On February 02, SAP made its 12sprints collaborative decision-making project available as a public beta and formed a research partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council. The news kind of got lost in the blogoblather about management changes. The idea of hooking up with the 2.0 Adoption Council is to give the beta a large enough n to make it worthwhile.
12sprints is a Business-Objects-based decision-making application and environment, which SAP says is
"the first and only software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that brings together people, information and methods to drive swift, informed decision-making."
Parsing the phrase to mean business intelligence (BI), or more precisely analytical apps, via SaaS, I think the claim may be true. But I admit I have not researched it thoroughly. Either way, SAP via 12sprints is doing for BI what IBM/Lombardi did for business process management (BPM) a few years ago via Blueprint. That is, it represents moving an inherently on-premise function onto the Internet. I say inherently on-premise because BI is so tied into competitive advantage for the IT user that the enterprise typically wants to keep the resulting data close to the vest.
At the least, the 12sprint effort might give a lot of users a taste of Business Objects' functionality that SAP can later turn into real business. Unlike Lombardi Blueprint, SAP says it will charge for 12sprint after the beta phase turns into general availability.
Reading the SAP press release also introduced me to the organization called
"The 2.0 Adoption Community, an external community where fans and friends of the pro-2.0 global village can collaborate and share with Council members."
Does that mean there is an anti-2.0 movement that I have been missing?
The name 2.0 Council implies a message that I think is strong from a marketing point of view, melding the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 buzzwords. As users of 12sprint, assuming they actively take up SAP's offer, the 2.0 council will illustrate whether there is a market for cross-legal-boundaries BI. Just as BPM makes more sense in cross-legal-boundaries as support for supply chain management, I would guess there is a similar need for BI. Once that need is determined, SaaS is a great way to go.
As an aside, while I have never heard of an anti-2.0 movement, there clearly is an anti-SAP crowd out there and it is sure to dump all over SAP for getting into 2.0 ecosystem after the enterprise software and web worlds have already moved on to 3.0. But not to worry, SAP. Spring in Heidleberg is just around the corner.
-- Dennis Byron
Unfortunately, and to the chagrin of our members, there is a lot of anti-2.0 out there. It exists in the form of industrial age organizational dynamics, autocratic decision-making, and old-fashioned corporate politics. People (the beneficiaries of 2.0 working) are reticent to change when the devil they know can be tamed with existing skills/tools.
We are looking forward to the SAP initiative. Check in with us from time to time, and we'll tell you how it's going. But thanks for picking up on this in light of the recent management shakeup kerfluffle.
Posted by: Susan Scrupski | February 12, 2010 at 06:37 PM