SAP Customer OnDemand covers the customers segment of SAP’s loosely-coupled cloud suite to support sales, marketing, and customer service teams. SAP Customer OnDemand is composed of SAP Sales OnDemand, SAP Social OnDemand, SAP Service OnDemand, and SAP Social Media Analytics by Netbase. The latest update to Customer OnDemand adds the SAP Customer OnDemand Support Portal, a web portal that allows customers to submit and track support tickets online or browse a library of possible solutions. The portal integrates with Social OnDemand and Service OnDemand to provide a unified ticket queue for the customer service team.

To help improve efficiency for users who do much of their work by phone in an office or call center to gain efficiency, SAP added support for telephony integration to SAP Service OnDemand and SAP Social OnDemand. To support salespeople who need access to customer information when they are on the road the latest release of SAP Customer OnDemand includes an iPad app with offline capability. Another new feature for salespeople is a customizable home page.

The latest version of SAP Customer OnDemand also provides some updates made with marketing teams in mind. The latest version comes with pre-built integration to BazaarVoice, a set of tools for gathering, analyzing, and responding to consumer feedback and sentiment on social media and customer reviews. Another new integration is with Fan Appz, a platform capable of delivering targeted promotions and advertisements to customers based on data from social media. For marketers who promote products around the world, SAP has added support for 19 new languages to the SAP Social Media Analytics component of SAP Customer OnDemand. Social Media Analytics also has a new tool from NetBase, the Focus Wizard, which allows market researchers to run queries on data from social media for specific topics while efficiently excluding irrelevant results.

SAP’s other OnDemand applications to receive updates this March fall in the money management category of SAP’s loosely-coupled suite and are younger than SAP Customer OnDemand. While SAP Sales OnDemand, the first component of SAP Customer OnDemand, has been available for two years, SAP Travel OnDemand had its general release just over a year ago, and SAP Financials OnDemand was launched less than six months ago.

SAP Travel OnDemand provides a set of tools for business travelers to book travel according to corporate compliance standards and approval processes and to submit receipts and expense reports. It also comes with mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Blackberry so that business travelers can use Travel OnDemand to submit travel expenses at a hotel, airport, or train station rather than waiting to return to the office. The newest version adds an Android app as well. SAP also added role-based analytics, increased support for pharmaceutical representatives who have to comply with new US regulations, and expanded country coverage so that now over 100 countries are supported. SAP Travel OnDemand already included integration with SAP Financials and SAP HCM, but the new adds some updates to that integration and adds a completely new integration with SAP’s newest OnDemand product, SAP Financials OnDemand.

SAP Financials OnDemand is the main component for managing money in SAP’s loosely-coupled cloud suite, and is aimed at midsize companies and divisions or subsidiaries of larger companies. Financials OnDemand was launched in late 2012, and this month marks its first round of feature updates. Along with the integration to SAP Travel OnDemand, Financials OnDemand now features improved integration with SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll. Just as expanded country coverage was added for SAP Customer OnDemand and SAP Travel OnDemand, SAP added support for more countries to Financials OnDemand, bringing the total countries that the new solution supports to eleven. SAP has ported Financials OnDemand to HANA, SAP’s in-memory database and application platform, which provides stronger capabilities for financial analysis.

The new version of SAP Financials OnDemand also includes support for integration with SAP Jam, SAP’s new collaboration platform based on Successfactors Jam. The integration with SAP Jam can help users collaborate about exceptions in financial processes. Support for integration with SAP Jam was recently added to SAP Customer OnDemand as well.

SAP’s OnDemand Solutions are still relatively new, so we’re likely to see many more updates in the near future.

M2M and the Internet of Things

M2M stands for Machine to Machine. M2M technology allows one machine to transmit information to another machine. For example, a vending machine equipped with internal sensors can transmit information about the inventory within the vending machine to a computer in the vending company’s office, or a moisture sensor in a potted plant can send a message to the owner’s cell phone when the plant needs to be watered.

M2M technology makes the Internet of Things possible. While the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, M2M most often indicates a one directional flow of information from a machine with a sensor to a computer with an application that can make some sense of the data while the Internet of Things denotes a network of machines that are capable of both transmitting and receiving information. An example of the Internet of Things is a smart grid where devices placed throughout the grid can communicate with each other to redirect power in case of a failure.

SAP and the Internet of Things

SAP sees a lot of promise in the internet of things to help businesses orchestrate, streamline, and optimize business processes.  A survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit commissioned by SAP predicted that the Besides smart grids, applications of the internet of things to business include automatic generation of customer promotions based on the weather (e.g. lemonade on a hot day, umbrellas on a rainy one), monitoring of vehicles to anticipate maintenance needs and avoid breakdowns, patient monitoring, and even tracking the location and health of produce. This is only a beginning; creative people are sure to invent new uses for connected devices as sensors, RFID tags, and wireless networking become less expensive.

To keep track of the vast amount of information generated by connected devices (a few bytes a minute from thousands of devices would add up to gigabytes of information over the course of a single day) and then make sense of it in a short enough span of time to make valuable adjustments requires a lot of computing power. This is where SAP’s favorite new technology, HANA, comes in.

One of the first internet of things scenarios that SAP created a specific HANA application for was SAP Smart Meter Analytics. This application runs extremely fast queries from large amounts of data collected by smart meters and allows utility companies to run analysis on a broad or granular scale, even by customer or building.

Recently, SAP has been placing a substantial investment into the Internet of Things. In late 2012, SAP appointed a VP of the Internet of Things, Suhas Uliyar, and just a few weeks ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, SAP announced a big step forward in its strategy. SAP and Ericsson are launching a joint cloud M2M service that they will market and sell together. Ericsson contributes the technology, such as network infrastructure and middleware, for devices to communicate with each other. SAP brings the software and the computing platform that can make sense of the data transmitted by those devices.

The companies hope that their offering, which provides the whole structure necessary for an M2M deployment, will make the Internet of Things more attainable for enterprises.

SAP’s Mobility Design Center seems to have roots in another recent SAP initiative, the AppHaus, which began at SAP Labs in the San Francisco Bay Area in early 2011. The concept behind AppHaus was to develop consumer-facing applications in a 90 day cycle from start to finish with a small team in an environment resembling a startup company. AppHaus teams in countries around the world such as India, Israel, China, and Ireland have produced multiple consumer-grade mobile applications, such as a photo-sharing app and a app to track product recalls as well as a cloud application that runs on SAP HANA. Because of their content and design, these apps appeal to a broad spectrum of people, many of whom are unfamiliar with SAP.

In the SAP Mobility Design Center, SAP applies the methods used at the AppHaus such as sprint cycles, Agile methodology, lean teams, and design-thinking or user-centric design to answer a growing need in the enterprise: custom mobile apps. Rather than building general-interest consumer apps as in the AppHaus project, at the SAP Mobility Design Center, the user experience designers and mobile developers work with customers to develop mobile apps that fulfill a specific need in the enterprise, and validate the design with the business users throughout the process.

When SAP proclaims in their announcement that the mobile apps created here are “consumer-grade” they mean that the quality of the user experience of the apps is similar to what one would expect from a highly-rated app at the iTunes store or the Google Play store. The developers at the SAP Mobility Design Center design most of the apps using the SAP Mobility Platform and can integrate a device’s native GPS or camera capabilities into their mobile apps as well.

Some features of the mobile apps created at the SAP Mobility Design Center are not consumer-grade. SAP’s developers make sure these apps integrate smoothly with customers’ SAP systems, and build them according to enterprise-grade security standards. In addition, SAP offers continuing support and maintenance for the life of the app.

SmartOps was founded in 2000 and has been a partner of SAP since 2006. A few years later, SmartOps began developing its software in conjunction with SAP. SAP customers such as DuPont and ConAgra have used SAP Enterprise Inventory Optimization by SmartOps to reduce their inventory and increase customer satisfaction. SmartOps also developed its Analytics and Intelligence Module, which provides reporting, dashboards and other analysis tools, to run on the SAP BI BusinessObjects Platform.

SmartOps’ Inventory Optimization tools have been complementary to SAP’s supply chain planning software. SAP APO (Advanced Planner and Optimizer) has many planning capabilities such as supply network planning, demand planning, production planning, detailed scheduling, and availability to promise, but it does not have a component that specifically focuses on planning inventory. SmartOps’ Enterprise Inventory Optimization had been the best-integrated third party solution to fill this gap.

After the acquisition is complete, SAP plans to port Enterprise Inventory Optimization to the SAP HANA platform, affording faster performance for the applications’s predictive algorithms and calculations of inventory by location and item across multiple tiers. Enterprise Inventory Optimization would join SAP Sales and Operations Planning and SAP Supplier Infonet as a HANA-powered application in SAP’s supply chain and supplier management suite.

SAP also plans to incorporate SmartOps’ Enterprise Demand Sensing, a cloud application that debuted in summer 2012, and its predictive algorithms into SAP Demand Signal Management, an application that already runs on SAP HANA.

The bid for SmartOps is the latest in a series of acquisitions by SAP of former partners, including Crossgate and Right Hemisphere.

ASE, which stands for Adaptive Server Enterprise, was Sybase’s enterprise-class database for transactional applications. Sybase ASE became widely popular in the finance industy, but was only able to run SAP applications with the ASE verison 15.7 release in 2011. Less than two years later, SAP is planning for SAP Sybase ASE to be the preferred database for running transactional applications in SAP’s Real-Time Data Platform, a collection of data management tools that SAP is integrating to provide very fast performance.

SAP is including a license for Sybase ASE with SAP ERP on HANA, indicating that SAP has plans for these two databases to work together. While SAP has committed to continuing support for third-party databases, SAP has the greatest ability, not to mention incentive, to build integration between its own databases. In a recent Statement of Direction, SAP laid out the plan for HANA and ASE.

While SAP HANA can support transaction and analytic processing on the same data, not every business application stands to benefit greatly enough from up-to-the-moment analysis and ad-hoc queries to justify the expense of running it on HANA. SAP plans for ASE to be a less-expensive alternative to HANA for such cases. At the same time, SAP plans to make data in ASE easily accessible to HANA and vice versa, easing integration for companies with a mixed landscape.

SAP is also planning to make ASE a transitional database between a standard disk-based database and SAP HANA. SAP is working toward making migration from ASE to HANA very smooth using the Sybase Replication Server. For those planning to use HANA as a database in the future, SAP recommends moving to ASE in the short term to make for an easy transition to HANA in the long term.

SAP Mobile Documents answers a recently developing problem that many businesses face. Mobile workers need access to business documents in  order to get their work done, and use their ingenuity to get these documents to their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. They often turn to well-known consumer-grade services such as DropBox, which is free, or iCloud, which is designed to provide excellent integration with Apple’s mobile devices, and sometimes email documents to themselves. Much of the time, people who export data from the company network in this way do not notify their IT departments, and most probably do not know that the lack of secure encryption and authentication on these services expose these documents to being leaked.

After SAP had deployed thousands of mobile devices to its internal employees, SAP’s CIO, Oliver Bussmann, determined that the consumer-grade solutions that workers had turned to in order to manage content from their mobile devices were simply not secure enough to protect proprietary company information and shut off access to these services via Afaria, SAP’s mobile device management platform developed by Sybase. But since SAP was committed to enabling its workers to use mobile devices for work, Bussmann’s team set about developing a secure content management solution that its internal employees could use to store, access, transfer, and share business documents.

Known informally as SAP Box, this content management solution became the germ of SAP Mobile Documents. SAP Box proved successful enough internally that SAP improved and scaled the application to offer to customers facing the same risk of data leakage and loss through consumer-grade applications that SAP had.

The security features of SAP Mobile Documents include encryption for stored data as well as data being transmitted, secure authentication, folder-level security, and document level security such as expiring password authentication. At the same time, SAP has tried to make the interface friendly enough to make it a usable alternative to the popular consumer-grade content management services.

SAP’s assertion that SAP Mobile Documents will run on any device is based on the HTML5 version of the application. SAP Mobile Documents is not just for mobile, as any device with an HTML5-compatible web browser, including desktop computers, can access SAP Mobile Documents without installing any other software. SAP is developing clients for a variety of devices as well. The first version of SAP Mobile Documents will include native applications for Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, and iPad. Applications for Android phones and tablets, iPhone, and Windows 8 phones and tablets are planned for releases later this year.

SAP Mobile Documents allows a user to access content from a variety of sources. A user can store a document in a personal folder in the system and then retrieve it from a different device. If a user stores a document in a shared folder, other users can access the document as well. SAP Mobile Documents can also be set up to connect to corporate document systems such as SAP Netweaver Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. In a future release, SAP Mobile Documents will be able to connect with other document management systems that support the CMIS standard.

SAP Mobile Documents is built on SAP Netweaver Cloud and can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise. A hybrid version built on Netweaver Cloud is planned for later this year.

Social Enterprise Features Galore

The main engine of SAP Jam is taken from SuccessFactors Jam, but SAP Jam incorporates many features from SAP StreamWork as well.

Aside from the underlying platform, perhaps the most notable feature that continues in SAP Jam from SucessFactors Jam are the video and screen capture tools that allow users to record video or presentations, or capture screenshots and share them with colleagues.

SAP’s Enterprise Social team has taken a number of features from SAP StreamWork and rebuilt them on the Jam platform, most prominently the structured decision-making tools such as pro/con tables, idea ranking, decision sign-off, and polls.

From the SAP StreamWork team also comes the method to securely embed and integrate SAP Jam into various components of SAP’s business software.

Other features of SAP Jam include document sharing, microblogging (status updates), discussion threads, photo sharing, link sharing, a wiki, a blogging tool, and task management. Users can rate content and view content based on most views, most likes, or search by tags. Within SAP Jam, users can view streams of activity and apply various filters to see only the activities that are relevant to them. The application also provides recommendations of  colleagues you might want to connect with and content you might be interested in.

SAP Jam is cloud software that is accessible from anywhere, but there are SAP Jam clients designed specifically for many popular types of mobile devices such as Android, iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry.

First Integrations

While SAP Jam’s source applications had their roots in standalone enterprise collaboration platforms, SAP Jam is shaping up to be much more integrated with other business applications.

Sameer Patel’s vision of social collaboration in the enterprise entails delivering a social platform to places where it can help people get their word done, such as documents, processes, and exception handling. Accordingly, SAP has launched SAP Jam with a number of integrations with SAP software in areas where collaboration makes sense.

SAP Jam, because it’s based on Jam, was already integrated into SuccessFactors Learning, making it easier for new employees to learn about their new roles and companies by connecting them to content created by their colleagues, and helping them find the right experts and mentors within the company.

SAP Jam also came ready to work with the mobile version of SAP Financials OnDemand, supporting collaborative decision-making among busy managers and executives on-the-go.

Integration with on-premise SAP CRM and SAP Sales OnDemand can help salespeople who use SAP Jam to develop sales strategies in conjunction with their sales team, product managers, and supply managers.

More integration points in other areas of SAP’s business software are sure to come.

Whither StreamWork?

Current SAP StreamWork customers can continue using that application for now, but will eventually be pushed to transition over to SAP Jam as more and more improvements are delivered to Jam while StreamWork continues unchanged.

We should see SAP Jam continue to be improved with features and ideas from the StreamWork team, as well as fresh ideas from the new SAP Jam team. Prashant Padmanabhan, Sr. Director, Product Management in the OnDemand Human Capital Management (HCM) group of SAP Labs and SAP Mentor, assures that some of SAP’s best designers and engineering minds are on the project.

Analytical v. Transactional

What is the difference between an analytical and a transactional application?

An analytical application typically processes large chunks of historical data. An analytical application might highlight segments of data, make comparisons between different parts of the data, produce visual representations of the data, or predict trends based on past data, but makes very limited, if any, changes to the database or data set. Analytical applications generally use OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), which is optimized to aggregate many records, and, when dealing with structured data, they run faster on databases that present the data in columns, quickly querying large volumes of data from the pertinent columns only.

A transactional application is used to record or update data. Transactional applications typically query a small amount of data at a time. alters the data. For example, when someone buys something, the record of the purchase will be added into the company’s database. Transactional applications generally use OLTP (Online Transactional Processing), which is optimized to retrieve a small number of records at a time, and includes measures to prevent update conflicts. Databases that present data in rows are by nature suited transactional applications, which deal with adding, editing, or viewing single records or rows at a time.

SAP HANA has been designed to accommodate both OLAP and OLTP. It has a column-oriented database which supports both read and write operations, but can also present data in a row store format. Most of the applications built so far have taken advantage of the very high speed that SAP HANA can attain in OLAP processing because of its in-memory nature and column store. For example, the companies in SAP’s 100K and 10K Clubs have achieved 100,000-fold or 10,000-fold speed improvements for various analytical applications.

Business Benefit?

No one expects performance gains from running transactional applications on SAP HANA to be as dramatic as those seen by the members of the 10K Club. While some of these companies were running analytical batch jobs that took days before they switched to HANA, the speed at which many transactional systems run does not leave much room for improvement.

It is possible that upgrading a transactional database to HANA might provide some business benefit by shaving off a few seconds from each transaction process and in turn somewhat increasing the productivity for a company, but the main benefit of running transactional applications on HANA is what Vishal Sikka calls a dissolving of layers.

Traditionally business analysis has been done in a special database or data mart optimized for use by analytical applications, separate from the main transactional database of the company. SAP HANA allows a business to run transactional applications and high-performance analytical applications on the same data. You can see this in SAP 360 Customer where the transactional applications of the package, e.g. SAP CRM, run on the same HANA database as do the analytical applications, e.g. the dashboards in SAP Customer Insight.

Running both analytic and transactional applications from the same HANA database allows for fewer layers between action and analysis. Instead of two databases, there is only one. Analysis can be performed on the most up-to-date information rather than the information that has been loaded into the data mart.

SAP CRM is only the first of SAP’s major transactional applications that will be ported to HANA. Development is underway for versions of SAP Business One and SAP ERP to run on HANA and Vishal Sikka announced plans at SAP TechEd Las Vegas in October to move SAP’s recently acquired cloud applications, SuccessFactors and Ariba, over to HANA.

Amazon is SAP’s primary partner for running applications in the public cloud. SAP Business Suite joins several other SAP software packages certified to run on AWS including Afaria, SAP Business-All-in-One, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, and SAP HANA One.

SAP Business Suite customers who want to increase the size of their SAP landscapes without investing in hardware can take advantage of Amazon’s inexpensive services.

New Windows 8 Metro UI

With the advent of Windows 8, SAP has been preparing for that to change. Windows 8, which had its launch party on October 25, 2012, is available on desktops, laptops, tablets, laptop-tablet hybrids, and smartphones. It features a new interface called “Metro” designed to give a consistent user experience across different types of devices, and catering to touch-screen devices with its large tiles.

SAP’s Eric Lai reports that 38% of organizations using iPads and 45% of organizations using Android tablets are considering  migrating to Windows 8 instead. In the Windows 8 era, adoption of mobile devices running Windows is projected to increase rapidly.

Earlier this week in Madrid, SAP made a trio of announcements that should make Windows 8 more practical to use in the enterprise.

Perhaps most importantly, SAP has added support for Windows 8 to the SAP Mobile Platform (previously known as the Sybase Unwired Platform). A common complaint among very early adopters of Windows 8 mobile devices is that there are very few apps. Windows 8 support on the SAP Mobile Platform will make it easier for developers who want to create applications across different mobile operating systems to add Windows 8 to their list, as well as giving developers who want to create apps specifically for Windows 8 tools to connect those apps to enterprise data.

Besides useful business apps, another key ingredient of a viable enterprise mobile solution is security. SAP also announced that SAP Afaria, the mobile device management software developed by Sybase, is now compatible with Windows 8 devices. Afaria is a tool for enterprises to manage security, data, and apps on mobile devices that access sensitive company information.

Third, SAP announced six apps for the Windows 8. Of the six, SAP Manager Insight, SAP Learning Assistant, SAP Interview Assistant, SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet, and SAP GRC Policy Survey had been developed previously for other platforms. SAP WorkDeck is a brand new application that merges features from several other SAP applications developed previously such as approvals and workflows. SAP plans to produce even more apps for Windows 8 devices.

Microsoft Surface Tablet

SAP’s support of Windows 8 devices will be good news for businesses and IT leaders who are more comfortable with Microsoft and prefer to deploy tablets or smartphones with the more rigorous security capabilities of Windows 8 in comparison to Android or iOS devices. SAP’s new support of Windows 8 mobile devices should also benefit companies with a bring-your-own-device policy as Windows 8 devices, such as the Microsoft Surface tablet, are sure to become more plentiful in the office after this gift-giving season.

It is no surprise that SAP is working to enable enterprises to make use of what is projected to be a growing mobile platform. Perhaps what is most striking about SAP’s announcement is that mobile support for Windows 8 came before support for desktop Windows 8 to run the SAP GUI. It would seem that mobile first is more than a buzzword for SAP.