It is open season on the CIO. But check out any large corporation’s IT budget and 80% is spent on external vendors – sw, hw, services and telecomms – and only 20% on CIO and IT staff. And that 80% is stubbbornly difficult to bring down (I know – I help CIOs negotiate IBM, SAP, Oracle and the incumbent vendors down). And the savings that do come out of this has been increasingly forced into compliance/risk mgt spend especially in companies where the CIO reports to the CFO.

And for the few pennies left for innovation spend they have web 2.0, telemetry, mobility, virtualizaion, and a bunch of other new stuff competing for the CIOs attention.

Most CIOs I know are not fat or lazy – they flat have little room to maneuver. You want CIOs to implement all the cool new web 2.0 stuff coming out of the Valley – pick on the real culprit. Go after the lack of innovation in the 80% that is spent on major incumbent vendors. Free up dollars from there.

And then have web 2.0 stuff show better payback than a mobile app or telemetry app or a data center consolidation project.Even fat, lazy CIOs will be jumping for that stuff…In meantime, good luck finding business users with IT dollars to spare and the cajones to tell the CFO his security, compliance concerns are worth blowing off.

PS – Mojito. Cuban for life is good -)

Thanks – that means a lot! I never really gave that all much thought just did what I thought needed to be done (got enough heat and still do for working that way as well I guess) – did you see the new posts about the RFC SDK group now communicating directly with the RFC Connector builders? Ruby and Perl connectors have been totally rebuilt on the new RFC that’s also been totally rebuilt and is now up for testing and much to our surprise there are a ton of SAPMats links now posted on SDN for people to download the RFC SDK (way ahead of schedule) to give the new Ruby and Perl connectors a thorough run through. (both SOA and RFC)

We still fight but now we notice we’ve got several on the sideline now wanting to “tag” in and go at it with us.

Have a great one!

Craig

By the way.
IPP-ISP etc and all the major internal systems are all on ERP 2005.

Actually quite a few more things have happened since you left, most of SDN is standard code now and is either available or will be available soon, Jive Software (forums) is also certified now on NW. True we are up in the air a bit with the Wiki part still trying to figure out the “right” way to move things but I think we’ll get there as well.

The best part is that SDN is rightly trying to standardize and we push hard on the EP and KM groups to make things work so we can basically package it up and offer it to the customers as well – it’ll take some time, not sure when we’ll see it but we are certainly heading that way (not even sure I’ll see it happen but I’m optimistic!)

Craig

SAP is a software company, not only do you have a higher obligation to use these new applications and ideas internally but also to make them available to your customers so that the investment return in SAP accelerates. As it stands now, the overwhelming majority of customers on ERP2005 and BPP are new customers, the existing customers (including SAP itself) are on older versions because the cost and complexity of upgrading is significant. Speaking of upgrade statistics, have you seen any lately? SAP mgmt has locked down those stats so tight that nobody outside of the most senior mgmt has them… what does that tell you?

But let’s not confuse tools that developers are using with tools that business application users can take advantage of. You said it yourself, the developers wiki is rich but the sales/marketing wiki is not. What does that tell you? For me this says that IT is not putting the resources where people can use them. How about scrapping that shitty portal for starters? Nobody uses it anyway, except Henning with his one-off custom version.

Insofar as Shai, he talks the talk but where are the results? Has Duet moved off Henning’s critical list yet? As one of your very large marquee customers told me recently, they put a hold on Duet because 1) they believe they already licensed much of the software the Duet is trying to sell them again, and 2) the CATS scenario didn’t work and Henning had it on critical because of their issues.

Thomas, I respect you greatly and admire your defense of your employer, but I think you would do well to be objective about this. I still love SAP and have great loyalty to the company, but I also know that being reflexively pro-SAP isn’t going to do the company any good. There are major issues with SAP’s approach to the market and A1S isn’t going to automatically solve everything, much to the disappointment of Zencke and Shai. SAP has had flat growth for 3 years while watching one competitor buy up share and new competitors emerge that are fundamentally different in their approach. The fortress of IT is under assault and you guys are manning the walls with them, I’m not so sure that’s a position I would want to be in because defenders in a fortified position have a hard time doing anything but defending.