HP Giving SAP New View On Life
SAP is getting something vital from its newly-formalized relationship with HP that has nothing to do with HP's database technology or its formidable consulting and sales team: it's getting a breath of fresh air.
Case in point: while SAP's Franz Aman and I were waiting for Kris Robinson, vice president of HP's business intelligence unit, to join us on a conference call, I suggested that until very recently, business intelligence was touted as an almost academic way to understand customers and predict their behavior, whereas since the economic crisis began, it's been sold with much more short-term applications in mind (like giving call center agents more complete information about customers during a call or Web chat).
Aman, a vice president who came over to SAP via the acquisition of BI vendor Business Objects, wasn't willing to go there. He allowed that "there was a need for more education than in the past," (in other words, customers were too dense to get the value of BI) and argued that BI vendors "have not been in the esoteric space for a long time."
By that time, however, Robinson had joined the call and agreed that Bi applications "initially were sold as a capability, but now they're a business requirement." In other words, Business Objects, along with CognosIBM (since acquired by ), SAS and their ilk had been better at touting the virtues of the science than the actual business benefits.
Robinson also noted that SAP and HP want to "extend BI functionality to a much larger class of users than even two or three years ago." That is clearly a reference not only to call center agents but line-of-business managers who don't have an IT department at their beck and call, or enough familiarity with complex applications to create their own analytic queries and reports.
The nature of the deal between the two companies is an extension of the answers Aman and Robinson gave; SAP recognizes that it needs to expand its market for BI software beyond those customers who already use its huge and expensive suite of applications for managing supply chains and human resources. It also recognizes that it has a tendency to match complexity with complexity â€"- engineering applications that perform great work but require advanced degrees to even use.
It has therefore combined a less complex user interface that includes preconfigured reports with a powerful database engine from HP allowing it to pull in data from a wide variety of sources -- notably, non-SAP sources of data -- that can be used to parse and spit out reports.
HP also provides it with a sales force that knows SAP intimately, but will be seen by customers as a third-party that isn't necessarily wedded to SAP software, thus broadening its potential reach. "The partnership gives SAP a large channel of touch beyond their traditional customer base," Robinson said.
While the two executives settled into a familiar pattern of discussing their respective products and services within the context of a partnership they were duty-bound to promote, Robinson was clearly more at ease with the exercise than Aman. He might be a relatively recent arrival to SAP, but he's clearly integrated the giant's holistic culture very well. SAP works closely with many partners, including HP and Microsoft, but doesn't like to talk about them much.
Partnerships and data centers with lots of software from different vendors represent a dangerous thin edge of the wedge, because Oracle is always lurking somewhere in the background. The reason both vendors acquire as many point application vendors as they do is so that customers don't introduce a rival into their data centers that can ultimately become a Trojan Horse.
HP and SAP have been partners of convenience in the past (many SAP applications run on HP hardware), but this combination of forces in the software and database arena is a fairly new thing for them. It will be interesting to see whether HP can give SAP a new outlook on life.