For example, Stuart Lauchalan at Business Cloud9 reported:

With all eyes on Lars Dalgaard’s maiden address as SAP’s new head of all things Cloud at Sapphire on Tuesday, co-CEO Bill McDermott’s let slip that the firm considered canning Business ByDesign.

What Lauchlan doesn’t know and what McDermott didn’t clarify is that those thoughts go back three years to a time when ByDesign was a mess. The Frontline goes further with the evocative and - quite frankly irresponsible headline: SAP finally admits Business ByDesign Defeat declaring:

SuccessFactors clearly stole the limelight at the event - even from SAP’s baby of the moment, in-memory database Hana.

Whomever wrote this hasn’t stayed on for the final day and has little clue what they’re talking about. Even so, it is a measure of the sense of confusion that even the tiniest slip gets the peanut gallery up on its hind legs yelling foul when nothing of the sort has happened. More from the Frontline:

Perhaps even more interesting is that SAP is quickly dumping Business ByDesign set of applications for the newer model of SuccessFactors.

It was the SuccessFactors founder and chief executive Lars Dalgaard who broke the news.

“Business ByDesign was a beautiful vision but it was too big. Everyone does not want to put all their apps out in the cloud in one go. It was intimidating,” he said.

While there may be truth in that statement, the author forgets that SAP reported 1,000 sales of BYD in 2011 from near nothing the year before. The go to market may need work but you cannot ignore the facts.

But that doesn’t take away from the numerous messaging banana skins upon which SAP managed to slip on what should have been a crisp message. Even in private meetings with Jim Snabe, co-CEO SAP, the company admitted that the current cloud message was ‘cloudy.’

During the public Q&A, Dalgaard did himself no favors by saying:

“The pricing of these applications is attractive and their availability is immediate,” and “Brand doesn’t matter,” the latter statement being quickly clarified over Twitter to me by Dalgaard:

@dahowlett of course it matters and SAP has 1of the best - it just doesn’t matter compared to customer execution and excitement - need focus

Even Zach Nelson, CEO NetSuite was able to poke fun at SAP’s expense. From our own Phil Wainewright:

There was a great piece of theatre on stage at SuiteWorld in San Francisco this morning when NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson revealed that the company had signed an important new customer from the computing world: its archrival SAP. The software behemoth’s newly acquired subsidiary, SuccessFactors, remains a NetSuite customer, Nelson revealed: “They just renewed their license for NetSuite. I’m really pleased to welcome SAP as a customer.”

But it is in the product area that I believe SAP has made its biggest mistake. As I (along with colleagues) explained to SAP in the run up to SAPPHIRE Now, carving out financials from the BYD suite is both a defensive and non-differentiating play. Nobody needs a new GL, even if it is running in the cloud. SAP missed the opportunity to explain something that it does best: develop against big problems like industry specific billing or moving forward in industry specific needs such as claims management for insurance. This was something I broached with Jim Snabe, co-CEO SAP. He said that the company’s initial cloud plan to compete along lines of business is very much a step one, suggesting the company will tackle bigger problems at step two.

I’ll buy that but that was not what was said during the keynote or afterwards in a testing Q&A with Dalgaard that over ran by some 10 minutes.

At the post Day 2 parties, person after person approached me asking what the heck is going on. The way I described it was to fire up my phone and show them the device clock - only in Dalgaard’s reality, what might be 9pm is in fact 9am. In other words, the messaging is often diametrically opposed to the words spoken in the public domain. Dalgaard dismisses these issues by saying that he’s not a fan of PR.  Neither am I. But in a world where perception is reality, SAP is about to get a reality check.

What you say matters. If it is wrong then you need to clarify. If it continues to be wrong then the PR trainers are going to be kept fully employed.

For myself, I am making no immediate judgments in the public domain. Today, I have a meeting with Dalgaard during which I hope we will get sense rather than misdirected headline one liners. It might be OK in the maelstrom of Silicon Valley fueled testosterone to make daft statements. It may well be that the disruptive message is one that SAP needs. But confusing and chaotic messaging to the global 2000 that runs its business on SAP is not a story that sits well.

This post will be updated with video once it is uploaded - updated.

See also: Lars Dalgaard swings for the cloud fences | SuccessFactors swaps NetSuite for ByDesign | CEO outlines vision for ‘a better future’ | SAP HANA teams with Opera Solutions for real-time packaged analytics | Sustainability is dead. Long live sustainability

Blytheco will focus on selling, implementing and supporting NetSuite cloud ERP /financials, CRM, Ecommerce and supply chain solutions to a growing new prospect base that is increasingly interested in moving to cloud-based business management solutions from on-premise software. The partnership extends Blytheco’s offerings beyond its traditional focus of on-premise Sage applications. Having built best practices for extending on-premise software to meet industry-specific needs for its clients, Blytheco is planning to leverage that domain knowledge to build SuiteApps using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform to leverage their NetSuite cloud offerings to meet vertical needs.

I would not normally cover this type of announcement but it is important for several reasons.

• Over the last few years, Sage has lurched from one management crisis to another as it sought to disentangle itself from a disastrous adventure into the healthcare market.
• Sage had not been able to offer its resellers much new to sell in the last few years. That changed last year but it hasn’t stopped the steady stream of grumbles among a reseller base that is itself aging.
• Sage’s business model is under threat for which the company does not have a solid response.
• Sage’s attempts to get into the cloud have been a string of repeated failures.

Last week, the company reported what I consider a weak first half. In my analysis on my personal weblog I said:

…despite the talk about organic growth, Sage is achieving more per customer than it was in the past but there are less of them. This is not sustainable in a market where cloud pricing is stable. An 81% renewal rate on support contracts bolsters that theory as customers move to cloud solutions. In fact, an effective loss of business means that year over year from 2010, Sage’s business when measured on volume has shrunk by a third, offset by price hikes in some places and additional subscription revenues coming in at lower prices elsewhere.

One senior investment banker I bumped into asked: “What does (CEO) Berruyer think he’s doing? The current strategy makes no sense especially when there is so little available for real innovation across the whole portfolio.”

All of which plays perfectly to NetSuite that really needs to ramp the reseller network if it is to accelerate growth. During a conversation with Craig West who runs NetSuite’s reseller program, I said that while the Blytheco deal may not of itself be terribly significant, the fact that a died in the wool Sage reseller has taken the plunge out to be a signal to the whole of the Sage reseller market both in the US and elsewhere.

I asked if Blythco will likely drop Sage any time soon. West said: “That’s not likely - they have a lot of customers to continue supporting. But for replacement business, we’re well positioned. Sage 100 and 200 are going nowhere and NetSuite can fit in nicely in those upgrade situations.”

I’m not going to disagree. For the last few years, Sage has had a very difficult time in the UK for example moving it Sage 50 customers up to 100 and beyond. In many deals it often loses out to either a cloud offering or (mostly) Microsoft.

Of course NetSuite hasn’t cracked the SME market just yet. It still has to figure out what to do about Intuit which remains a powerful and important incumbent.

Much of what was discussed with myself and colleagues Jon Reed, John Appleby, Harald Reiter and Vijay Vijayansakar must remain embargoed and to be drip fed over the coming two days. That’s always a pain in the butt yet there are very good reasons why SAP wishes us to keep quiet. That’s OK with me.

The only real public activity was when Bill McDermott stood up and delivered a short address that had all the hallmarks one might normally associate with a political gathering. It was that kind of delivery. Andrew Nusca captures the flavor of the session with what I personally heard as echoes of an Obamaesque past:

“Business has a chance to spur widespread productivity and growth,” far beyond enterprise borders, he said. “We can take the consumer, customer experience to a remarkable next level.”

The surprise for most was that SAP took a radical departure from its past fare of grand visions and cheesy demos. Instead it got real, walking, talking customers to join McDermott on stage. I know this was CMO Jonathan Becher’s brain child as it is a topic we have regularly discussed. The questions from MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski were mostly softballs to even the untrained ear and at times bordered on the inane.

Even so, I give Becher, McDermott and the creative team a LOT of kudos for stepping away from a formula that no longer works and is often as dull as dishwater to business people. Of course a keynote of this kind is always a sales pitch. But if you’ve got to have them then I’d much rather it was customers doing the advertising than the often hollow sound of a professional sales person.

See also:

SAP Sapphire: Innovation, and 3 case studies to ponder and

SAP Sapphire: Facing ‘consumer revolution,’ McDermott tacks toward innovation

Some of my more techie colleagues were decidedly ticked off but you know what? It really is time for this 40 year old engineering company to get its customers talking about what SAP provides in the real world - business solutions that really do run some of the largest companies in the world.

Curiously, all the customers were talking about ERP. They recognize it represents the backbone of what they do. No transactions, no dollars flowing through the business coffers. No amount of socially larded razzamatazz changes that. And no amount of poo-pooing SAP for being old and stodgy can get away from the fact it is still the largest independent business applications vendor in the world by a comfortable margin. Yet curiously you’d be hard pressed to find any of the hundreds of booths flogging ERP.

It was particularly poignant listening to Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts who last fall shared a stage with Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com at the 2011 Dreamforce gig. Then, SAP was shown as the system of record underpinning Burberry’s social business efforts. This time, the sub-text was the power of HANA providing the data crunching capability to make sense of the many data points that Burberry is now collecting and analyzing as part of its social business endeavors.

All those cloud zealots need think again. Co-existence between the on-premises and cloud worlds *is* today’s reality for core business activities involving financial transactions. Anyone who thinks otherwise for the vast majority of business is living in a reality that SAP customers don’t recognize. Does that mean these customers provide a justification for SAP’s sometime odd approach to cloud topics? Absolutely not. As SAP knows only too well, customers place their technology bets where they will get best value. If that means sticking with on-premises then fine. If it means cloud, then that’s fine too.

How that changes in the eyes of SAP senior management will be seen during tomorrow’s keynote with SAP co-CEO Jim Snabe and newly minted board member with responsibility for SAP’s cloud portfolio, Lars Dalgaard. Like my colleagues, I’ll be taking a front row seat for what promises to be a fun packed morning, enhanced by sessions with senior management later in the day.

In the meantime, you can get a brief glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes in the day one wrap shoot we recorded after the show finished.

It is no secret that in acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP wanted to achieve two goals: defend its position in core HR against new threats while buying credibility as a cloud player in an area where it already has competency (i.e. talent management), but which customers eschewed in favor of SuccessFactors and the like. It is also no secret that Lars Dalgaard, SuccessFactors CEO has been given the job of creating SAP’s cloud unit. I’ve already talked about the fundamental challenges facing that effort.

In back channels with SAP HR/HCM experts, I’ve suggested that many have been thinking tactically rather than strategically. I’ve provided an explanation as to what I mean which can be wrapped up in one word ‘differentiation.’ I am troubled by the fact that I am not really hearing anything from anyone who is trying to re-imagine the future of business let alone the future of work. Instead, I see people concentrating too much on issues around integration, overlaps, functional roadmaps and immediate competitive threats. While all those things are worthy of answers for the short term they don’t convey a sense of vision for the long term that reflects emerging realities. Therein lies a much larger problem waiting to deal a potentially lethal blow to SAP/SuccessFactors probable plans.

As I listen to customers from all sizes of company, watch the to and fro among competitors of where they think the threats lay it is easy to assume that in HR/HCM, the war for winning business largely remains between SAP and Oracle with Workday being that annoying upstart that is rapidly becoming a stone in the shoe of everyone. I believe that attention is misplaced.

In Oliver Marks post on HR/HCM ‘walled gardens’ I saw both a poignancy in his commentary and a clear warning for the mega vendors. In this one post Oliver has the bones of answering a question I’ve heard and asked over the years: ‘Where are the real threats to the incumbents? Have we seen them yet?’  The consensus answer is almost always no. While we analyst types might be clever bastards when trying to understand what we already see, we don’t always have the answer for the unseen. Oliver’s post points us in that direction. He says:

Despite the slick exterior image many companies create for themselves, the internal reality is typically a patchwork quilt of technologies layered over the years since the dawn of enterprise computing by a succession of inhabitants to serve specific business needs, both departmentally and across the organization. Many of these technologies are clearly modeled on outdated work concepts and processes, but the entire organization hangs together around tenured ideas in the collective mind of the organization and form. The resulting culture is not unlike the organic growth of the walled city structure above, and you have to feel for the IT professionals responsible for security and keeping it all functioning.

That’s an uncomfortable assessment. What is the answer? Oliver turns to John Wookey, he who has walked the halls of both Oracle and SAP and who is now tasked with building something fresh at Salesforce.com around social and HCM. Referring to a Wookey post at TLNT.com, Oliver quotes:

…if there is any area that desperately needs a social model, it is HCM. People-centric systems should promote connection, communication, and collaboration. That is the core of the social enterprise.

Consider performance management, which is one of the most important processes for every company. Performance management systems are universally hated. Why? Because they create work for every employee in the company, while serving only to meet HR-driven compliance processes. Somewhere along the way in building these systems, we focused the core design on the wrong problem.

Wookey then goes on to outline the broad strokes of his plan for performance management which is the heartland of the SuccessFactors story. In reviewing his assessment and particularly around his talk of user experience:

…They must be engaging, easy, and fun to use.

I could not help but recall the UI’s I’ve seen from both Workday and SuccessFactors. Most people I speak with believe the Workday UI/UX is among the best they’ve seen in a long time. I say it is ‘getting there’ but I’d like to see more. The SuccessFactors UI is pretty and is evolving along lines that will become competitive to Workday over time. But it is the UX that sucks. Repeating Wookey:

Performance management systems are universally hated. Why? Because they create work for every employee in the company, while serving only to meet HR-driven compliance processes.

He believes there is a middle ground where the needs of the workforce can be met in delightful ways while satisfying the needs of compliance and all that other good stuff. Oliver is not so convinced:

Sometimes given HR’s location within the Kowloon Walled City like infrastructure amongst all the company silos, the reality is not immediately apparent that HR’s limitations are often the weakest foundations of the entire crumbling social business edifice, and ripe for overhaul.

And neither am I. In reinventing HR admin, Workday has not had to concern itself about the problems to which Oliver alludes because they are clear about what they’re doing: re-engineering a function everyone hates but in a way that satisfies both users and HR admin. They give HR what they need and are comfortable with while making darned sure users want to use the system via a better experience. However - and this is where it gets interesting - they are solid partners with Salesforce.com.

While all the talk around HR focuses upon the Workday threat, I believe the mega vendors are missing the point. What once seemed strange to me - the hiring of John Wookey for an area way outside Salesforce.com’s competency - suddenly comes into sharp focus. Here’s why.

Wherever I go, whomever I meet on the customer front, it is common for me to hear about some part of the business that is using Salesforce.com.

It doesn’t matter whether the company is a 10 person business or a well known brand, I can almost guarantee I will hear the same story. Salesforce is everywhere. Now parse that against the job Wookey is tasked to achieve and you can quickly see how the threats which today remain unseen are obvious and around the corner. It is what Wookey does with those huge Salesforce.com resources that will tell if the company really does have the talent to re-imagine not re-engineer, HR/HCM along the fault lines that Oliver sees. Since Salesforce and Workday are well aligned, there is no reason why that partnership should not flourish and become the 1+1=3 powerhouse that topples the incumbents over time.

Of course SAP and Oracle will snipe away saying that Wookey never completed a project at either place and so the chances of success are close to zero. They will continue to say that CRM is tactical and can be dismissed because only they have what it takes to handle the strategic stuff. I am not of that school. I saw some of the challenges Wookey faced. I feel he led a fantastic effort to get SAP Sales OnDemand close to complete. Salesforce.com is a different animal. Salesforce.com has re-imagined collaboration at the heart of its social business party piece.

Oliver believes that:

The poor economy in most parts of the planet masks a reality that the war for talent has never been more competitive internationally. That talent is typically more agile and connected than ever before, and is very different to back offices used to grappling with digitally supercharged flows of documents and filing cabinets. Old paradigms mapped to modern technologies tend to create information log jams, which are one of the differentiators for quality -or otherwise - of business performance.

Good news for SuccessFactors? Not so fast. He goes on:

Unlike the dismantling of the Kowloon Walled City, there will be no big bang cultural rip and replace across entire businesses. What is happening at an increasing velocity is evolutionary change, and the human resources executive function needs to stay ahead of this wave to become the nucleus - or risk being subsumed into a new wave of chaotic fragmentation across multiple silos.

If Oliver’s experiential based thinking makes sense to you then that should be a source of relief for SAP/SuccessFactors. I don’t think it plays out that way.

Given what we know about Salesforce.com’s relentless and focused approach to marketing, it can only be a matter of time before Wookey walks into Marc Benioff’s office with the first fruits of his labors tied to the news that he can hit the marketing go button. That may happen as soon as Dreamforce.

In the meantime we have to wait a few more days to see which direction SAP/SuccessFactors are taking. If it doesn’t represent a firm recognition of the topics outlined above then it will be a #fail on vision. Some colleagues say that SAP is always long on vision and short on delivery. I think this is one occasion where they absolutely should be bold on vision if they are to galvanise customers into believing that the SAP/SuccessFactors combination is not just an opportunity to flog more stuff but address the value based problems the companies I speak with are wrestling. And all without disruption. It will be a neat trick if they can articulate that let alone pull it off.

SAP has been casting its advisory net pretty wide in recent months. It has organised a series of calls and meetings with a variety of influencers on many topics. Emails from some senior management have been flying around and I recently participated in a small confidential event on SAPPHIRE related material. However, I am not privy to specific announcements and would expect that SAP will be writing and re-writing keynote scripts right up to the last minute. Therefore what follows is less of a prediction and more an advance commentary.

My sometimes JD-OD show guest Vijay Vijayasankar, IBM associate partner has already penned a detailed view of what he wants to see. He opens with:

Right off the bat – I am not a fan of this “5 market” strategy, given the “kitchen sink” approach. SAP just comes off as trying hard to be everything to everybody, and does not give the impression of having a value proposition that differentiates them. SAP has clear leadership in Apps and Analytics, and has a fair shot at databases. Cloud and Mobility are not in that league yet. Consequently, I am just looking for SAP to clarify its plans for mobility, cloud and database.

I am in agreement with Vijay’s broad strokes but take a different perspective. As supplier to 24 industry segments I am constantly amazed at how little SAP knows about its target markets and the things they have been doing or the things they want to do.

Database

Vijay goes on to get into some of the detail with questions around his desired topics. To be honest I am less interested in HANA than others. I’m kinda HANA’d out. I’m only really interested in four things:

Rock solid customer stories that have moved beyond the proof of concept stage. RIght now, the SAP charm offensive on its own media properties points to great brand names like Kraft Foods and John Deere but they read suspiciously like futures. I am scheduled to film at least one HANA customer, I’d like to find more.

Customer enablement. HANA’s speed is well known but what is less well understood is how this opens up opportunities for companies to transform operations. My sense is that some customers are overwhelmed with the potential for new business case scenarios. Others are baffled by the current focus on Business Warehouse on HANA as it isn’t a short term play. Both SAP and its partners need to send in SWAT teams capable of helping customers make sense of the smorgasbord of opportunity, finding ways of delivering breakthrough value in the current year, not in 2013/14. Make the CIO a hero in the process and customers will ‘get it.’ Send that message in a non-sales manner and SAP is good to go. That leads on to my next point.

What’s the HANA apps story? Applications across a broad spectrum of needs will be the jewels for SAP. Right now, customers cannot see enough POC apps to ‘get’ HANA as a value differentiator. I am scheduled to meet with Deloitte’s Harald Reiter (another JD-OD regular) to go through their HANA booth. I’ll do the same with IBM and anyone else that’s got a decent story. I am concerned however that SAP will not have come up with a blockbuster app of the kind I discussed with Vijay recently. It desperately needs a public portfolio of stories that talk to unique, industry specific applications that cannot be built except with HANA. That’s how it differentiates and makes a credible case for HANA as both a database and applications platform. Talk to those issues and customers will prick up their ears.

What does the roadmap look like? The roadmap for HANA has changed drastically over the last couple of years. What started out as an idea for boosting analytics performance is rapidly morphing into something very different. We are told that co-founder Hasso Plattner will share a keynote with Vishal Sikka, executive board member and the driving force behind HANA. If I don’t hear the how and the why of what HANA will be about in the next couple of years then SAP will have missed an opportunity to deliver a crisp, clear and unequivocally differentiated message to the whole of the market. So far, the best differentiation I’ve read that could be put in front of any CXO comes from David Dobrin. If SAP addresses this topic in this way then they will have done a great communications job for both customers and developers.

Cloud

Vijay’s post closes in on many of the detailed topic areas I’d like to check off as having credible answers. The most difficult will be around the organisation and style of leadership.

Will SAP’s cloud unit be ring fenced? When Doug Merritt was leading the cloud charge several years ago, we discussed ring fencing in a LOT of depth. In the end, the SAP board was not prepared to go that route and Merritt moved on. SAP’s culture and style of leadership does not sit easily with that of SuccessFactors. The current phrase du jour is ‘Culture Eats Strategy.’ There is another side to that for SAP: Culture Eats Culture. The SAP works council in Germany is already complaining about what it sees as a shift in the power center of the company over to the US. As a company, SAP has been here before. Will it learn the lessons of the past and give Lars Dalgaard’s team the elbow room they need to build a coherent cloud strategy? That can only come from ring fencing.

How will the cloud unit be organised? I watched Dalgaard stand up in front of a German SAP developer only event and declare that everyone is in sales. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. That might work inside the SuccessFactors teams and has some merit as a guiding principle in the new world of on-demand applications. But that’s like saying SAP developers are overhead. The last time I heard someone say something similar was at PeopleSoft when Craig Conway came on board. He was more blunt declaring that if employees were not in sales then they were overhead. It took little more than a year for much of PeopleSoft’s best talent to drift away. Dalgaard will need to work very carefully on this point if he is to build a powerhouse, sustainable cloud unit. It’s both an organizational and change management problem where Dalgaard needs to be patient. With that in mind, I’d like to hear some detail around this specific topic because without something coherent here, there is no story for developers in the ecosystem. In turn, that means there won’t be any product worth talking about.

Mobile

Vijay’s post on mobile asks many of the questions I have posed at various times in the past. Right now, progress is glacial, the story is confusing. Developers don’t have any easy on ramp to SAP technology components i.e. Sybase Unwired Platform, Gateway and Afaria to say nothing of back end requirements for Netweaver and the Business Suite.

Rejigging as a work in progress? The consensus among developers I speak with is that SAP has shot itself in the foot, missing opportunities that are obvious to everyone except SAP. A good part of this centers around the fact SAP has a cultural problem with licensing topics. RIM had the same issue several years ago. Nothing moved unless it had been given the legal work over. Net-net it took years to get things done. Look at the picture today? A severe market kicking has woken RIM up to the reality that it desperately needs mobile developers and guess what? All those developer enablement barriers are collapsing. In a swingeing commentary on SAP mobile, John Moy of Australia Post and John Appleby of Bluefin Solutions tore into SAP’s mobile strategy. (check at 41:48)  In a conversation I had with SAP I said that the points come down to one word: ‘friction.’ Get rid of the friction throughout the delivery of mobile development resource, enablement and applications marketing and SAP will be in good shape. This is not a trivial set of tasks. I am told there will be important announcements but the real prize is getting this done by SAP TechED, later in the year.

What’s with the happy talk? When I read Eric Lai’s piece on SAP’s positioning according to Gartner I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end I shook my head and wondered what brand of dope everyone is on. Gartner’s positioning and the explanations I read don’t tally with what I am seeing in the market or for that matter what I see in the SAP store for mobile. Its position as leader per Gartner while Apple is placed somewhere in the back is plain nonsense. The levels of innovation Apple has delivered in its business model, supply chain, developer enablement and consumption models are the envy of everyone in the market. Gartner’s omission of Workday doesn’t make sense. Neither does its lowly positioning of Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Of course for enterprise things are a little bit different to the consumer world. I am sure Vinnie Mirchandani will squirm at the thought his old alma mater could make such strange MQ decisions. And then for SAP to crow over it without looking around to see if it makes sense shows a lack of market understanding. In fairness to SAP, if the research is methodologically faulty then they cannot be blamed. But to push this into the market and expect CIOs to simply suck it up is bordering on the delusional given what customers are asking for and where they are placing their bets. SAP needs to carefully think about how it bridges the gap between what it is reporting around Gartner’s view and what many voices have said on this topic inside the SAP ecosystem. Messaging at SAPPHIRE on this topic needs to be laser focused. Happy talk doesn’t cut it in a market where SAP is at risk of squandering some great assets.

Finally

The topics and approaches I am proposing in my question areas may seem a little ‘inside baseball’ but they contain common themes. Much of this conference is going to be about the extent to which SAP is pivoting around the new rules of business, design, developers, customer needs and cultural change. Chewing off SuccessFactors has become a driver for this but both the database and mobile areas need important work.

My final wish is to see customers on stage answering questions that are relevant to customers. Seeing customers on canned video or answering fluffy questions in a live setting doesn’t do it for me. SAP knows my thoughts on this topic and I am assured that part of the program is evolving. We’ll see how much progress they have made along with the extent to which CMO Jonathan Becher can bring alive the promise that SAP is about customer users talking to customer user issues. That would be a major step forward.

Above everything though I am looking for a small handful of juicy bones that not only talk to the vision  but with feet rooted in the real world delivered in crisp terms. In other words I want to be surprised.

Doug Henschen had a fun piece on Information Week about the latest round in the war of words bubbling up over SAP HANA v Oracle Exalytics. I’m not going to dive into the technical ‘he said/she said’ stuff because a) I don’t claim to fully understand it and b) it’s irrelevant for the purposes of my argument.

Here’s what I think is going on.

When SAP trumpeted the claim that it would be the number two database player by 2015, it forgot to do some fundamental math. At least according to my reckoning. In a conversation with Steve Lucas, SAP database executive, we batted numbers back and forth. While we didn’t exactly agree, he didn’t exactly disagree with what I was saying. At the time I wrote:

Right now and depending on whose numbers you want to read, SAP would have to grow its overall HANA and Sybase database business something around six to seven times from the existing numbers over the next few years. That assumes a static market whereas the indications are that database demand will grow rapidly. SAP can benefit from that growth organically but then so will everyone else. In the meantime, it has major obstacles to overcome.

SAP makes much of the fact that HANA accounted for  €160 million (or US $210 million) in net new sales last year but then I see that Oracle grew its DB licenses by $141 million in the last reported quarter. (p8 - PDF download) You can be certain that Oracle will make Q3 sales seem paltry when it closes out the fiscal year next month. By any measure, SAP has a mountain to climb when compared to the number one database company. Add in the fact Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle will relish in ribbing SAP for sipping its own brand of milkshake and you have a heady mix of FUD, counter-FUD and plain silliness ahead.

You can read this anyway you wish but two things should be obvious:

1. Making such an outrageous claim without explaining the ‘how’ of getting from A to B was a PR gift to a company like Oracle.
2. Oracle’s push back looks like SAP just stuck a big fat target on its back and said: ‘Kick Me!’ And just as surely, that’s what Oracle has done according to Henschen.

Now, we have SAP calling foul on Oracle’s Thomas Kurian for his bending of the facts in providing an equally mind boggling cost comparison. (see image at top of post.)

I am reasonably close to some aspects of HANA and this is what I know.

Hardware costs are plummeting and technology that goes into HANA boxes is progressing at one heck of a lick. The other week, I saw a box one colleague calls ‘FrankenHANA’ which not only sounds like a 747 in take off mode but which is way faster than anything else seen to date at the specification. It also comes in at a price point that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. I’m not allowed to say what that price is because the machine is still under final tweaking. Let’s just say that if what I’m told is correct then Kurian is way out of touch on current available hardware pricing. Orders of magnitude out of touch.

That doesn’t matter to Oracle because for as long as it is shipping its engineered systems i.e. Exalytics, the Enterprise X-box plus services only it can realistically deliver, the company is coining it all the way to the bank. That’s the sort of music Oracle and its Wall Street masters like to hear. Add in the fact Oracle has control over all the moving parts and you start to see some interesting price negotiations looming if price becomes a competitive issue.

Since the initial trumpeting of the no. 2 slot assertion, SAP has back peddled, saying that it wants to be the fastest growing database company. That’s more credible given it is coming off a tiny installed base but Oracle won’t let SAP off that lightly as is evident from the latest exchanges. Or if it does, then it will be dripping with the kind of sarcasm only Oracle is able to deliver and still leave some commenters giggling.

However, and this is where it gets really interesting, HANA is not about the database at all. The database merely serves as one part of a much more sophisticated model that SAP is developing. It centres around the new kinds of application that would not be possible without HANA. HANA is therefore much more than a technical database, it is an entire stack designed to do two (basic) things:

1. Chop out layers of complexity in enterprise application landscapes
2. Serve as the foundation for any number of applications that developers can dream up.

When viewed in this way, SAP represents a far more potent threat to both Oracle and IBM than when seen only through the eyes of the database argument, albeit the database element must be of genuine concern to its competitors.

While SAP today talks up analytics, this itself is only a temporary staging post, a jumping off point if you like for the creation of new styles of application. Henschel’s article talks about a clutch of examples but with one huge caveat (my emphasis added):

SAP recently offered a handful of customer examples, including Centrica (mentioned above), Aqualectra (another utility), Medidata (a SaaS-based service firm that helps big pharmaceutical companies run clinical trials), and an unnamed Japanese retailer. But the summary stories were loaded with platitudes like, “Hana helps us bring our customers new efficiencies that they never even dreamed of.” Okay, like what? If I’m spending big bucks, I want rich details about tangible competitive advantage.

SAP has a genuine problem (or three) here. On the one hand customers can see the advantages of speed but then what? In my discussions with Camelot, the UK’s lottery operator, their challenge is that the power HANA puts into their hands creates a situation where business analysts may be overwhelmed with potential scenarios. They need coaching in figuring out which use cases provide the biggest bang for the buck. They will not be alone.

SAP has made a few mistakes in its go to market with HANA that mean they don’t have the hundreds of use case examples that would cement the argument in its favor.

During the early part of the first year of going into general availability SIs and developers had a difficult time getting adequate resources with which to build their own HANA applications, documentation and answers to bug queries. SAP’s partners justifiably complain that they don’t yet see an SDK against which they can build, so are limited in what they can offer customers.

Similarly, SAP has effectively been subsidising HANA sales through discounted consultancy that only it can deliver, dealing another blow to the partner ecosystem.

Keeping partners at bay in the early stages makes sense when you believe that you can max out the revenues for a new product. The flipside is that the application demand created by HANA quickly becomes such that SAP alone cannot develop all the solutions the market wants. I can only find 20 published use cases. It is hardly surprising then that Vinnie Mirchandani chides SAP:

Last week in  a call with SAP I told them that years after talking about HANA I would have expected it to have at least 20,000 customers with some level of adoption.

SAP needs the IBMs, Accentures, Deloittes, CapGeminis along with a host of mid-range SIs to bulk up on the number of available market solutions that in turn drives market adoption. It needs the developer stories to supplement its own efforts.

Despite these concerns, I recently had a glimpse of some promising work undertaken by IBM that talks directly to a working capital finance use case I term as ’self evident.’ (see video above.) By that I mean that what it does is obvious to a finance person as is the value that could be derived. I can see plenty of revenue for SAP/IBM tied to huge value derived from better cash management.

To its credit, SAP knows the problems and is trying to figure out how best to balance its own revenue needs against those of the broader SAP customer community. The $155 million fund for third party HANA apps is a good start. Hopefully, there will be more good news at the upcoming SAPPHIRE in a couple of week’s time. My fear is that they will once again fall into the trap of announcing things that are either too early in the development cycle or are too difficult for customers to understand.

There is another problem that should not be under-estimated. The SAP developer ecosystem is not used to what are emerging as the ‘new rules’ of developer led sales. The days when you could rely on a seemingly endless stream of large scale projects and custom development are largely over.

HANA may yet provide fresh customising opportunities but the emphasis is on solutions that have broader appeal. That doesn’t obviate the need for customisations in many current landscapes but it does create a different type of market. It is one where the developers not only have to be attuned to customer problem solving but have to actively market what they build to many more customers than in the past. From what I have seen, very few SAP developer shops understand this dynamic.

In the meantime and as I have said before, Oracle will continue to crank out webinars, ‘fact sheets,’ the odd talking head lathered with its own brand of competitive public marketing in an attempt to derail SAP. Or as one wag said to me: ‘Oracle arguing pretty much you need spark plugs in an electric vehicle.’ For its own part, SAP would be better off ignoring Oracle, sticking to what it does best and stop feeding the media with more fodder with which to titillate the chattering classes. It can never win those arguments and in any event, they represent the wrong battle ground.

Disclosure: SAP is funding a video project I am undertaking in partnership with Jon Reed to surface interesting developer projects including HANA solutions.

Update: The SAP HANA Effect by Vishal Sikka provides a technical response to Oracle claims.

A week has passed since the opening keynotes at Inforum 2012. That’s given me time to reflect on what happened, what we saw and digest what the company’s cloud and mobile strategies mean for the market going forward.

In my first Inforum post I said:

So what we have is a company that has rolled up many well known names like GEAC, SmartStream, Lawson and others but is now leveraging that entire portfolio via ION to both extend the applications and provide good reasons for its customers to remain wedded to ERP - regardless of vintage - while offering access to new technologies that deliver the kinds of value we normally associate with pure play cloud, mobile and social apps vendors.

Looking back, it is clear that Infor is leading its customers to where they want to be rather than forcing them into technology shifts. Even so, I was surprised to learn that taking all cloud enabled solutions into account, the company has 1,200 customers with cloud solutions accounting for 2.4 million users. That’s significant.

In the above video recorded analysis, colleague Frank Scavo points out that this is a pragmatic approach for existing customers. Given Infor has barely scratched the surface of introducing customers to cloud solutions, they have a lot of runway in front of them. Their relative success and past technology investments (as opposed to applications) bodes well for the future.

We were both interested to hear more about the Inforce partnership with Salesforce.com. This was first announced at Dreamforce 2011. At the time It seemed odd that Infor would look to Salesforce.com as a development partner but as Frank points out: SAP and Oracle weren’t available for that kind of relationship, leaving Infor as the natural opportunity.

image courtesy of Frank Scavo

While the demonstrations of Inforce Everywhere running on iPad were impressive I was concerned that Infor may be underestimating the work that lies in front of them to get bi-directional feeds between Salesforce.com and Infor systems. Right now, Inforce Everywhere is little more than a straight integration between Salesforce and Infor ERP. Even that is limited to a few applications in the overall portfolio.

For example, there was no clear answer about what happens when Infor finds customers at the upper end of its demographic that might have multiple instances of Salesforce.com (and therefore Chatter.) Similarly, while the accounting data displayed on iPad was interesting, I saw little sign of analytics or the more traditional row and column reports that sales people will need in the field. I am aware that there are significant technical hurdles to overcome in this area in Salesforce’s Force.com platform. It will be interesting to see how Infor tackles those issues.

Despite those caveats, I am net positive about the partnership. In the past, Salesforce.com has proven that it can play ‘nicely’ with its partners even though there are times when Salesforce.com cannot keep up with the application test review demands of its Force.com partners. That matters in a hyper competitive, high speed environment. In an earlier review of the partnership, Frank said:

Although there are several obstacles to success, I see great value in this partnership. Infor’s customers now have an interesting and compelling way forward for CRM and for cloud computing generally, while Salesforce.com has a great opportunity to do an end-run around SAP and Oracle to gain mind-share with a large body of installed ERP customers.

It is hard to disagree given what we’ve seen to date.

On the mobile front, Infor has done significant work in bringing Motion to market with a few contextual but lightweight applications. In conversation with Dematic, (see video below)

it is clear that customers see mobile as the next wave they have to manage. So far, the very few customers who are working with Infor mobile technology are happy.  They see a viable platform that not only manages the mobile environment but provides the bones for what they will need in new development.

I was pleased to hear executives talking openly about the creation of an application store and encouraging developers to get involved. Infor says it wants to make developer onboarding as frictionless as possible. Given what we have seen elsewhere, that in itself will be a significant achievement. Much of what Infor does is based upon Microsoft technologies. That means they should have little difficulty in attracting talent familiar with Microsoft but wishing to learn about mobile development.

Where the company was a tad vague was in its commitment to specific platforms. iPad/iPhone are obvious candidates but I didn’t hear enough around HTML5 for example. Neither did I hear specifics on Android or Windows Mobile.

Six takeaways and questions:

1. Pragmatism with innovation that customers can consume seem to be the two watchwords that Infor is using to maintain its development focus.
2. There is no fundamental difference in the challenges that Infor customers have to overcome and larger customers more likely to approach an SAP or Oracle. Today’s Infor portfolio matches many of those needs but there is a lot of work to be done in cloud/mobile before Infor can safely claim it is meeting a significant proportion of customer need. An ongoing diet of case studies will help that cause.
3. Infor will eventually transition all applications to cloud but is prepared to wait while customers become accustomed to that environment.
4. The focus on vertical market applications will present challenges to Infor development. How will it productise profitably both horizontally and vertically while maintaining a solid revenue stream beyond maintenance of existing solutions?
5. How quickly can Infor establish a significant portfolio of applications that will make an appstore credible in the market?
6. Infor has the luxury of working through its challenges outside the glare of public scrutiny of its financial performance. Even so, investors have confidence in the management team. This is an important market differentiating position.

In August 2007 I wrote:

Google is the new evil empire – but now I really am beginning to believe it. I know that user agreements are typically ignored by most users, but anyone in the corporate world who ignores this risks seeing their IP in a Google marketing campaign, or worse.

He’s [Josh Greenbaum] right. As I’ve said before, Google’s terms of service need updating. Like Josh, I’m not a practising lawyer though I spent enough time arguing tax cases to know a mess when I see it.

It took Google a full four plus years to come close to remedying the situation through what are now its unified TOS. But even they are not to everyone’s taste. Now we have G-Drive, Google’s Dropbox clone and with it? The same blanket TOS that are being applied to all Google Apps.

Our own Ed Bott weighs in extensively on the topic here and here. Ed’s not a lawyer, neither am I but it doesn’t prevent us from being annoyed at things we think invade our privacy or which mess with what we believe to be our inalienable rights.

Nilay Patel has a crack at the topic - he is legally trained but not a practicing IP/copyright lawyer. He concludes:

Contracts are meaningful and important, but even the most noble promises can easily be broken. It’s actions and history that have consequences, and companies that deal with user data on the web need to start building a history of squeaky-clean behavior before any of us can feel totally comfortable living in the cloud.

I get that. But what does ’squeaky-clean’ mean? I have no idea because he doesn’t explain other than to say:

What’s most important is how much trust you’re willing to give companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Dropbox as more and more of your data moves to the cloud.

I get that as well. But that’s almost the last thing on my agenda. When assessing any service the FIRST thing I want to know is whether it is fit for purpose. I’m a long time Dropbox user and I may yet try out G-Drive. But I know that service has plenty of practical wrinkles that would prevent me from recommending it as a service in mixed PC/Mac environments. I suspect the same will be true for G-Drive but for different reasons.

Martijn Linssen attempts to provide answers, implying that functionality comes first but that Google might try to preface its TOS with some plain English. That wont work because whatever language is used in a contract is a part of the contract and therefore open to the same degree of interpretation as any other part. That’s the problem with contracts as anyone who has been involved in a dispute knows.

How many time have you said: ‘But I didn’t mean that’ or ‘But I didn’t know it might mean that?’ It’s happened to me on many an occasion. It is one reason why negotiating contracts is such a pain in the ass.

Martijn makes a point that’s hard to disagree and upon which I believe we should be concentrating our attention:

Listen, Google: you got to change. Abandon the path of copying what the competition invented earlier, mixing that with all you have, and presenting that on a silver plate as a finished product that is frozen stiff.

Study the product-cycle, watch some striptease vids, learn how to lure and bait, skim the market layer by layer, piece by piece, and control yourself - don’t give it all away mere seconds after you’ve made an entrance.

You’re in the fast-fashion business whereas you should be in the slow-fashion one, dear Google. You have the money, the power and the glory to walk the catwalk - and keep or push every one else out. But when was the last time you did that?

Google has a long history of throwing things over the fence, seeing what sticks and then retiring that which doesn’t take. It’s a classic, new age ‘fail fast’ outfit. G-Drive may yet be another. We’ll see, though the indications from Android Market…err…Google Play are that at least 10 million people at least want to try it out. That’s a lot of market share in one day.

So please, if you like what Google delivers but do not like their TOS, toss a coin and either go elsewhere or put up and shut up until the people that Google DOES listen to - the regulators - get their claws into the company. It will happen soon enough.

By all means raise the issues but can we please have a little less hysteria and emotional appeals to fairness and more sober reflection of what we’re actually doing here? As I said on Twitter, we’re at the very early stages of seeing and using cloud storage. It will be a large industry. If anyone thinks they’ve got the lock on how contracts should be phrased then I would suggest they’re living in La-La land. As Patel points out, the TOS all attempt to do what the vendor wants but I don’t believe we have a full understanding of how to translate our needs into terms that can yet be parsed against the vendors’ needs. That’s always a game of give and take to which the vendors will (eventually) pay attention.

If it is our data and we choose to use services like G-Drive, Dropbox et al then it is our responsibility to assess whether the terms are those with which we can live. No lawyer can help us except to point out the addressable risks. Assuming they themselves understand and from what little I know, that knowledge is thin on the ground. It is a reflection of the state of the art.

Instead, I suggest that people considering this style of service FIRST go through the process of assessing their storage needs, ask themselves about the advantages they (might) get form cloud services, assess current, mid and long term requirements and THEN look at the TOS. Bleating about it after the event doesn’t cut any ice. At least not with me.

Ever since Charles Phillips tipped up as CEO at Infor in 2010, the question on many colleagues minds has been: what next? This is the company that spent 2002-7 rolling up the tier two players Oracle was not interested in acquiring. In the process Infor lost top line revenue momentum, bumbled along servicing a debt mountain but did ‘ok.’ This week, we started to see the first fruits of Phillips’ labors as he not only gave credit to his new management team for upping revenues and profit but also talked at length about the fact Infor is now building its own applications and a new future.

Prior to the main sessions, I bumped into Paul Hamerman, analyst at Forrester saying of the forthcoming conference: ‘This should be interesting’ to which he replied: ‘Yeah, what next for a $2.8 billion revenue company that hasn’t developed a product of any note.’ Phillips put that argument to bed very quickly, talking about the outcome of Infor’s ION development effort.

ION can best be described as light weight middleware that helps integrate systems at the data level via an XML transport. While heavyweight vendors might scoff at the idea, customers I spoke with were more than happy. “It took us one week to implement,” said Dale Brittan, CIO Brewster Dairy Inc, the US’s largest manufacturer of Swiss cheese. Asked for more detail, Brittan said that one week was the amount of time it took the company to figure out how data needed to be organised in order to become capable of integration. Other analysts reported hearing similar customer stories. The overall message was loud and clear - Infor provides what it terms ‘unbreakable’ integrations and upgrades via ION.

Elsewhere, customers talked about the value being delivered from Inforce Everywhere. From Infor’s blurbs:

“Inforce Everywhere taps into the social, mobile and open capabilities of Force.com and Chatter to deliver unmatched collaboration and communication across the enterprise.”

Julia Klein, CEO CH Briggs, a distribution specialist in the construction industry said their Inforce implementation took eight weeks. “We are not so interested in the social media part of things. We saw the opportunity to leverage the many years of ERP data we hold to give us speed in understanding what’s going on in the business. That makes a real difference because managers are seeing trends in real time. In the past we could get to the data but it took time, we had to arrange meetings and so on. Now we get actionable at the point when it’s needed.”

Again, that story is repeated.

So what we have is a company that has rolled up many well known names like GEAC, SmartStream, Lawson and others but is now leveraging that entire portfolio via ION to both extend the applications and provide good reasons for its customers to remain wedded to ERP - regardless of vintage - while offering access to new technologies that deliver the kinds of value we normally associate with pure play cloud, mobile and social apps vendors. It was particularly interesting to hear the company has made investments in design specialists who are improving the user experience while maintaining the integrity of the information available to users.

This will be a horror show to technology purists but it demonstrates an attention to the pragmatic mid tier business that wants the new but doesn’t want the disruption of rip and replace.

However, it is the future that interests me and as executives talked up their mobile story - which is still in its infancy - and the ability to deploy applications through a hybrid cloud approach, I was left wondering where Infor will find the hordes of developers it needs to truly take this company forward at sustainable double digit growth. It was a question I put to Phillips and which he kind of side stepped.

While he acknowledged that the applications the company needs for tomorrow need building by a different class of SI, I didn’t hear a commitment to creating an infrastructure that might compare with Salesforce.com’s platform play. That was disappointing. On the mobile front, while I heard plenty of encouraging noises about new applications, it is not clear to me how Infor provides an attractive package that entices iOS developers, for example. In fairness, Infor itself recognises that the speed at which mobile is moving makes bet placing for this category very difficult. I get that.

Phillips has the opportunity to do something genuinely fresh in the market. His team has delivered on what was promised to investors, has restructured company finances to allow for more acquisitions and successfully onboarded an executive teams that delivers. That buys a lot of flexibility behind the closed doors of a private company.

With a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face, Phillips said: “I really want to build business networks.” The hint one can draw is that more acquisitions are on the way but they will be different to those of the past. Apart from mainstream product tuck ins, now is the time when Infor puts its foot on the gas of developing deep functionality for the verticals it serves while growing the addressable market. Ray Wang, CEO Constellation Research concluded: “This is the strategy Charles wanted to follow at Oracle - consolidate and then build out.” [Disclosure: I am a board advisor to Constellation.]

Not only does it make a great deal of sense as a move that protects the customer base, it is the first time I have heard an articulated vertical market strategy which sounds credible.

It is therefore hardly surprising that in the executive Q&A that a representative from Golden Gate, Infor’s principal investor said that Infor’s future: “Probably lies in an IPO,” while careful to stress the long term nature of investors’ commitment to the company.

Of course nothing is that simple and many questions remain about how Infor gets to where it says it wants to be. One customer for example expressed concern about the way Infor is changing its pricing model to one that is processor based: “That stinks of Oracle,” this CIO said.

But in the end I was impressed with Phillips relaxed approach, his emphasis on meaningful transparency and a clarity of vision that I have not seen with this company for many a year. While other vendors may stress the new, Infor is taking a more subtle approach. It is one that keeps customers onside with what they already have, while promising them a viable future. That’s a good story all the way around. It is certainly one to watch.

Schedule 70 deals are effectively blanket purchase orders that allow federal agencies to buy pretty much anything they need from approved companies supplying IT services. The loss of this contract goes further than simply putting a block on future orders. According to Informatinon Week:

Mary Davie, assistant commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service’s Office of Information Technology Services, said in a statement only that the Oracle contract “was not in the best interest of the government.”

… Due to the cancellation, agencies won’t be able to exercise options on existing task orders or place new orders after May 17, and blanket purchase agreements for Oracle services made under Schedule 70 will be terminated.

Quite what this means in practice remains to be seen. It would be highly unusual for ongoing software solution implementations to be ripped yet that seems to be at least one implication from what the government is (or is rather not) saying.

In recent times, the Feds have been more disposed to favorably considering open source alternatives to proprietary software although this would likely have little impact on business applications - at least in the short term.

Neither party is commenting beyond what has already been said but it will almost certainly mean Oracle will need to go back to the negotiating table for unfulfilled contracts. In the meantime, government buyers can be sure that Oracle sales people will be all over them to maximise spend in the run up to Oracle’s year end, which falls 31st May. The Feds can also be sure that Oracle will send in its audit crews, keen to wring out the most they possibly can from whatever is left on the table.

Of course this will not prevent Oracle from collecting maintenance fees on those contracts where the government continues to use Oracle hardware and software. Even so, losing such a lucrative contract is bound to cause ripples among customers.

I have long held the view that Oracle is shaping up for a fall as it continues to both squeeze and alienate its customers through predatory pricing and sales tactics. While the loss of $388 million will hardly be noticed in a business turning over north of $37 billion, the repercussions may be felt more widely. Not that Oracle will worry any time soon.

In March, it was reported that Oracle has effectively pulled a Schedule 70 in the UK, persuading UK government that it would make savings through centralised purchasing, bulk buying, a single discount (read government only price list) and shared services.

However, the UK’s National Audit Office has been skeptical of these big deals. The Register recently reported that:

The NAO published a report highlighting that a £47m upgrade investment was required from the government to cover the costs of updating Oracle’s ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems before November 2013 at three shared service centres.

At present, the Cabinet Office spends around £1.5bn a year on finance, procurement, HR and payroll systems.

The NAO noted in its report that Maude’s department would be required to cough up around £50m of transition costs and between £26m and £77m on redeployment, offset by one-off savings of £32m by shunning the Oracle upgrade costs.

One has to wonder the extent to which UK government is watching what’s going on in the US and asking itself whether it really has done the best deal it can for citizens. In the US, at least for time being, the answer seems an unequivocal ‘no.’

Elsewhere, in a private briefing earlier this week, Rimini Street said that it continues to win large deals for Oracle customers looking to slash their maintenance costs. This follows a blow out Q1 and bullish forecast for the year. Rimini Street now claims a sales backlog of $450 million.