SAP & EMC Keeping it Simple at FKOM

This past week I was fortunate to attend SAP’s FKOM (Field KickOff Meeting) event for Latin America in Riviera Maya (just south of Cancun). Prior to leaving for the event, we got some feedback that SAP’s theme was going to be “Simple Wins”. We also received feedback as an attending partner, that the dress code was “relaxed”, thus being acceptable to wear jacket & jeans at all FKOM events globally. This made me think of Steve Lucas’ keynote Monday afternoon at SAP TechEd in October in Las Vegas. Steve was wearing Jeans, and the majority of the speakers that came to the stage were also wearing Jeans; including John Appleby, Vijay Vijayasankar, Chris Paine and others, which was awesome! Of course some of us started to have fun with that using the #JeansDay hashtag. Thinking of this and having a quick chat with my partner in “trouble making” crime: Sylvie Otten Sollod (@sylvie75015) we decided to create a fun image that we can use in social media during all FKOM events around the world which also showcased our message and theme: “SAP & EMC Keeping it Simple”. Sylvie and her behind the scene PhotoShop expert husband went to work on it and came up with the following (of course there is an additional message, which is all SAP field sales folks need to succeed in 2015, is an EMC business card): Each morning at FKOM I got a chance to take a jog on the beach to clear my mind and get ready for a full day of action. I have to say it was one of the nicer beaches I have ever been. At FKOM’s keynote by Rob Enslin (President of Global Field Organizations) we heard about SAP’s vision in 2015, to help clients build “the Perfect Enterprise” with the next generation HANA Platform now known as: S4HANA. Simple Finance (sFinance) for HANA is the first prebuilt solution with S4HANA and Simple Logistics is right around the corner. In one of the breakout session, Thack Brown of SAP did an incredible job walking through the value proposition of Simple Finance on S4HANA. He set the bar for how to communicate in a “simple” way why it make sense for clients to deploy sFinance. The innovations SAP is building on top of the HANA Platform are impressive, and I personally believe they will help drive adoption in client sites. This, of course, needs to be combined with the right use cases as well as a strong business case and plan on how to deploy. I thought Sven Denecken also gave a great talk on how S4HANA and SAP’s Cloud strategy will play out in 2015. I thought SAP did a fantastic job with the S4HANA message and the overall FKOM LatAm event. SAP’s passion to go above and beyond the normal is contagious. It is very cool that partners such as EMC have an opportunity to attend to better understand and align with SAP’s field organization at the global FKOM events. Although EMC (and EMCs Federation with VMware, VCE, Pivotal & RSA) may not fall in the “regular” partner category where SAP is most focused on; including SI’s (small and large), VARs (resellers) of SAP software, and Cloud hosting Partners, I personally believe EMC is closely aligned with SAP.

We at EMC are committed to evangelizing the HANA platform as the next phase of our existing SAP clients’ Business and IT Journeys. We are also 100% committed to help our existing SAP clients simplify & reduce the cost of their infrastructure by driving a Cloud strategy: On-Prem, Off-Prem and Hybrid with our own Infrastructure Platform solution. We are also working with Cloud Service Provider Partners globally who run those same Infrastructure Platforms to host SAP Cloud offerings. There is no better way to deploy HANA than on EMC’s Virtual Platforms On-Prem or Off-Prem with EMC powered HANA Cloud Providers.

At FKOM San Diego next week you will see us launch another set of SAP Cloud Provider offerings including one specifically in North America for SAP clients. It’s interesting to note that some of these partnerships both enable SAP Cloud offerings (including HANA Cloud) powered by EMC for the Service Provider as well as provide “how to build” blue prints on how to deploy HANA in clients’ own data centers. This of course enables Hybrid scenarios for SAP clients for maximum flexibility and choice. As Sven Denecken said in his FKOM Keynote: “The world is going to stay Hybrid for a very long time”. We believe SAP clients will continue to have integration points to SAP applications in SaaS or other off-prem deployment scenarios and to some extent non-SAP applications on-prem or off-prem, which all need to be integrated.

There are over 15,000 Global SAP clients running on EMC platforms today (and growing rapidly), including the majority of Global 1,000, based on our track record with those clients we have proven to earn Credibility, Trust and Relationships and deep reach into many organizations. This is why our ability to take the next generation of SAP Solutions such as S4HANA, put them on top of our proven EMC Infrastructure platforms to help our clients innovate, simplify and reduce cost, is unmatched in the SAP Ecosystem.

One of the many examples, is our internal EMC IT HANA story which we are now live on Sidecar, BPC, BW and S&OP for HANA and are actively moving to CRM and ECC on HANA to replace Oracle DB. We tend to tell that story to other SAP clients every day including that it runs on VCE’s Vblock Converged Infrastructure using Virtual HANA and TDI (Tailor Data Center Integration).

While we were at FKOM (our Americas SAP team in Riviera Maya and our APJ SAP team in Singapore) it was so cool to see (on Twitter) that SAP’s CEO, Bill McDermott showed up with EMC’s CEO, Joe Tucci to speak at EMC’s Leadership conference in Boston. I heard Bill did a great job talking about leadership, and of course told inspiring stories from his new book “Winners Dream”. A very surreal situation for me sitting at an SAP conference while SAP’s CEO is meeting and speaking to EMC executives…especially considering I had a copy of that same book in my lap (since it was given to all FKOM attendees). 🙂

Can’t wait to hit FKOM San Diego this coming week and hear more on the #SimpleWins theme from SAP.

If you are attending FKOM San Diego next week (for SAP employees) and you want an invite to EMC’s reception on Tuesday evening, please come find me and follow me on twitter (@henrikwagner73). We will be giving away some cool prize…of course through a Social Media contest. Pay attention to the @EMCSAP twitter handle. Rumor also has it that “HANA Truth Serum” will be served! See you in San Diego where I’ll be wearing my jeans and discussing why #SimpleWins!

Want to virtualize SAP HANA with VMware? See what’s new!

With SAP TechEd Las Vegas coming up next week, as well as a large amount of our SAP clients asking us about SAP HANA with VMware; I asked my good friend Axel Streichardt to write a guest post on the topic. Axel is a thought leader around SAP with VMware in the ecosystem and got his finger on the pulse of VMware for SAP HANA. Axel is a fellow European (German) also a very cool dude that I enjoy working with at EMC 🙂

See Axel’s comments below on his perspective on this topic…

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Exciting news. We are getting closer to a fully virtualized Hana (or vHana, how I call it, my mother calls it even my grandma calls it) support for production from SAP and VMware. Both companies announced back in June the availability of virtualized Hana (vHana) and the strategy and timeline for running vHana in production in various flavors, such on a supported hardware appliances like Cisco and VCE, TDI (tailored datacenter integration) or even on commoditized hardware.

In case you haven’t heard, but EMC IT went live over a year ago with a fully virtualized SAP landscape, including app and database tier to reduce cost, minimize risk and increase flexibility. A couple of weeks ago, Mike Harding from EMC’s IT team discussed the Hana strategy and the plans to deploy vHana for production, another milestone in EMC’s journey to the cloud. Check out the replay of the webcast here.

Virtualization is undoubtedly mainstream and more and more customers deploying even top tier business applications, such as SAP, on VMware, because virtualized SAP provides tremendous business advantages over classical physical SAP deployments. Advanced flexibility, agility and cost are just a few of these advantages. Imagine hardware maintenance without disruption and live migration of running vHana nodes even under heavy load to avoid a disaster strike. VMware just released a demo video to underline the power of virtualization for vHana by moving a busy, running vHana node from one ESX server to another within minutes. No expensive standby hardware, no business disruption and maintaining all SLAs.

I am working on a more detailed blog on vHana to be released very soon with the full details on the various vHana deployment architectures and its advantages and why EMC is the number one storage and data management infrastructure for a truly, 100% virtualized Hana deployment.
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Axel is about to launch his own blog on “Everything you need to know about SAP and Virtualization”, so I highly suggest you check it out as well as follow Axel on twitter @aggi_gi

See you at TechEd next week!

The SAP Big Data Bus: Are you on it or under it?

The picture is now crystal clear for me around SAP’s Big Data strategy for existing/new clients and for eco-system partners announced a few weeks ago.

Also very cool that SAP created an SAP Big Data Tour bus which is a mobile showcase of SAP’s Big Data solutions, which is staffed by experts and packed with demos. Wish I would have time to see it live earlier this month in SF! (Perhaps at TechEd?)

SAP HANA is an incredible powerful solution to achieve real-time insight in order for your business to gain competitive advantages in various scenarios. The challenge I believe some have had…how HANA fits into a larger picture of a company’s structured and unstructured data strategy in and around their SAP deployments, which in some cases can amount to PBs of data.

The concept of “Temperature of Data” comes up in more and more customer conversations we tend to have. Where do you deploy “Hot”, “Warm”, “Cold” data and how do you manage those data sources with the various technology solutions such as traditional RDMS, In-Memory solutions, and solutions for unstructured data. How do you also provide a foundation to build out the right infrastructure (on-premise, off-premise, or a combination of both) for all this data?

The piece that I think becomes further clarified in this strategy is; how do you take it a step further and provide abilities and insights for how data can also move between each of the data sources based on policies driven by changing business climates.

Vijay Vijayasankar did a great job outlining this future SAP Big Data direction including the SAP HANA Data Platform in an SCN blog post the other week.

There is no question that Big Data represents a tremendous opportunity to gain competitive advantages for all kinds of organizations. Take for example, Americas Cup racing which is going on right now with the impressive AC72 Sailboats collecting massive amounts of data in real-time about conditions around them (winds, speeds, currents, and efficiencies) to improve accuracy and decision making to sail faster and more safely.

If you havent checked out the Human Face of Big Data project, spend some time getting to know the stories about how Big Data is impacting and changing the world to be a better place. Incredibly inspiring stories about Big Data use cases in various cultures and geographies around the world.

Another example is how our own Organization (EMC IT) is using a combination of Big Data solutions including SAP HANA to gain better insight and decision making showcased in last week’s SAP webcast “Why EMC IT chose SAP HANA”
If you take the time to listen to the webcast recording you will learn how EMC has taken critical business processes that use to take 2 hrs (and sometimes not complete at all) down to 5 mins in order to get better insight and execute better decisions in Real-Time.

So how does EMC fit into this SAP Big Data strategy?
– First of all, many of us in EMC’s SAP practice feel it’s a very sound Big Data strategy hence we tend to have these conversations with clients supporting this strategy.
– Secondly, when SAP clients embark upon a Big Data journey deploying SAP HANA, Sybase IQ, Hadoop, they will constantly look for ways to reduce the $ cost per/TB in each environment as well as in the overall data center architecture while maintaining the right SLA based on each business use case. Some of these deployments will be on-premise, some off-premise and some in a hybrid architecture…either way we believe EMC’s close integration with VMware (and being the parent company) will be absolutely key in this conversation as clients manage risk, cost and innovation.
– Third, another area that we find ourselves in customer conversations is around Data Center Readiness for Big Data including SAP HANA deployments. Clients are looking for rock solid HA, Backup/Recovery as well as Disaster Tolerance solutions which are areas that EMC has 30+ years experience and has laid the foundation for most SAP clients in their existing architectures.

EMC Accelerates the SAP Big Data Bus!

If you are interested to learn more on this topic, attend our next SAP Week event in SAP’s Houston EBC Nov 5th-7th.

Finding the inspiration to write…after attending Sapphire Madrid

Around 2 years ago I came across Simon Sinek’s work (Ted video and book) which altered my approach to business in a positive way. Some of Simon’s core values that he discusses in his work and gives examples around are: “Challenging the status quo”, “Inspiring” and “Innovation”.

Every week now I tend to evaluate where my time is being spent and how to formulate my ideas. I find myself incorporating these core values more and more in my professional dealings with customers, partners and my peers…trying to be a “Change Agent”.

Challenging the status quo. Life is a ton more fun if you constantly look for ways to do a better job in solving the problem you are already solving today, or finding ideas to create new opportunities and markets.

Inspiring others (or being Inspired): I get drawn to people and ideas that inspire me. And there is nothing more rewarding than when people around you give you feedback that you have inspired them to do something that impacts their life.

Innovation is the reason I work in technology. The pace of innovation in the technology industry is incredibly fast and seems to have accelerated in the last few years. I have an opportunity to constantly learn something new and be a part of transformation around me. There are some top organizations that do an incredible job innovating technologies (such as Intel and SAP with HANA) and they tend to constantly stay a few steps ahead of their competitors.

This past week I was fortunate to attend Sapphire Madrid for the first time after attending SAP TechEd and Sapphire in the U.S for a few years now. Not only did I have a ton of fun (the laugh “meter” went off the scale many times during the week), but most importantly, I was inspired every day which is the reason I decided to finally start writing a blog. I want to share my thoughts and experiences with others that may be interested.

At Sapphire Madrid I was inspired:

To meet and talk to EMEA based SAP customers
To have conversations with key leaders in the SAP partner community
To meet more of my EMC peers based in EMEA
To finally see SAP announce that HANA supports running in a VMware environment (non-Prod)
To work together with Cisco, VMware and VCE folks to impact SAP Cloud and HANA strategies
To have the opportunity for a short conversation in Swedish with SAP’s Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe (can’t recall meeting a Dane who speaks Swedish that well)
To hear SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka mention the SAP TechEd Las Vegas “HANA Real-Time Race” in his keynote on Thursday afternoon…even though the HANA Race in Madrid didn’t happen. (I will not mention the piece of me personally thanking Vishal for doing this 🙂 )
To eat and drink amazing Spanish favorites including some top Ribera’s and Rioja’s with some amazing Pata Negra and Steak Tartars. I also learned that it’s possible to get certified in cutting Pata Negra in a 5 day course.
To watch an authentic Flamenco show in downtown Madrid at Corral de la Moreria with incredible craftsmanship by the artists
To see SAP customer: McLaren showcase their cars on the show floor

From time to time I will continue to write to share some ideas and experiences around what I am fortunate to come into contact with at EMC around the SAP ecosystem community that makes me Challenge the Status Quo, be Inspired (or Inspire others) and be part of driving Innovation to make the world a better place…or at least the technology industry 🙂