Kristian Kalsing

Single-vendor versus best-of-breed

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:53:00 +0000

When it comes to buying software, most large enterprises have a defined strategy of buying all their software from a few big vendors. The whole idea really stems from the more generic idea of single sourcing. Companies can get much better deals by pooling similar purchases into one vendor agreement. This works great for commodity-like products with limited innovation such as office furniture and factory supplies. But in areas where innovation is ripe and newer and better options are continually becoming available, this strategy fails miserably. The problem is that the large vendors are less incentivised to build good quality products with validated functionality since they can sell it solely based on the "strategic vendor" argument. Another argument for the single-vendor approach is the ease of integration. In reality though, most vendor portfolios these days are a mishmash of acquired products that don't always play together as nicely as the vendor claims.

Buying best-of-breed applications is quite the opposite strategy. Rather than just buying whatever your "strategic vendor" is offering, you are scanning the market for the best-of-breed applications that will deliver the most value to your business. Often these applications are discovered by people close to the problems in the business. At the end of the day, the business will always prefer a best-of-breed application because it is, well, the best of breed. Best-of-breed used to be much more commonplace before the emergence of the all-singing, all-dancing ERP suites from companies like SAP and Oracle. Over time, however, the more the mega-vendors succeeded in pushing their "one suite for everything" message, the more best-of-breed as a strategy lost its legitimacy. This is changing again though. I am now seeing a trend where best-of-breed is fighting its way back into the strategic conversations.

I have observed this trend in two areas that I have been close to in the last 5-10 years: collaboration and data management. In collaboration SharePoint was on a long lasting winning streak by providing a "Swiss army knife" that could address a wide range of collaboration, content management and portal needs. It successfully spread like wildfire in most large enterprises, often driven by the business but also loved by IT because of the "one platform for many use cases" argument. However, speaking to many analysts, there is definitely a consensus that for SharePoint "the glory days are behind us." SharePoint is no longer perceived as the magic silver bullet and we're starting to see a best-of-breed trend where companies are mixing and matching different products for different purposes. E.g. using Box for file storage, WordPress for websites, Jive for collaboration, etc.

Another area where I have seen this trend is in data quality and management. Large enterprises have for a long time been buying whatever their large vendor of choice (e.g. SAP, Oracle, IBM, Informatica, etc.) would throw at them to fill these needs. But working for Winshuttle (bias alert!) has taught me that the single-vendor strategy leaves significant open gaps in many important areas. At Winshuttle, we've been very successful in providing best-of-breed capabilities for desktop data management and data governance process improvements, filling vital gaps in those areas.

It reminds me of what's happened in the grocery industry over the last 50 years. It used to be that we would shop for our groceries at individual specialty shops. We would buy our meat at the butcher, our fish at the fishmonger, etc. Then along came supermarkets, offering a much more convenient option where we could get everything under the same roof. But we are now slowly realising that we are actually getting sub-standard food products this way. More and more specialty shops are reappearing offering quality foods and collectively catering to a much wider variety of demands. Like with best-of-breed applications, specialty food stores offer exactly what we want and it's usually much healthier too!

The reality is that both strategies have validity in different areas. We're still going to the supermarket for commodities like washing powder and cling wrap. Companies will still be buying the "commodity capabilities" from their primary vendors. But companies are also increasingly selecting best-of-breed applications in areas that are strategically important to their business and where the need for innovation is driving rapid change. In other words, we shouldn't really be having a fundamentalist argument about whether single-vendor or best-of-breed is the better strategy. We should rather talk about how to best implement a hybrid of the two.

Speaking at Collaborate 14 in Las Vegas

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 20:58:00 +0000

The Oracle Applications Users Group is having their annual community event, Collaborate, in Las Vegas on April 7-11. I'll be there in the Winshuttle booth talking to attendees about solving master data problems. I also have the below session scheduled for Friday at 11 am.

Improve master data quality with Excel and SharePoint
Business user tools such as Excel and SharePoint can be utilized to improve processes for master data creation and maintenance. Power users in the business can create web forms and spreadsheets for data collection and validation. Combined with automated workflows, these provide the business with transformed processes for ongoing data governance. In this session, it will be discussed how to quickly improve data quality with lightweight and cost-effective solutions, employing a bottom-up approach that will yield immediate results.

Speaking at the ASUG Chapter Meeting in New York City

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 16:50:00 +0000

There is an effort going on to revitalise the ASUG community for the New York City Metro Area. If you are based in the area and work with SAP, it's a great community to get involved in. The next meeting will be on February 5 and you can sign up on the ASUG website. I'll be there delivering a session on improving SAP master data.

Improve master data quality and save your company millions of dollars
Poor master data quality costs businesses millions of dollars in both lost opportunities and having to rectify mistakes. With the increased speed of data access delivered by SAP HANA technologies, a high quality master data foundation becomes even more critical. In this session, it will be discussed how to quickly improve data quality with lightweight and cost-effective solutions, employing a bottom-up approach that will yield immediate results.

The best books I read in 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 17:35:00 +0000

Cleaning out consumed books on my Kindle this morning, I got inspired to share which of the books I read in 2013 that I enjoyed the most and would recommend to others. It's a mixed bag of novels, business books and various non-fiction.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
My favourite novel of the year explores what happened to Japanese Americans on the west coast of the US during World War II. It is a historically accurate book providing a fascinating window into life in Seattle in the 40s.
Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan by Kathleen Jamie
I love travelling and I love reading the accounts of other people emerging themselves in other cultures. My wife and I went to Pakistan in July and out of the 60+ countries I have spent time in, Pakistan is probably the most friendly and hospitable place I've ever visited. Unfortunately, not many travel there, but Kathleen Jamie did and she's written a beautiful book about her experiences.
K2:Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs
It's hard to beat the combination of adventure and drama that you find in mountaineering books and I'm a sucker to those books. One of the best I read last year is Ed Viesturs' narrative of the climbing history of K2. The fact that I was trekking into K2 base camp in Pakistan while I read the book only enhanced the reading experience.
Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life by Arlene Blum
Mountaineering used to be a heavily male dominated sport. Back in the 1970s, Arlene Blum was determined to change that and led the first teams of women to successful summits of great mountains like Denali and Annapurna.
Fall of Giants and Winter of the World by Ken Follett
These are the first two books of a historic trilogy which follows five interrelated families move through the 20th century. It's a very captivating way of learning about all the events that led to the world wars and the impact those had on people in various layers of society. Warning: These are big books! Although these days you don't realise until after several hours of reading and the progress bar hasn't moved much.
Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivated Us by Daniel Pink
When it comes to motivating people in the workplace, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Read this to understand why great companies should give their employees autonomy, mastery and purpose. I read this as part of a Friday book discussion group at work and I am grateful that I work for a company that sees this book as a blueprint for people management.
Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand
What does it really take to ensure a sustainable future for humanity? You may find some of these ideas controversial, but this is an eye-opening book written by a green activist turned realist.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
In short, new archeological evidence suggests that the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparse, primitive or living in a pristine wilderness. Populations were some of the largest on the planet, very sophisticated and they actively engineered the environment around them. Some great lessons on sustainable geoengineering.
Presentation Secrets by Alexei Kapterev
If you do a lot of presentations, it's always good to get a few tips for improvements. This book is great because it's written by a guy who by his own admission used to be a lousy presenter. It contains some very pragmatic guidelines for story telling, building attractive slides and delivering with a passion.
I Am The Secret Footballer: Lifting the Lid on the Beautiful Game by Anonymous
For a lifelong football fan (football with your feet that is), this is a rare insight into the "glamorous" life of a professional footballer. Written by a current player at the highest level, whose identity remains a mystery, this is an honest and fearless account of what goes on behind the scenes in the world of professional football.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Considering this book in the context of "Big Data" will give you some interesting perspectives on the future...

Slide deck from ASUG New England 2013 on improving master data quality with Excel and SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 22:03:00 +0000

Yesterday I did a presentation at the New England chapter of the Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG). The talk was mainly about using Winshuttle to compose solutions for improving SAP master data quality, leveraging the widely deployed and familiar front-ends of Excel and SharePoint.

We discussed how power users in the business can create web forms and spreadsheets for data collection and validation. Combined with automated workflows, these provide the business with transformed processes for ongoing data governance. These types of agile and cost-effective solutions can quickly improve data quality, employing a bottom-up approach that will yield immediate results.

In the introduction, we also discussed how Gartner is expecting enterprises to move towards a Pace-Layered Application Strategy in the coming years. Ultimately this architecture is expected to better support business change, differentiation and innovation. I can only encourage you to research the topic. It makes a lot of sense and it is certainly driving our product investment strategy at Winshuttle.

See you at SAPPHIRE in Orlando

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:36:00 +0000

In a little over a week, it's time for SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando. Apart from working the Winshuttle booth and meeting with various customers, partners and subject matter experts, I'll be facilitating a "microforum" discussion on master data:

Improve your Master Data following a bottom-up approach
Partner & SME Solutions Microforum 2
Wednesday 4:00 pm - 4:45 pm

During the conference, I'll be very interested in connecting with anyone who wants to share their experiences with managing and improving SAP master data. If I don't see you at the session above, you can find me at the Winshuttle booth or reach out to me on Twitter (@kalsing).

See you at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:39:00 +0000

Next week it's time for the biggest SharePoint event of the year, Microsoft's own SharePoint show in Las Vegas. I'm looking forward to catching up with many friends in the community from around the world. I'll be anchored in the Winshuttle booth talking about ERP integration and business critical processes with anyone who is interested. Swing by or reach out to me on Twitter (@kalsing).

I have a scheduled partner theater session at 7.20 pm on the Sunday night about how SharePoint can be a platform for delivering on Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy. I'll barely be back from a visit to Winshuttle Labs in India, so my colleague Jeff Shuey is going to cover for me. Jeff's an awesome presenter so don't miss it!

A pace-layered application strategy around your ERP
For ERP-centric business processes, there is an increasing gap between business users’ need for optimization and innovation and IT professionals’ goals of reducing costs, maximizing security and standardizing technologies. Learn how SharePoint can bridge this gap and become your platform of innovation in business critical applications, enabling you to quickly respond to ever-changing business conditions.

Wrap-up from the ASUG Data Governance SIG in Houston

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:10:00 +0000

I've spent the last three days in Houston at the ASUG Special Interest Group (SIG) for Data Governance. It's an area that has been steadily growing and in its eighth annual incarnation there was 220 attendees and three full days of sessions, all focused on data governance. Certainly, a stark contrast to the Oracle conference I attended last week in San Fransisco which had 50,000 attendees with a very broad range of interests. Kudos to the organizers for putting on an excellent event with an intimate atmosphere where we all had the opportunity to connect with everyone else.

The content included lots of invaluable insights from various SAP customers and industry thought leaders, all about how to tackle data governance. One of many things I wanted to validate at this event was the case for using Microsoft tools as an important part of the tool bag for data teams. It was evident that master data management and governance are areas where using tools such as Excel, Access and SharePoint is very common. Data governance is often championed by technically savvy business people who want to be empowered to solve problems without lengthy and costly projects on the tool implementation side of the equation. Hence, it makes sense that these business user oriented tools are heavily utilised. However, it was also clear that the use of these tools needs to be managed properly to keep everything aligned with the long term objectives.

There was a lot of talk about best practices for executively sponsored governance programs with a well-defined long term roadmap. However, it was also acknowledged that a top-down approach does not, by itself, yield the short term results required to keep the movement going. As it was nicely put by Maria Villar from SAP when talking about SAP's internal data governance program: "Information governance is a team sport and everybody has to play" and "ownership should be pushed to the lines of business." Most speakers reasserted that process owners in the business should be accountable for their own master data. In one session, when the audience was asked whether they had a roadmap outlining their master data program, the majority responded that data management capabilities have been introduced on a reactive basis.

All in all, I sensed a consensus around the need for both top-down and bottom-up data governance initiatives. There needs to be a long term roadmap outlining the strategic goals which will ensure the continuous support from top management and alignment with the company's business goals. But there also needs to be more tactical initiatives where lightweight and cost-effective solutions will yield immediate results and measurable business improvements. It's the latter, I'm currently focused on at Winshuttle.

Wrap-up from Share 2012 in Atlanta

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:59:00 +0000

I’m about to shoot back to the Pacific Northwest after some great days amongst SharePoint peeps in Atlanta. For me, the Share 2012 show started on the Monday night, being a booth bandit for Winshuttle in the exhibition hall. We had some interesting conversations with people wanting to understand how to get their SharePoint environment better integrated with their SAP backend.

Tuesday kicked off with a triple keynote with back-to-back sessions by Dux Raymond Sy, Microsoft's Gideon Bibliowicz and finally Jody Billiard and Shawn Olsen from Coca-Cola. Dux was interesting and enthusiastic as always. One of his key messages was that in order to succeed with your SharePoint initiative, it needs to be intentional, business-driven and have the necessary sponsorship. It sounds obvious, but in too many organisations SharePoint is still being driven by IT as a secondary initiative without clear business goals.

Following Dux, Gideon provided an overview of Microsoft’s vision for the SharePoint platform. Microsoft’s fastest growing server product ever is still all about the platform-based approach coupled with an extensive and vibrant eco-system. Having been involved in the SharePoint community as well as other technology communities at various stages throughout my career, I can only agree that the SharePoint eco-system and community are second to none in the enterprise world when it comes to breadth, depth and most importantly, enthusiasm.

Jody and Shawn from Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated were next sharing their experiences with rolling out ‘RedCentral’ for the 2,000 users in their division. After a rather energetic introduction, even showing ads for Coke brands on the big screen, they focused on an interesting use case around using SharePoint to deliver tools to their sales force consistently. They have done a great job getting the most out of the standard capabilities. A piece of advice for everyone was that building a dashboard on SharePoint will get you a promotion!

I also attended the late afternoon panel discussion on governance which was moderated by Jeremy Thake. It was a lively discussion, but I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been even better if there had been more specific advice on how to implement governance. Governance conversations have a tendency to stay on an abstract level. There was some mention of best practices around site templates and other bits, but much more of this would have been great.

The closing keynote on Wednesday afternoon by Sarah Haase from Best Buy was a highpoint. Sarah went through various approaches to driving successful user adoption, providing lots of practical advice on how to get users engaged and excited. A key takeaway was that this is entirely possible and there are proven ways of tackling it. She also showed this hilarious video illustrating how a movement takes form.

From my perspective, it was interesting to spend the majority of my time speaking to customers on the exhibition floor. There was clear evidence of a growing interest in taking SharePoint beyond basic collaboration and document management. More and more customers are looking for ways to leverage SharePoint as a platform for solving more business process-centric problems, involving workflows and business data from various backend systems.

Kudus to The Eventful Group for putting on another terrific event. I’ve been involved in many of their events for the last five years and it’s always a pleasure. One of the really cool things they do is line up an off-topic motivational talk at the end of the first day. I was particularly excited about listening to Braam Malherbe’s story since I only just read his book, The Great Run. Check it out. This guy completed a 4,200 km run along the entire length of the Great Wall of China. It certainly makes any challenge with SharePoint look rather insignificant.

Speaking at SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference 2012 in Orlando

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Time flies and we’re rapidly approaching May and the annual SAP bonanza in Orlando. Like last year, I’ll be delivering a presentation on how to empower business units to solve SAP challenges with SharePoint. I will have a particular focus on where to find the “low hanging fruit” and the characteristics of those use cases. This is the session abstract:

Leveraging SharePoint to Empower the "Business Developer"
Increasingly, business people empower themselves to create solutions that support their business functions. These business developers are here to stay and harnessing their enthusiasm and integral domain knowledge can provide the business with a vital competitive advantage.
Considering SharePoint's popularity amongst business users and its wide range of core capabilities aimed at business developers, it provides an immense opportunity for supporting business processes across the enterprise. Without writing code, it is possible to extend the use of SharePoint to include solutions that are fully integrated with SAP.
This session will outline what it takes to surface SAP transactions in SharePoint following an approach that is entirely driven by the business. In particular, there will be specific examples of how a business developer can utilize SharePoint to create forms and workflow solutions which evolve around SAP.

During the conference, I will also be conducting research interviews with subject matter experts in functional areas that can benefit from SAP/SharePoint integrated solutions. If you are going to the conference and want to share knowledge and experiences around surfacing SAP through SharePoint, I’d be keen to hear from you. You can reach out to me on Twitter (@kalsing) or send me an email.

Export SAP data to SharePoint with Winshuttle Query

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:28:00 +0000

When business users are automating processes by essentially building applications in SharePoint, there are often use cases where a solution needs to include data from SAP. It could be mash-up scenarios between SharePoint content and SAP data or it could be simple use cases where having SAP data in SharePoint for easy access makes sense.

There are many ways of achieving this through custom programming. However, what I wanted to bring to your attention here is a new feature of Winshuttle Query which effectively empowers a business user to create an SAP data query and export the extract to a SharePoint list without writing any code.

I have recorded a five-minute video that demonstrates how this works. The video shows the desktop approach which is handy for quick prototypes and ad-hoc requirements. There is also an enterprise version of this functionality where the data queries can be scheduled to run regularly on a server, automatically keeping the SharePoint lists in sync with the SAP tables. Apologies if my voice sounds a bit muffled on the video. I blame Camtasia’s voice optimisation.

Speaking at the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:03:00 +0000

After an awesome few days at the WUG conference in Chicago, I’m headed for Berlin next week to speak at the European SharePoint Conference. I’ll be talking about how SAP customers can utilise SharePoint as a platform for optimising SAP-centric business processes. Although my talk is centered around SAP, the issues and solutions discussed are relevant to any large ERP back-end. Here’s the session outline:

Accelerating SAP Transactions with SharePoint and InfoPath
Data entry into SAP can in many cases lead to complex business processes taking up unnecessary time and resources throughout the organisation. Enterprises can achieve significant cost-savings by providing alternative interfaces that simplifies data entry and increases user adoption.
Considering SharePoint's popularity amongst business users, it provides an immense opportunity for delivering SAP transactions to the broader user base. As an integrated part of the SharePoint platform, InfoPath is a tool for creating electronic forms which can be utilized by business users to rapidly create fit-for-purpose user interfaces for SAP.
In this session, you will learn what it takes to surface SAP transactions in SharePoint solutions following an approach that is entirely driven by business users. In particular you will see specific examples of how a business user can utilize SharePoint and InfoPath to build alternative user interfaces for SAP, with no programming involved.

I’ll be keen to connect with anyone at the conference who wants to discuss SAP/SharePoint integration and/or workflow for SharePoint in general. I will also be looking for a SharePoint talent to join our European team. Just ping me on Twitter (@kalsing) and we can arrange to meet. I look forward to meeting you!

Wrap-up from the Winshuttle User Group conference in Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:15:00 +0000

The annual Winshuttle User Group (WUG) conference has been the sole focus of my attention the last few days. After the inaugural event in New Orleans last year and follow-up events in London and Paris earlier this year, the WUG has grown exponentially into a sizable affair with more than 400 Winshuttle enthusiasts gathered to share experiences, attend customer presentations, participate in training classes and engage with the Winshuttle Partner Network.
The show was kicked off Monday with a keynote that included a solution demo by Winshuttle Co-Founder Vikram Chalana and a very inspirational talk by Harold Hambrose on software design and usability. Vikram’s demo showcased an expense claim process automated in SharePoint and fully integrated with SAP. It was a great example of all the Winshuttle products working nicely together to provide a complete, yet simple solution. In 15 minutes he demonstrated both the end user experience and gave an overview of how it was all put together. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this demo was the fact that the entire solution was built in under four hours on a flight from Seattle to Chicago.
Following the keynote, I attended a couple of customer presentations focused on the Central governance platform. Both sessions sparked some hectic debates between business users and IT representatives. Like any other business user-oriented software platform, such as Microsoft SharePoint or SAP Business Objects, the Winshuttle suite aims to empower the business without compromising IT governance requirements. It is a balancing act that sometimes can create some internal friction in organisations. However, consensus was that it is something that cannot be ignored and business units seeking more autonomy in solution development need to partner with IT every step of the way to ensure success. It is clear that business user tools must have good governance and control features to be relevant in an enterprise context.
At the end of the first day, I facilitated a panel discussion on master data governance. Again, all attendees were very open to share their experiences and some valuable lessons were passed on. Probably less than half of the companies represented had reached a maturity level where master data governance is centralised with an executive sponsorship. This is what everyone is striving for though and it is increasingly becoming an area of high priority.
Tuesday was all dedicated to training and overall the event was a massive success. Like other industry events, the WUG provides a perfect opportunity to collect feedback from customers and partners alike. And there is no doubt the customer-to-customer interaction was well appreciated by everyone. Large enterprises face many of the same challenges and taking out a few days to learn how other companies are dealing with these challenges is invaluable. And as a Product Manager, I have certainly come away with a long laundry list of first-hand customer feedback and ideas that will feed into both short term product improvements and long term roadmaps.

SharePoint rock star wanted for Europe

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:56:00 +0000

Following the success of Winshuttle’s product suite as an effective way of utilising the SharePoint platform for SAP process optimisation, we are ramping up our global SharePoint competencies. We have an immediate opening for a highly motivated SharePoint rock star in Europe.

We are looking for a consultant with solid SharePoint experience who can work directly with business units to compose solutions. Are you interested? You will be helping customers to optimise SAP processes through the use of Winshuttle and SharePoint technologies. Prior experience with SAP is desired but not a must.

This is an awesome role where you will be part of a strategically important Acceleration Team where the primary objectives are customer readiness and enablement. As such, your focus will be on short and sharp engagements that prove the value of Winshuttle software and help customers to hit the ground running.

Key responsibilities include project scoping, solution architecture and proof-of-concept delivery. Expect to be working with many different customers across Europe. Ideally, you should be based out of our EMEA head office in London, but we would be willing to consider other arrangements.

I’ll be in Berlin for the European SharePoint Conference, 17th through 20th of October, and in London during the first week of November. If you are interested, please drop me a line (kristian dot kalsing at winshuttle dot com) and we can arrange to meet up for a chat. This will be a lot of fun!

Keynote summary from SAP TechEd in Las Vegas

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:30:00 +0000

The 15th anniversary edition of SAP TechEd has kicked off in Las Vegas and the keynote was delivered this morning by Vishal Sikka on stage, introduced by Hasso Plattner connecting through from Germany. In addition, various technical leads were called in to add their two cents’ worth in their respective areas of expertise. If there was one common theme throughout the keynote, it was certainly HANA. Actually, there was barely a single sentence during the 1.5 hours that didn’t include the magic word, HANA!

Before Vishal Sikka came on for the main act, Hasso Plattner briefly summarised the vision for HANA which was painted at SAPPHIRE earlier this year. Back then, a great deal of attention was given to the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’ Now, after 12-18 months of proving the technology with early adopters and after three months of general availability, it’s time to get down to business and concentrate on the ‘how’. The inherent challenge will be to bring a highly disruptive technology to the market without causing major disruptions in the installed base.

Vishal Sikka started out by emphasising that the intention with HANA is not to add more complexity to an already crowded mishmash of application layers in the SAP technical landscape. Nor are they “replacing the litter with a different kind of litter.” HANA is all about “bringing together the grand simplification.” Delivered on the next generation of commoditised hardware, HANA will provide a unified infrastructure for future applications. A new consolidated layer of in-memory data and application logic will “provide businesses with the freedom to innovate.”

There were lots of lofty promises as you would expect from a keynote, but halfway through the presentation there was a reality check when the attendees were asked to raise their hands if they were considering embarking on a HANA project. Less than 5% of the audience put their hands up. Despite all the hype surrounding HANA, most customers are still battling with much more mundane aspects of realising the return of their existing investments in SAP technology.

Moving on to future developments of the HANA platform, the most immediate introduction to the market will be the launch of BW for HANA (Project Orange) on November 7. Customers will basically be able to run BW directly on top of HANA, eliminating the databases currently underpinning BW and introducing unprecedented performance improvements. With HANA, SAP is in general betting on traditional data marts and data warehouses going away in the future.

The keynote also had some brief updates from the major SAP platforms of NetWeaver, BusinessObjects and Sybase. The key message here was that all technologies are undergoing a renewal and support for HANA is added wherever it makes sense. Capabilities for managing HANA in the SAP landscape will be added to Solution Manager. Technologies such as PI, BPM and Gateway will all be extended to support HANA. BusinessObjects universes will be natively optimised for running on HANA.

Finally, the keynote was concluded by a series of demos and examples of applications built on various UI platforms underpinned by the HANA infrastructure, accompanied by the usual customer testimonials of how easy it was to implement. However, the final verdict of the promised simplicity will have to wait until we have heard the experiences of customers that were not carefully nurtured as early adopters. All in all, it was a keynote that was reinforcing SAP’s strong commitment to HANA and driving the message of “bringing on the grand simplification of the layers.”

More evidence of a less SAP-centric approach

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:11:00 +0000

It is not more than two or three years ago that the prevailing view within SAP was that customers should adopt a wall-to-wall SAP strategy. In the mish mash of technologies called NetWeaver there would be an answer for everything. Any application or integration need around the SAP Business Suite could be addressed with “something” from the NetWeaver mixed bag.

This viewpoint has been changing significantly over the last few years and there is now less of a push to solve every problem with an SAP product. This is particularly evident in SAP’s release of the Gateway product, which will make it much easier for developers to build front-ends to SAP using non-SAP technologies.

At the annual summit of the SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) held in Sydney this week, there was even more evidence of customers complimenting their SAP landscape with non-SAP technologies for specific purposes. In R “Ray” Wang’s event report a few points stand out:

There is an increase in technology spending despite reductions in IT budgets. In other words, the business is buying.
65% of attendees are considering solutions outside the SAP sphere.
For collaboration solutions SharePoint appear to have gained mindshare.
CRM remains dominated by Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM.
Analytics discussions include many non-SAP products such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion and QlikTech.

The ironic aspect is that allowing other platforms to seamlessly integrate with the core SAP system will potentially make companies more SAP-centric from a data perspective. If organisations can deploy their own user interfaces and tools of choice, fully integrated with SAP, then there will be much less demand for buying other industry-specific solutions. I suspect this is what SAP is finally realising too.

Top 20 SAP transactions and quick wins using SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Over the last few years one of my colleagues, Jim O’Farrell, has done some excellent work in terms of working with Winshuttle customers and calculating the ROI of business process acceleration. Part of this work includes looking at customers’ logs in the SAP Workload Monitor (ST03N). These logs keep a tally of all transactions handled in the system and provide valuable insights into usage patterns in SAP. Usage logs from individual customers are highly confidential, but analysing the data in aggregate is quite interesting. For example, the table below lists the top 20 transactions based on actual usage data aggregated from more than 250 SAP customers worldwide.

Rank	Tcode	Description
1	VA02	Change Sales Order
2	IQ02	Change Material Serial Number
3	CAT2	Time Sheet: Maintain Times
4	VA01	Create Sales Order
5	FBL5N	Display Customer Line Items
6	ME23N	Display Purchase Order
7	IQ01	Create Material Serial Number
8	VL02N	Change Outbound Delivery
9	FBL1N	Display Vendor Line Items
10	MD04	Display Stock/Requirements Situation
11	LM13	Put Away Clustered
12	MIGO	Goods Movement
13	ME21N	Create Purchase Order
14	FBL3N	Display G/L Account Line Items
15	VA03	Display Sales Order
16	MIRO	Enter Incoming Invoice
17	QE51N	Results Recording Work List
18	IW32	Change Order
19	VL03N	Display Outbound Delivery
20	FB03	Display Document

A really interesting aspect of this list is that it includes eight display transactions. In other words, some of the most frequent use of the SAP GUI is simply to retrieve information and not perform any updates on the system. We are all familiar with the well-known usability issues of the SAP GUI. Having to navigate and master this generic interface for quick lookups and retrieval of business data, often while performing work in other tools, is an unnecessary burden on productivity.
I am often asked about how to qualify business scenarios for SAP/SharePoint solutions, which is primarily focused on extending the reach of SAP and serving casual users in their tools of choice. Building such solutions involves various degrees of complexity and effort, but the table above helps you identify the quick wins. There is obviously a lot less complexity and effort involved in creating an interface in SharePoint that is merely reading information from SAP. These eight frequently used display transactions is a good place to start when considering how to realise productivity gains by surfacing SAP through SharePoint.

Three points to consider when using the SharePoint BCS

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:23:00 +0000

The SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is an integration feature of SharePoint 2010 which provides read/write access to line-of-business data in external systems. Once an external system has been modelled in the BCS, a SharePoint user or developer can compose solutions that use external data directly without having to possess expert knowledge about the API of the back-end system.

There are many options when it comes to architecting a SharePoint solution that is integrated with an external system. In some scenarios the BCS will be a valuable constituent of a solution, in other cases it may not be a good fit. If you are looking to connect SharePoint with an ERP system or other line-of-business system, there are some important points to consider when deciding whether the BCS should be part of your solution architecture.

Up to 20 operations need to be supported
The BCS provides a back-end neutral framework for integration by requiring the API of the back-end system to be mapped to 20 stereotyped operations. Many APIs of business applications are not very BCS-friendly and it may require substantial effort to distill the APIs into services that can be mapped to the stereotyped BCS operations. This is not a problem when connecting to simple data sources like SQL Server databases, but more complex business applications often have APIs that are very hard to decipher for outsiders (e.g. SAP has a very granular generic API which presents a significant challenge in this regard).

Data is retrieved on-demand
Business data accessed through the BCS is exposed through what is called external lists in SharePoint. These external lists share many of the characteristics of the traditional SharePoint lists. However, one important difference is that the data is not stored in SharePoint. This is often a positive thing because you generally do not want to replicate business data across multiple storages unless you have to. But there are also common scenarios where data caching is required. For example, the administrator of your ERP system might not be too happy if you are frequently hitting the system live to retrieve data that rarely changes.

Workflows cannot be associated with external lists
SharePoint workflow generally works by reacting to items in a list being added or changed. Items in external lists are fetched on-demand and are not stored in SharePoint and therefore workflows cannot be directly associated with external lists. If you consider a use case where you want to trigger a business process every time a new item is added to a table on the back-end then the BCS is not a good option. You can still query data in an external list as part of a workflow running on a document library or an “internal” list, but items in an external list cannot be the primary object of the workflow.

These are all important things to consider when deciding whether the BCS should be part of your solution architecture. There are solutions where the BCS is a natural fit and there are solutions where you will have to come up with an alternative way of bringing the line-of-business data into SharePoint. As always, if you have any experiences with this please share your thoughts below.

Webinar on surfacing SAP through SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 03:30:00 +0000

At the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin in October, I will be speaking about accelerating business processes with an SAP/SharePoint integrated approach to solution development. In particular, the session will focus on leveraging business user-oriented tools such as InfoPath and the Winshuttle usability suite to automate business processes that involve interaction with SAP.

Leading up to the conference there is a pretty solid schedule of regular webinars, free for all, providing brief introductions into the topics covered at the conference. Wednesday this week, I will be delivering a session on surfacing SAP through SharePoint. It won’t be a deep technical dive but rather an introduction into why SharePoint should be considered in the context of SAP and what the main challenges are. This is the outline:

Surfacing SAP through SharePoint
40% of ERP implementations have user adoption issues resulting in limited ROI from initial investments in ERP. Complex generic interfaces that are not intuitive for casual users of line-of-business systems such as SAP continue to slow down business processes. The popularity and rapid adoption of SharePoint provide a tremendous opportunity for bringing core SAP functionality out to more users while meeting usability expectations.
This session outlines why surfacing SAP through SharePoint is beneficial to the business and provides an overview of the key challenges in implementing SAP/SharePoint integrated solutions.

You can sign up for the webinar here and also check out all the other upcoming webinars. These are 20-30 min sessions on some very relevant topics where you will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

Speaking at SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 10 May 2011 02:26:00 +0000

Next week it is time for the biggest show in the world of SAP. Over 10,000 attendees will descend on Orlando in Florida to experience and explore the latest and greatest in SAP-based business and technical solutions and strategies. Additionally, SAP hopes to reach another 4,000 people worldwide at connected events that will receive real-time feeds or content from Orlando.

In recent years, SAP has been ramping up the use of social media during their events. So, if you are unable to attend you can still follow the event on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. SAP will even have dedicated social media reporters who will be covering specific topics. For attendees, they have also promised a snazzy mobile app (for Android, iOS and BlackBerry) which will include venue details, floor plan, searchable agenda, profiles of exhibitors, daily updates and links to the social media sites.

Now that it is less than a week away, I am starting to get excited. I am looking forward to reunite with many friends and colleagues from around the world. The event is also a unique opportunity, as a product manager, to learn about customers’ challenges and verify product hypotheses. I will also be delivering a presentation on the Tuesday at 11 am with the following abstract:

Accelerating SAP Software Transactions with SharePoint and InfoPath
In many cases, data entry into SAP software can lead to complex business processes that take up unnecessary time and resources throughout an organization. Enterprises can achieve significant cost-savings by providing alternative interfaces that simplify data entry and increase user adoption.
SharePoint's popularity with business users provides an immense opportunity for delivering SAP software transactions to the broader user base. As an integrated part of the SharePoint platform, InfoPath is a tool for creating electronic forms which can be utilized by business users to rapidly create fit-for-purpose user interfaces for SAP software.
In this session, you will learn what it takes to surface SAP software transactions in SharePoint solutions following an approach that is entirely driven by business users. In particular you will see specific examples of how a business user can utilize SharePoint, InfoPath, and Winshuttle to build alternative user interfaces for SAP software with no programming involved.

Apart from speaking at the event, I will be well busy as a booth bandit for Winshuttle. We will have eight demo stations showcasing our complete usability platform for SAP and as usual we will have some exciting new things to show, so don’t hesitate to drop by. Just look for the giant “Brushy.”

Using the SharePoint 2010 Service Application Framework for vertical solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:53:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 introduces the concept of Service Applications. It is effectively a replacement for the Shared Services Provider (SSP) in the previous version of SharePoint and the new architecture offers a modular approach which has a lot of benefits from an administration and manageability perspective. The plumbing for the Service Application Framework is baked into SharePoint Foundation and many of the server capabilities provided by both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server are in fact Service Applications. These services include, but are not limited to Search Services, Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Services, Visio Services, User Profile Services, PerformancePoint Services and Managed Metadata Services.

There is a quite a bit of coverage out there about what Service Applications mean for administrators and the benefits they bring to the management of a SharePoint farm. There are also some high-level articles about what opportunities the framework brings to application development on the SharePoint platform. For example, check out Andrew Connell’s general introduction and Spencer Harbar’s coverage of the core concepts. There is also a section about the Service Application Framework on MSDN, although this is still a bit light on actual content.

What I wanted to explore here is the opportunity for ISVs to leverage the Service Application model since it is an open framework that third-parties can take advantage of. This means that third-party applications can potentially offer a lot more capabilities than was the case in SharePoint 2007. A Service Application can take advantage of the following:

Use a custom database for application specific data and have the database managed by SharePoint.
Host and manage middle-tier web services.
Perform scheduled operations with a service-scoped timer job infrastructure.
Store application settings within a configuration store in the SharePoint configuration database.
Take advantage of claims-based security.
Rely on SharePoint infrastructure for scalability, performance and availability.

All of above offer some interesting opportunities for ISV applications. When you combine a custom database, a middle-tier of web services and timer job infrastructure, quite advanced functionality can be built leveraging these core server capabilities. This may significantly increase the scope of vertical applications deployed through SharePoint. Potentially, ISVs can develop more server products based on the SharePoint foundation rather than building everything from scratch. The primary benefit being that ISVs can focus on what they are truly good at, namely building functionality for their domain of expertise, and spend less resources on implementing core server components.

There certainly are vendors that have advanced products based on the SharePoint 2007 platform which include databases, web services and timer jobs. However, with the Service Application Framework, these products can potentially be redesigned to be less of a patchwork and more aligned with standard SharePoint infrastructure. It also offers new opportunities for deeper integration between SharePoint and various third-party applications. For example, some of the BPM and ECM vendors have been providing a SharePoint integration option for years for both SharePoint 2003 and 2007. These vendors, along with others, now have an opportunity to take this integration to a new level using the Service Application Framework.

From a cloud computing perspective, the Service Application Framework compliments the Sandboxed Solutions in a multi-tenant SharePoint environment. Sandboxed Solutions are well suited for building add-on functionality to SharePoint itself. However, with limitations such as no web services, no application pages, etc., they are not adequate for building vertical solutions. If you rely on those capabilities and want to build a multi-tenant ready application, then the Service Application Framework is your answer.

It all sounds good. The big question, of course, is how mature is this framework at this point in time? Third-party Service Applications are not yet supported on SharePoint Online (SharePoint Online Standard Developer Guide), so the framework hasn’t been truly tested in a large-scale multi-tenancy environment yet. For on-premise solutions, I am also yet to come across ISVs where they are building their products based on the Service Application Framework. It’s an interesting and promising architecture that could potentially take SharePoint to the next level in terms of vertical integration, but the technology is still in its infancy and time will tell whether it’ll be a successful platform for third-party products.

Duet Enterprise at the Australian SharePoint Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:58:00 +0000

The Australian SharePoint Conference coming up in only a few weeks from now will have a broad coverage on anything SharePoint. This will also include some goodies for SAP/SharePoint enthusiasts. I have just heard on the grapevine that Microsoft will be delivering a session on the newly released Duet Enterprise. It’s yet to be published in the agenda, but they’ll definitely be there.

Slide deck from Share 2010 on improving SAP usability with InfoPath and Winshuttle

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 06:01:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I delivered a presentation on using InfoPath to address SAP usability issues at the Share 2010 conference in Sydney, Australia. Ten years after SharePoint technologies first hit the market, Share 2010 was really the first dedicated SharePoint conference entirely devoted to covering the business challenges around the SharePoint platform. Speakers included early evangelists of a more business-oriented approach to SharePoint such as Paul Culmsee, Michael Sampson, Dux Raymond Sy and Erica Toelle. Overall, Share 2010 was a resounding success and the vibe was unlike anything I have ever seen at the more technical SharePoint events around the world.

Considering Share 2010 was aimed at the SharePoint community, I wasn’t sure beforehand how big of an audience I would get to a session about a specialised topic such as SAP usability. But as it turned out, the positive feedback was overwhelming. Oxygen and IQX also delivered a presentation on SAP/SharePoint interoperability solutions and both sessions were very well attended. Since most attendees were from the business side, many were also regular users of SAP. If your business runs on SAP and SharePoint is your portal platform of choice, then it makes perfect sense to explore ways of surfacing SAP through SharePoint.

In my session, I went through how we can leverage the Winshuttle 10 platform to rapidly build data entry forms in InfoPath which post data directly to SAP. Data collected in these forms are posted to SAP via web services which are authored and deployed by business users with Winshuttle. I am not aware of any other technologies in the current marketplace that will effectively empower business users to build their own web services for SAP without writing a single line of code. The slide deck below provides some insight into how this works.

Improving SAP Usability with InfoPath and Winshuttle

View more presentations from Kristian Kalsing.

As a Product Manager for key components of the Winshuttle platform, I am obviously very keen to hear your feedback on all this. It is an approach which can be applied to hundreds of common use cases which are currently not very well supported by the more developer-centric and resource intensive options out there. I look forward to your comments below.

General availability of Duet Enterprise

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:46:00 +0000

The long anticipated development platform for SAP/Microsoft interoperability solutions, Duet Enterprise, is slated for general availability later this week. To mark this milestone, there will be a Duet Enterprise Launch Summit on the 1st of February 2011. The summit will have physical events in Frankfurt and Orlando, but you can also attend the event online at no cost.

For companies that run on SAP and utilise SharePoint as the broad collaboration platform within the enterprise, Duet Enterprise provides interoperability infrastructure and a development framework for building solutions that span across both technology stacks. It supports all versions of SAP from 4.6c and up, but does require NetWeaver 7.02 and SharePoint 2010 (and optionally Office 2010 for offline scenarios).

Presenting on ERP usability at Share 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Kristian Kalsing) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 03:29:00 +0000

Next week, the inaugural Share 2010 will see the light. Share 2010 is the first SharePoint conference focusing entirely on the business aspects of SharePoint. I will be presenting on how business users can use SharePoint and InfoPath to improve ERP usability. In particular, I will be showing some of the cool new solutions business users are able to build by leveraging the Winshuttle 10 platform.

Improving ERP usability with SharePoint and InfoPath
Monday 29 November | 16.30 – 17.25 | Track
40% of ERP implementations have user adoption issues resulting in limited ROI from initial investments in ERP. Usability issues for the casual user of core systems such as SAP often lead to complex business processes taking up unnecessary time and resources throughout the organisation.
Considering SharePoint has become the de facto collaboration platform for many organisations and proven popular amongst business users, it is worth asking the question: Is the time ripe for taking SharePoint to the next level and utilise the platform for improving business processes that involve interactions with the ERP system?
In this session, we will discuss what it takes to surface ERP functionality in SharePoint solutions following an approach that is entirely driven by business users. In particular we will see specific examples of how a business user can utilise SharePoint, InfoPath and Winshuttle to build alternative user interfaces for SAP, with no programming involved.

Throughout the conference I will be keen to catch up with anyone who wants to discuss SAP/SharePoint solutions. Bringing SAP into SharePoint provides an excellent opportunity for taking SharePoint to a whole new level. Just ping me on Twitter (@kalsing) or call my mobile number on the conference networking list.