Saturday, November 12, 2011

Cloud, mobile, in-memory computing: Has SAP lost the plot?

SAP has not lost the plot. They are re-positioning.

Warwick Ashford writes in ComputerWeekly.com:

SAP is betting on an innovation agenda to sustain its seven consecutive quarters of growth, but with all the attention on cloud, mobile and in-memory computing, is the business software maker in danger of moving too far from its core ERP business?


Innovation, was certainly a dominant theme at of SAP’s customer and partner event Sapphire in Madrid, but Jim Hagemann Snabe,  co-chief executive at SAP was at pains to emphasise that SAP is innovating at the core as well as in mobile, cloud and in-memory computing.
Snabe announced that innovation around the core ERP business suite is ramping up from a six-monthly cycle to once every quarter, saying there is momentum at the core with lots more innovation to come.
“SAP believes a company needs to understand and grow from its core, and our core and 39 years’ experience is in the ERP business suite,” he said.
Snabe said the core remains important as a base for all the innovation at SAP. “We will not abandon the core; by revitalising the core and ensuring consistency, we are able to innovate faster at the edge with mobile and cloud,” he said.
Driving the point home, Snabe said while SAP was innovating at the core as a basis for all other innovation, some competitors were tearing everything down and offering something new.
Read full article:
More about Warwick Ashford:
Warwick Ashford is chief reporter at Computer Weekly. He joined the CW team in June 2007 and is focused on IT security, business continuity, IT law and issues relating to regulation, compliance and governance. Before joining CW, he spent four years working in various roles including technology editor for ITWeb, an IT news publisher based in Johannesburg, South Africa. In addition to news and feature writing for ITWeb’s print publications, he was involved in liaising with sponsors of specialist news areas on the ITWeb site and developing new sponsorship opportunities. He came to IT journalism after three years as a course developer and technical writer for an IT training organisation and eight years working in radio news as a writer and presenter at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).