UPDATED 13:21 EDT / MAY 18 2016

NEWS

Analysts advise SAP to be cautious in its expansion | #SAPPHIRENOW

At the end of the first day at the SAP Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida, the initial round of presentations and interviews were due for examination to highlight the most notable facets and draw out some of the underexamined aspects.

John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down to discuss and analyze the turnout at the conference, with special excitement surrounding having had the opportunity to talk with sports star Reggie Jackson.

Growing the right assets

Summing up the main focus of the first day as he saw it, Furrier said, “Integration around a core in the cloud, on-prem, is the key thought that I’m seeing.”

Burris agreed, and added, “Certainly, what we heard today a lot more is, number one, that SAP does not think it’s going to go it alone; that partners are as important as they ever have been and are likely to be even more important.”

Burris also noted that SAP was showing significant growth but would do well to be cautious in its expansion. “SAP is one of the few tech companies, IBM being another one, that has a track record of acquisitions success. And when you start getting successful, there’s always a tendency to say, ‘Oh, maybe we can do it all ourselves.’”

Customers and capabilities

Moving on to address ways in which the market is being grown, Burris pointed out a shift from the “known process, unknown technology” paradigm to “unknown process, known technology.” He explained: “Now we’re trying to bring technology to engagement, and how we go to market, and how we engage with our customers, and how we create.”

He continued: “We used to focus on taking cost out of the business. Now … we’re focused more on the top line; how do we generate new revenue?

Burris also pointed out: “It used to be that we would spend all of our time worrying about very, very complex contracts and getting it right because we had to protect ourselves from future opportunistic behaviors on the part of our suppliers. Now we’re talking about speed, and getting it done fast, and trying to ensure that we can respond and have a right set of relationships with our customers.”

Furrier gave his own take on how this shift was altering the opportunities for new enterprises, saying, “New capabilities are emerging, so unstructured data, IoT, Big Data, new things, new inventions, are being discovered by startups.”

Data and cloud

On the more technical side of the discussion, Furrier and Burris picked through some of the strengths and weaknesses of SAP’s offerings. Furrier was reserved on this front, saying, “I think SAP has not done a good job promoting and articulating the value proposition. I think they’re still … feeling their way through to the market.”

Furrier did, however, see big chances for the HANA cloud, which SAP has been showcasing. “The HANA cloud has an opportunity, in my opinion, to be the galvanized center of gravity around an ecosystem of integration, and I think the integration equation is something that I believe is going to be the new barrier to entry for start-ups,” he said. “… but to scale at the level of enterprise, with unique, kind of weird requirements for compliance to innovation, has a little bit of nuance to it.”

Burris agreed, noting, “HANA makes it possible for SAP to have a greater influence over how its own data gets integrated in its ecosystem, and they didn’t have that before.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU