May 09, 2011, 8:00 AM — While SAP has spent the past year spinning a vision for on-premises, on-demand and on-device computing, its upcoming Sapphire conference is an opportunity for the vendor to lay out some important specifics on these plans for the thousands expected to attend.
SAP also needs to avoid giving short shrift to the concerns of customers still reeling from the effects of the economic downturn, who are more interested in getting greater value from their current SAP investment than shelling out cash they don't have for the latest and greatest.
Here's a look at some key topics to be broached and questions to be answered at Sapphire, which kicks off next week in Orlando.
The move to mobile apps
One of the biggest announcements expected at Sapphire concerns a converged mobile-application development platform composed of SAP technology and the tools and middleware it gained through the acquisition of Sybase last year.
There's no question SAP's customer base is clamoring for mobile applications, but the company needs to tell them the best way to plan their purchases and projects, said Kevin Benedict, CEO of Netcentric Strategies, a consulting firm focused on enterprise mobility.
"I believe they are attempting to do that," he said. "In the past it was challenging because they were a little bit unfamiliar with mobility."
There are a number of specific categories for enterprise mobile applications, each with their own technical demands, he said.
One includes more complex applications that can also run in offline scenarios, Benedict said.
The "container" approach sees applications written in HTML5 code that dynamically reorient themselves for various devices' screens.
And some companies might be satisfied with simply setting up a mobile website that users can access on any sort of smartphone.
"Each of those have [their] own product stack and methodology that goes along with it," Benedict said. "In the past [SAP] didn't even know what to say, so I hope they spent the last year learning that and developing these buying-decision learning trees, so people can decide what might be a prudent place to start."
SAP is not trying to do mobility on its own. The company is "very aggressively" recruiting partners to build applications for its mobile platform, according to Benedict. Sapphire showgoers should expect quite a few to be showcased, "because it shows things work, and shows platform acceptance and success," he said.
Making sense of SAP's SaaS (software-as-a-service) strategy
SAP is using a two-fold approach for on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, and has taken some time to figure out the strategy.
After some fits and starts, its Business ByDesign suite for midmarket companies and divisions of larger ones is ready to be sold at scale. SAP expects to have 1,000 customers on it by year's end.
SAP should and probably will deliver strong Business ByDesign customer stories at the show, said Jon Reed, an independent analyst who closely tracks the company. This will give attendees a better sense of the software's stability and potential benefit to their businesses.
But the big money remains in SAP's on-premises ERP systems, which run many of the world's largest companies and aren't going anywhere anytime soon. SAP has started rolling out a series of specialized SaaS applications, including the CRM (customer relationship management)-themed Sales on Demand, that it is positioning as extensions to on-premise implementations.
At Sapphire, SAP needs to offer customers more clarity on when and how the software should be adopted, and pricing information wouldn't be a bad thing either, said Forrester Research analyst China Martens.
But SAP shops might also wonder where the divide is between what these extensions do and the features gained through regular product upgrades, for which they already pay handsome annual fees. It will be up to SAP to start making that distinction.
Hullabaloo about HANA
If SAP CTO and executive board member Vishal Sikka has a favorite topic these days, it's the in-memory database technology that powers SAP's new HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance).
Sikka and other SAP executives have exercised little restraint in touting HANA's performance and cost advantages over other databases. But the product remains in its infancy, and a series of specialized analytic applications that will run on top of it are only now starting to be released.
