Who will win the DIGITAL race - SAP or Salesforce?

Thank you first of all for taking the time to read this blog, I am sure you are looking for some nuggets that will help you in your career or day to day strategic thinking & decision making or just for good reading.

 Let me preface that there are other big vendors in the DIGITAL race (Oracle, Infor, Adobe etc.) but for simplicity sake and the 2 technologies I am closely associated with, I am going to compare and contrast these 2 technology giants.

What is DIGITAL?

The combined bucket of all these new technologies in this decade; Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep machine learning, IOT (Internet of Things), blockchain, drones, big data, public cloud, mobility, AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality), social media and more on the way.

 Salesforce (Ticker: CRM)

Salesforce has already won the Saas CRM race (check out Gartner CRM annual reports) with mindshare and market share but Digital is much more than just SaaS CRM. How about all the technologies mentioned above under the digital umbrella, Salesforce has its hands in most of them with Einstein AI, IOT tool kit and good integration with social media sites.

 SAP (Ticker: SAP)

SAP has won the legacy ERP mindshare and market share but again Digital is not just ERP/back end systems. SAP has also jumped into the digital wave with its brand name Leonardo which is a mixture of most of the technologies mentioned above.

What does winning this new tsunami of digital looks like?

Winning looks something like this where a 125-year old company such as GE helping itself and its customers cut costs, proactively track failures and do preventive maintenance on their industrial engines and big machines, increasing output and cutting costs, increasing overall sales , shortening product lifecycles. All because GE decided to jump on the digital wave and ride it and not wait and watch. GE Digital aims to be among the top software company by 2020.

Can SAP or Salesforce do that to its customers and help them win in this digital race?

Winning yesterday is no guarantee for either of them to win tomorrow but there are some indicators to predict to the best we can.  SAP has all the back-end data and front-end technology companies it has acquired (Hybris, Ariba, Concur etc.) but the challenges remain. Can the customer get over the mind block of SAP being complex, costly and not user friendly? SAP seems to be doing everything they can to become user friendly with their HTML5 persona based responsive UI across all SAP applications but making the complex simple has earnestly started but remains to be seen.

 Salesforce on the other hand is still seen as lightweight not able to run a whole enterprise like manufacturing or HR or finance or supply chain. Question remains does one need all that for being successful in the digital age? Can they win just focusing on sales force automation (SFA), service, ecommerce and marketing? These current focus areas have a digital component to it and Salesforce will do well to win there if history is an indicator.

When a whole billion dollar multi-national across the globe wants to go digital whom will it look to; SAP or Salesforce?

May be both or whoever can help the customer get where they want to reach within their time frame with minimum disruptions to their current operations.

SAP’s challenge is trying to run nimble and make the complex simple (better said than done) and Salesforce challenge to grow their product portfolio while staying true to their winning formula; easy to use and win fast.

It’s a good competition to have for the end customer watching the David vs Goliath fight but ultimately all the customer cares is who can help them move the dial forward and win be it SAP and/or Salesforce.

Which public cloud must I move my SAP applications to - AWS/Azure/Google Cloud ?

Which public cloud must I move my SAP applications to - AWS/Azure/Google Cloud ?

As a decision maker which cloud should I choose to move my SAP applications to?

Hopefully this blog will help assist you in that decision-making process to add to your own company specific analysis.

Disclaimer:

The analysis below is by no means exhaustive; addressing all use case for all companies in all industries but some data points/perspectives in your individual analysis of your company’s use case of migrating SAP on premise application to the public cloud.

Background:

I am assuming your company is a SAP shop with numerous SAP applications running your core operations like Manufacturing and/or Finance and/or HR/SCM/CRM/PLM etc.

Pointers to help decided between the 3 cloud providers:

All these 3 public cloud providers have their own USPs; AWS as the leader with the most breadth of features & functions, Microsoft Azure with Productivity suite Office 365 and myriad of Microsoft technologies that existing most companies (SQL DB, Active Directory, .Net applications etc.), Google Cloud with its Analytics, AI services, G suite.

If we consider the 3-layer stack of top to bottom; SaaS, PaaS & IaaS; IaaS is almost a commodity in terms of price, storage capacity, compute power. There is hardly anything to differentiate the 3 vendors although they differ on prices (with all the price wars) at the IaaS layer.

So we proceed to the PaaS layer which is where the real battle of differentiation belongs. SAP’s Cloud applications are certified to run on all 3 PaaS platforms but based on what is your company’s top 3 goals of moving SAP to the cloud will help determine which cloud provider will be the best vendor.

PAAS comparison of AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

Which of these 3 PAAS complements SAP’s own Cloud Foundry based PAAS SCP (SAP Cloud Platform)?

For example; if your company wants its SAP applications working with G suite, it’s a no brainer to go with Google Cloud and same applies for SAP with Microsoft Office to go with MS Azure. But would you decide to move something as core as a SAP application to GCP or Azure just based on your company’s usage of MS Office of G suite? Something for the IT leadership to think hard and deep.

As a general thumb rule; what are the top 3 priorities for your business to meet their goals (short & long) should help decide the vendor or vendors. Your company might decide on a multi-vendor approach for all applications but not necessarily for SAP as a technology.

All the 3 vendors are growing their global reach & functionality as of the writing of this blog but as of today if your company is looking for a global reach because of your operations worldwide that could be a differentiating factor in favor of the vendor with most availability zones geographically.

Another deciding factor could be if something as core as IOT or Analytics or AI (Artificial Intelligence) is very critical for your operations, that could be a deciding factor in favor of the vendor who offers the most depth and breadth of that technology or service.  Finally looking ahead one to three to five years where your business is heading in terms of products & services (a general roadmap); the vendor who can add most value in your industry/products space now and into the near future is the one who should get the highest grade.

None of the 3 vendors would have 10/10 in all the possible services; so it’s possible that a company might have multi-cloud vendors; one vendor for IOT services, another for AI/machine learning services etc. It goes without saying it is better to have lesser vendors in terms of overall managing the vendors during issue resolutions and overall manageability. But is also helpful to have more than one vendor for price and overall negotiations in terms of customer responsiveness and keeping the vendor on their toes. This was a digression from our topic which was more on SAP and a public cloud vendor/s.

Since this blog is about SAP applications on a public cloud I conclude for now that SAP applications on a single vendor seems a better option than different SAP applications distributed across different vendors. This could change due to the very nature of cloud and the rapid changes it brings; it could be a case of a best of breed vendors doing various SAP applications based on their strengths but not in the near future.

Watch out more updates to this topic …………………..

How does SAP stack against Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce from an IAAS lens?

One of my new year resolutions was to start blogging actively since I personally have benefited from the amazing posts people have shared on Linked In and other sites. I hope this blog benefits you even as you are reading this now.

I also believe that is better to give than to receive (quote from the Bible).

Topic for today:

How does SAP stack against Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce from an (cloud provider- Infrastructure as a Service) IAAS availability lens?

Now I know what some of you are thinking; that’s not apple-apple since Salesforce is kind of odd man out (since others are both in the ERP & CRM space while Salesforce is not in the ERP space yet). But hang in with me to see the big picture.

Why this topic?

Industry pundits and major publications are predicting 2017 as the year of take off for business applications on cloud. Obviously everyone is aware of the staggering growth of AWS & Azure in the recent past with the last two (below table) trying to play catch up.

Background:

I have selected the 4 major business application providers (not in any order of market share or revenues just general mind share) and compared their (ERP/CRM application) availability across the 4 major cloud providers today.

I have omitted each of these business application provider (columns) as an IAAS provider since all of them have their applications hosted on their own cloud (IAAS).

IAAS Provider	SAP	ORACLE	MICROSOFT	SALESFORCE
Amazon AWS	Yes	N/A	N/A	Yes
Microsoft Azure	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A
IBM Softlayer	Yes	N/A	N/A	N/A
Google Cloud Platform	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

You may agree or disagree with my observations but again this is a perspective of a IT professional from his eyes.

Legend:

Orange block: Most likely will not happen

Non-Orange block: Could happen in the future.

What does this table tell us, what picture does it predict?

At 50,000 feet SAP seems to be the winner if any CIO were to decide on a IAAS provider for his enterprise. He can hedge his risks since SAP is available on 3 of the 4 major providers and maybe on the 4^th one in the near future.

For SAP and its customers it’s a win-win. Whether a CIO is part of a company with only 1 IAAS provider or multiple, SAP is available on most of them for him to decide the roadmap from a better TCO, ROI or other perspective. From a SAP's company perspective no matter which IAAS provider grows in market share, that improves SAP's probability of winning in the cloud era (although that is not the only thing that will help SAP win in the market place).

To talk a little bit about the non SAP vendors; I don’t see any of the orange blocks (in the table above) happening now or in the future (although in technology you never know).

 My justification for this observation: (orange blocks only in the table above)

ORACLE:

Oracle is trying to build its own AWS competitor cloud IAAS and hence might send a wrong message if they make their apps available on any of these 4 cloud providers.

MICROSOFT:

They are living the dream with most of the products (except the mobile portion of course). They cannot or will not make their business apps available on AWS else the wrong message goes to their customers ‘you don’t believe in your own product’.

SALESFORCE:

Their bromance with Microsoft in on a downhill with increased completion over customer wins (HP CRM deal), M&A (Linked In saga) et.al hence I don’t see Salesforce coming any time soon on Azure cloud.

The non-orange blocks mean that these business application providers could for host of reasons make themselves available on the remaining IAAS providers in the future.

Disclaimer:

The observations above are my own and do not reflect that of any of the companies mentioned in the article. Nor am I paid by any of these or other companies to express this opinion.