SAP always remind me of industrial scale ironwork; there’s plenty of other enterprise vendors who are huge but there’ s something about the German giant’s marketing typography and the sheer scale of their ‘the entire company runs on it’ image that is like an entire 5 mile long train.
The theme of this week’s Phoenix TechEd was ‘timeless software’, which on a practical level translates to infrastructure that isn’t subject to technology fashion – it will be running 20 years later, fully supported. This is about as fashionable as a conservative business suit and tie from 1988 to the tech world (I’m excluding the ironic fashion tech crowd here) but the cloth is thick and it is guaranteed to be fully functional.
At this moment there’s a retired cobol coder somewhere on the planet working and being paid handsomely for their knowledge. They are likely the only one who knows how some mission critical enterprise software, written decades ago, works.
SAP are thinking fifty years ahead – light years to a tech world breathless in the last 24 hour cycle about lists arriving in Twitter – to ensure the locomotive keeps running. there’s a maintenance price to be paid by the owner, that’s for sure, but it will keep on rolling, and you won’t have a cobol coder type problem in 2059.
They are keeping the lights on for their legacy R/1, R/2, R/3 systems in the rear view mirror.
This battleship gray infrastructure increasingly has to co-exist with modern collaborative technology, with increasing knowledge worker unstructured data capture requirements.
The SAP GUI (Graphical User Interface), the desktop front end to R/3, is not a thing of beauty but is the visual cue that comes up in many people’s minds when they think SAP. For the Web 2.0 era SAP GUI represents old, from a previous computing era. The reality though is that behind countless web applications SAP is the locomotive. Apple’s itunes sells millions of songs a day and processes artist royalties behind that attractive contemporary user interface.
Adobe’s Flex is arguably the enterprise equivalent – a way to create an attractive user experience to hide the mad aunt in the attic SAP user interface.
LiveCycle Mosaic, a new component of Livecycle ES2, is a rich internet application framework for creating customizable workspaces to mash up data. Data is pulled from the various back ends using LiveCycle Data Services and viewed in a browser using Flash Player, or on the user’s downloaded desktop Air runtime application.
Multiple user interface ’tiles’ can display financial portfolio and investment history drawn from multiple sources. These user configurable front ends to ‘timeless software’ are clearly non critical but greatly aid ease of use and aggregation of information while adding some sense of being in the moment stylistically.
Unstructured data – the capture of tacit knowledge – is conceptually top of mind this enterprise business fashion season, but pulling it out of the clouds and realizing practical application is a challenge which is not well understood.
Many people confuse a shiny new Web 2.0 GUI with unstructured data capture, but of course the two are in no way related unless consciously designed to be so. The methods required to provide the utility to organize tacit knowledge are a separate set of tactical goals, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on in upcoming posts.
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