory floor.

Imagine that you are a product development and/ore operations executive for the Pangalactic Anvil Company. You are in the middle of launching a new product: The Blacksmith Buddy 3000.

There are zillions of details about the product that you need to keep track of so that you can clearly communicate and manage how each piece is made and then assembled into a final finished good. You’ll need:

• Metal specifications for the smeltery
• Tooling schematics for the forge
• Any sort of artwork that might go onto the packaging for your printer (along with paper specs)
• Compliance information in case you have to answer to a regulator
• A way to tell your assembly line how everything fits together into whatever package you ship to your customers.

You could:

• Exchange and keep track of countless e-mails. (You’ll just cross your fingers and hope that everything is clear to everyone.)
• Make a document or a spreadsheet to try to clarify how all of the pieces are supposed to fit together.
• Put a bunch of files on a shared drive or an FTP site – and threaten to scold anyone who inadvertently overwrites or deletes the files.

Or you could use a tool like Arena.

Arena manages product data and controls product-related documents by allowing you to create relational bills of materials, with each component under strict change control. Rather than have scattered spreadsheets to keep track of everything, Arena keeps everything in one place as a definitive system of record for all product documentation. Think of it like your business’ product cookbook.

(To be clear: the cooks to the right are obviously using pots and pans made by blacksmiths that are customers of the Pangalactic Anvil Company.)

Individual parts can be associated with specifications and relevent documents. It allows for controlled supplier access and visibility to only the parts they need to see. If you want, it will auto-generate part numbers. Most important: once a part is released, Arena keeps changes under strict control and gives all stakeholders a definitive place to look for authoritative product information.

Now, some of you may be saying, “That’s all great, but my business doesn’t really need all of that – at least not yet.” For those looking for lighter weight solutions, Arena has recently launched two new products: PartsList and PDX Viewer. PartsList allows you to create and share simple bills of materials. PDX Viewer allows non-Arena users to view bills of materials that you’ve shared in the standard PDX format. These are great tools for small businesses to get their manufacturing operations started in an orderly fashion.

One more piece of good news for Business ByDesign users: SAP channel partner ERP Logic is working with Arena on an adapter for ByD. Very soon you’ll be able to manage your product data with Arena and manage your business with SAP in an integrated and harmonious fashion. (As an unabashed fan of ByD, Arena, and ERP Logic, I promise to let everyone know when it becomes officially available!)

You certainly can choose to keep doing things in an ad hoc fashion. Understand, though, that the risk you run is that you could end up being Wile E. Coyote while your competitors wind up being the Road Runner.

I’d like to offer a nostalgic epitaph for the recently dethroned monarch of technological obsession: mobile computing.

Dear Mobile: your ascension was long in the making and well deserving of the attention once you achieved your zenith. You were born of the seeds of Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Braun‘s respective work in wireless communication and the insight of Gordon Moore’s famous eponymous observation about integrated circuit engineering. You were greatly strengthened by the touch screen developments pioneered by Frank Beck & Bent Stumpe, with some early experimentation from musicians like Huge Le Caine and Bob Moog. Once the material costs fell sufficiently and the network infrastructure was reasonable, you became so common so quickly that people lost sight of the miracle you brought: we now can carry devices that allow us to bend time and space and to read people’s thoughts* from wherever we are.

It was the wide deployment of consumer grade speech recognition that ended your reign. Of course, Mobile, you haven’t actually left us. Like all things that pass, you have been subsumed into something even greater. Every sunset is a part of another sunrise.

Whether we are ready or not, computing is now in the era of UBIQUITY.

There are cameras everywhere. There are microphones everywhere. There are touch panels everywhere. There are microprocessors everywhere. In some nations, this fact has sadly been imposed by totalitarian regimes; in other places it has – for better or worse – been imposed by the choices of consumers. Some of these nodes stay in one place and some move about, but antennas and cables and satellites intertwine them all into an infinitely larger essence. QR codes that link the physical world to the digital world visibly now are now abundant. The cost of NFC – which creates that link invisibly – continues to drop and adoption continues to rise. Social media platforms capture the not just the voice of the people, but every thought people are willing to publicly record…and many people are way more willing to share way more thoughts than one might have expected not too long ago . (*Jumping back to the earlier asterisk: have you ever considered when you use social media, you are literally “reading people’s thoughts”? Or that looking at digital photos & videos of past events is, in a sense, bending time and making a telephone call is bending space? Eat your heart out, Arthur C. Clarke.)

Behind it all – interpreting the images, making the waveforms into words, tracking the touches, digesting the data – is the massive and ever-expanding computational power of the cloud. The conceptual boundary between online and offline has been erased. In fact, the physical “lines” where signals are “on” or “off” (i.e., the “wires” referred to in “wireless”) have faded from general experience and common memory. It is now nearly impossible to distinguish between what is and isn’t part of a computer.

People have been talking about the business opportunities and personal consequences of these converging trends for decades. It is here. I’ll be discussing these realities further in upcoming posts. (Yes, SAP friends, I am working on one about ubiquity & in-memory computing.) In the meantime, look around you and think about how you could make money off of the exabytes of data being collected about other people. Look around again and consider that everyone else is thinking about how to make money off all the data that is being collected about you. In the world of ubiquitous computing, the doors are everywhere and they swing in all directions.

Forget the future. Welcome to the present.

Why is it that, when it comes to creating software, almost everyone wants developers that are “ninjas”? Ninjas are secretive and highly unpredictable. The strike quickly and with impact…but then they disappear. It’s helpful to be able to call on a ninja when unexpected threats arise, but when assembling a team to tackle ongoing challenges I strongly prefer the battlefield discipline of the samurai.

This Lightning Bolt post is about the metaphorical equivalent of a stunningly crafted samurai sword: Pivotal Tracker.

Pivotal Tracker was first forged in 2006 as an internal tool by the legendary Pivotal Labs. They were seeking ever more effective ways to support continued success between their clients and the 150+ developers on their team. Their clients responded so positively to the tool, the interpersonal dynamics it encourages, and the results they were getting that Pivotal Labs decided to make Pivotal Tracker available to the public.

To achieve greatness in any given task, it is best to use tools that were built for that task. The corollary is that if you try to apply that tool to different contexts, you may come to the conclusion that other tools are “better.” If you want to use a sword for slicing deli meats, for example, you may find it functional…yet awkward. There are now countless cloud-based tools that aspire to support any type of project someone might want to do and therefore make compromises to serve the broadest possible set of general purposes; Pivotal Tracker is not one of those. Pivotal Tracker has been sharpened on project after project by the Pivotal Labs team for Agile Software Development.

The term “Agile” – like its cousin “Lean” – is bandied about quite freely in business these days. Far too often, I hear it used merely as a synonym for staying flexible. It is so much more than that. If Pivotal Tracker is a mighty sword, then Agile is bushido – a formal code of conduct and honor by which true warriors abide. Amongst its many variants – including the Pivotal Way – Agile incorporates practices like user story & acceptance test construction, point estimation & velocity, paired programming, and actively testing from the very beginning of development. Like the tenets of the samurai code, it is very easy to utter these phrases but it takes practice and sustained focus to achieve the benefits.

The most important benefit? You will succeed in battle with much greater reliability and predictability when you use well-crafted tools with dutiful discipline. Your stealthy ninjas that yearn for the thrill of dire crisis can spend their time doing urgent password resets.