How to manage the weakest link in most ERP projects

HEADLINE

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SAP INNOVATIONX

LONDON

Purpose and experience hot topics for SAP, as world’s biggest apps vendor disrupts itself with new vision and focus on making the world a better place through technology.

SAP’s InnovationX event was held at the Printworks factory in London and had a very different feel compared with many other tech summits I have been to. There was very little talk around metrics and most of the narrative was centred on problem solving, experience and purpose.

Jens Amail, UK&I managing director opened the show – once the dancers had got off stage – with an understated keynote that focussed heavily on SAP’s responsibility as a global tech firm to ‘do good’. Akin to Google’s long-held mantra of ‘don’t be evil’, the SAP spiel was focussed on how it can make the world a better place rather than how many cloud ERP customers it has. That may be because they don’t actually have many cloud ERP customers, but it didn’t feel insincere and made a refreshing change to listen to a tech giant talk about something other than world domination.

The recent acquisition of Qualtrics was placed front and centre – as you’d expect it to be having spent $8bn on it – as Amail laid out a vision of experience-led innovation centred around the new jewel in the SAP crown. Unlike acquisitions for scale, Qualtrics brings something entirely new to the party and it’s not just rhetoric

designed to justify the price tag that is fuelling SAP’s narrative. The surge towards customer and employee centric products and experiences is gathering pace. In fact, it has picked up such momentum over the last 12-18 months that it is starting to reshape how SAP positions itself in the market.

Amail talked about the connection of ‘O’ and ‘X’ to create a unified view between operational information and experiential data, noting that more three quarters of the worlds transactions touch a SAP system and this plethora of operational data coupled with new experiential understanding will radically change the shape of enterprise applications. Bill McDermott, talking at SAP’s Capital Markets Day, described Qualtrics as having “the biggest leverage of any acquisition we’ve ever made” and went on to state that “Qualtrics will not only turn SAP into a very different type of company, but will radically alter how businesses around the world understand, engage with, and delight their customers”. A bold statement considering not too many people had heard of Qualtrics 12 months ago – but I have a feeling that unlike many other proclamations from the big vendors – this one might actually come true.

OPINION

DLT

AN INTRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECHNOLOGY

BY IAN SMITH

Distributed ledger tech- bers of the network and, once a transnology (DLT), also action is verified by the network, the known as a shared information is written to the ledger and or distributed ledger, cannot be subsequently altered. Beis amongst the most cause of the way the data is recorded frequently used buz- and verified, it is immutable, incorruptzwords in business. However, despite ible and therefore, trustworthy. the attention it receives and its widely Bitcoin represented the first notable mooted potential, few understand pre- use-case for DLT, closely mirroring tracisely what DLT is, how it works, and ditional ledgers in many ways. Since what it can be used for. Practical appli- then, businesses have discovered a cations of the technology often being wealth of applications for the underlycrowded out by businesses using the ing technology, that often have nothing term as a marketing lever without hav- to do with cryptocurrency and its coning any real intentions of implementing. troversies.

So, what exactly is DLT, and how can Even so, many struggle to distinit be put to effective use for businesses? guish between DLT, blockchain and

Ledgers have existed for cryptocurrency. Blockchain centuries in accounting. Es- is just one of the more popsentially, they are a list of ular applications of DLT. A transactions explaining how blockchain system groups data has changed over time, used to gain an understandBitcoin transactions into blocks which are then executed ing of the world as it is now, represented against a shared database. or at any point in the past. the rst notable A blockchain system under-

Put simply, DLT is a digital use-case for written by DLT can be either counterpart to this, but with DLT, mirroring public or private and stimueach company maintaining its own copy of the transaction history. All transactions traditional ledgers in lates the results of a proposed transaction in terms of changes to data, and groups can be verified against the many ways. those sets of changes into copies held by other mem- blocks which are then executed against a shared database – the ‘world state’.

Most of the overzealous excitement about blockchain has focussed solely on the public variant. Massive, open systems threatening to overthrow the global economy and bring forth an anarchist utopia according to some; simply an interesting, if technically challenging way to build distributed systems according to others. As interesting as public blockchain may be, the less discussed variant (the private, permissioned blockchain) is becoming more prominent.

What are its use-cases?

Previously, it has been claimed that DLT is set to revolutionise finance, supply chain, asset ownership, digital identity and much more. Many of these projects, though, are still in their infancy and won’t mature into products with full functionality for a little while yet.

One tangible application of DLT already acknowledged as adding increased value, would be to supplement the huge amounts of time and money enterprises are spending on expensive cybersecurity solutions which fail to protect from breaches and hacks, but stifle business agility. A private permissioned DLT platform solves this challenge along with one of the thorniest challenges in the today’s digital economy; how to securely share data.

What is becoming clearer is that blockchain technology is still on track to become a transformative and disruptive force. Yes, market conditions and sentiment are bad, there are many average projects out there, and some critical technological shortcomings still need to be overcome. But there are good projects and initiatives too, building great products and services and actively solving these issues.

If you zoom out a bit, get some perspective and put the current market into context, you will realise that blockchain is on a rather typical journey to maturity and mainstream adoption. Once the key benefits and applications of DLT have been communicated and digested, we will begin to see the difference between the hype surrounding this transformative technology, and its tangible value to enterprise.