A Tribute To The San Francisco Giants

I took this picture of a mural on a recent visit to the Giants Stadium in San Francisco.
They just won game 3 against the Detroit Tigers.

SuccessFactors Jam Played an Important Role During The Merger

During SAP TechEd last week, I was invited to an analysts and influencers meeting with SAP's Co-CEO Bill McDermott. Vijay Vijayasankar, Associate partner from IBM and SAP Mentor asked Bill about the use of SuccessFactors applications inside SAP. I was not surprised when Bill singled out SuccessFactors Jam as the product that created the most impact inside SAP.

I had a ring side view of this unfolding in the weeks and months after SuccessFactors became an SAP Company. Email systems were not unified. We did not have access to each others networks. But every team inside the company, every individual for that matter, had the right to create a Jam group and invite anyone from either company to collaborate  share, create and decide. We took full advantage of that and executed with remarkable agility.

Two factors were key to the success of Jam usage inside SAP. The first one was that the product was in the cloud and was used without IT support. Second reason is the video creation and sharing tool in Jam.

I will recommend SuccessFactors Jam for this particular use case for all SAP Customers. I think every organization in the world will face M&A scenarios more often that before.

Here are some M&A statistics. Mergers and acquisitions increased 12 fold between 1985 and 2012. The total value of mergers and acquisitions in 2011 is $ 5 trillion.

A total of 43,000 M&A deals were announced in 2011. Although mergers and acquisitions slowed a bit in 2012, they remain a preferred way for organizations to attain growth.

Developer Licenses Policy For All SAP Products

Along with other SAP Mentors, I had a chance to meet and discuss the needs of the SAP Ecosystem with Chris Turner, the EVP of  HANA Partner and Developer Ecosystems at SAP and Anne Hardy, Vice President Developer Experience at SAP Labs. They were of the opinion that licenses for developers should be free for all SAP products. They mentioned that they are working with the general managers of every product group to make this happen. This is good news for all partners and developers of SAP products.  A good step forward for SAP.

On-The-Job Training add-on to SAP Learning Solution

80% of learning happens on the job. In certain industries, this on the job training is tracked for compliance purposes. This was a gap in SAP Learning Solution and some time back we requested our partner hyperCision to build a solution.

SAP Partner hyperCision has created an On-The-Job Training add-on to SAP Learning Solution. I was involved in the design discussions for this solution and I am very pleased that this solution is available for SAP Learning Solution customers. It is a very good solution for compliance driven industries. The solution is created by experts who understand SAP and the needs of compliance driven industries very well. Here is a video that explains the solution. You can buy this add-on from hyperCision.

SAP Screen Personas Looks Interesting

SAP is developing a new GUI (graphical user interface) customization tool currently known as SAP Screen Personas. Personas allows IT departments and even individual SAP users to customize their screen layouts in the SAP GUI through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

I saw a demo of SAP Screen Personas today during demo jam and it looked very interesting. I think this tool is going to make a difference. It is going to be generally available in December 2012. You can find out more from here. http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Img/SAPScreenPersonas

An FAQ on SAP Screen Personas is available at http://scn.sap.com/community/technology-innovation/blog/2012/09/05/frequently-asked-questions-about-sap-screen-personas-part-1