[Post adapted from an article written by Jerry Janda]

On Tuesday, November 9, SAP hosted an event for social media in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. A sold-out crowd of corporate social media leaders packed the auditorium for “BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media.”

The BlogWell conference featured eight case studies on the best social media programs at large corporations. GasPedal, a consulting company specializing in “word-of-mouth” marketing, held the event along with the Social Media Business Council, a community of social media leaders from large companies.

SAP is a founding member of the Social Media Business Council, a fact that Chip Rodgers, vice president and COO of SAP Community Network, acknowledged during his welcoming remarks. He told the standing-room-only audience how the council helps corporations navigate the quagmire of social media for big business – tackling topics such as compliance, legal, marketing, branding, and communications.

Chip also shared the evolution of SAP’s online community, which is now at 2 million members strong, with a million unique visitors per month and 5,000 contributions per day. He added that SAP has built social media into its culture and stressed its importance for large corporations.

“There’s a lot of value for us as a company, and I think for you as a company as well, to jump in, engage with your audience, your customers, and your partners, and have a conversation and pull them in,” he said. “That’s what BlogWell and the Social Media Business Council is all about – helping you to understand how to do that successfully.”

SAPPHIRE (here and) NOW

In addition to hosting the event, SAP presented one of the eight case studies. Brian Ellefritz, senior director of Global Social Media Marketing, explained the company’s strategy for a “virtual” SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s flagship event held concurrently in Orlando and Frankfurt in May. The goal was to use blogging, Twitter, and an online presence to generate excitement about the event – and to make those who couldn’t attend feel part of the SAPPHIRE NOW experience.

SAP faced challenges at the time. SAPPHIRE NOW was the first major event featuring the company’s relatively new co-CEOs, and the company had been criticized earlier for not listening to customers. Therefore, the social media strategy emphasized a tone change for the brand – treating the audience members as peers, not recipients – while still making sure key messages were communicated.

To create real-time accessibility, the SAPPHIRE NOW Web site streamed live sessions and offered replays from the Frankfurt and Orlando events. It was a big production. In fact, during the week of SAPPHIRE NOW, the site’s video bandwidth exceeded CNN’s.

SAPPHIRE ambassadors shine

Additionally, to truly provide “eyes and ears” for those who couldn’t attend, Brian’s team recruited and trained social media “ambassadors” to report from the shows. There were 12 ambassadors – six at Frankfurt, six at Orlando, each one dedicated to a specific newsworthy topic: SAP Business Suite, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP BusinessObjects, innovation, SAP Services, or SAP EcoHub.

Armed with Flip video cameras, the ambassadors roved the show floor in search of customers and other experts who could answer questions about their topics. They shot and posted videos, wrote blogs, and tweeted their observations (with hashtag #SAPPHIRENOW, as well as a hashtag for their topic, to make it easier for readers to keep up with what was happening). In the end, the ambassadors contributed 41 blogs, uploaded 152 videos, and attracted thousands of followers on Twitter – with viral reach going much, much further through word of mouth, retweets, and news feeds.

The SAPPHIRE NOW social media strategy was a success, and it also taught some valuable lessons. For example, preparing all the videos for the live blogs proved overwhelming for the production editor in each location, necessitating a change in the process.

On the other hand, potential minuses turned out to be plusses. Some ambassadors were savvier in social media than others, and with 12 of them on the beat, diverse skill sets might have resulted in chaos. In actuality, however, inconsistencies didn’t hurt overall impact. Combined with news coming out of other teams, such as media relations, the collective activities created real-time energy. That’s more important than individual performance. As Brian advised companies that might want to follow in SAP’s (virtual) footsteps: “In general, you look for the cumulative effect, and you’ll be in good shape.”

On the case

Other case studies came courtesy of pharmaceutical company Pfizer, food corporation Hershey, Scholastic Book Clubs, the Discovery Channel, IT services company SunGard, the BlackRock asset management firm, and Johnson & Johnson, a manufacturer of healthcare and pharmaceutical products. The studies covered all aspects of social media – from getting a program off the ground to launching creative campaigns.

Midway through the event, Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council, took the stage to give a presentation called “Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of Trouble.”

True to its name, the presentation offered tips to comply with regulations from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Specifically, companies must disclose and be truthful in social media outreach (meaning if you pay someone to blog for you, you must state it), monitor conversations and correct misstatements (meaning if a blogger calls your product a “miracle cure,” you must set the record straight), and create social media policies and training programs. To help satisfy the latter regulation, the Social Media Business Council provides ready-to-use templates.

Don’t lie to your mother

Sernovitz had much simpler suggestions to stay safe: Don’t write checks for positive third-party coverage, be honest about your relationship with a blogger, and don’t lie to your mom. In other words, if your mother can’t distinguish paid advertising from editorial in your social media, shame on you.

This approach to social media not only protects companies from the FTC, it also builds authentic relationships with target audiences. If a corporation gets caught paying for a positive blog, it will have a tough time regaining public faith. “Trust is the medium in which we work,” Andy said.

For companies still uncertain about what constitutes unethical practices, Andy closed with one final piece of advice: “If you have to ask,” he noted, “the answer is no.”

Please turn ON your mobile devices

Unlike other conferences where attendees are reminded to turn off their phones and laptops, BlogWell encouraged people to tweet and blog throughout the day. Based on the hundreds of tweets with hashtag #blogwell, attendees were pleased with the event – praising the sessions, sharing nuggets of wisdom from the speakers (often in real time), and gushing over the Philly-flavored snacks (Tastykakes and soft pretzels: staples of the local diet).

SAP was pleased as well. By hosting and presenting at BlogWell, the company further proved its position as a leader in social media and online communities.

“With so much buzz around social media,  it’s exciting that SAP is in such a leadership position,” Chip said. “It’s something we can all be proud of.”

Read the “Top TakeAways from BlogWell Philly 2010” by Michael Brinner

Other Useful Links:

• BlogWell event website
• Photo stream of the event
• Session coverage, live from BlogWell
• #Blogwell on Twitter
• Social Media Business Council
• GasPedal
• SAPPHIRE NOW Online
• #SAPPHIRENOW on Twitter

In true Web 2.0 fashion, I’m attending the SAP TechEd event in Berlin by watching the virtual TechEd stream, with live coverage of the main keynotes and interviews in key areas. You can watch a replay yourself on the Virtual TechEd site.

The session started off with the new (excellent) “run better” SAP ad, featuring a wide selection of SAP customers:

Mark Yolton then stepped up on stage to welcome the crowd and members of the SAP Community Network. He emphasized the importance of people and community at the event — 15,000 attendees across the four locations, with over a thousand hours of lectures and on-hands sessions.

Next up was SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, who kicked off with a message designed to combat the positioning of various SAP competitors including Oracle: “People are looking for solutions, not stacks”. It’s now about the ecosystem, and it’s not possible for an ecosystem to come together on a single stack. Organizations need “non-disruptive” change. A stable core is important, but there has to be continuous evolution on top.

Vishal reiterated some of the messages from previous years, including the notion of “timeless software”, that allows you to innovate even with older platforms.

Vishal emphasized the continuing importance of SAP NetWeaver: “It’s the foundation of what we do”. He went over some of the numbers: 18,000 NetWeaver customers, 10,000 using BW, and 6,000 using the SAP Portal, many with more than 100,000 users, including the SAP community network itself with over 2 million members. “It’s alive, it’s kicking, and the numbers tell us that it’s not only being used to run the core infrastructure, but also extending it to their non-SAP applications. It’s strategic to our customers, and so it’s strategic to us.”

Vishal then invited Bjoern Goerke, in charge of the SAP NetWeaver platform, to discuss the new NetWeaver 7.3, due out later this quarter.

Bjoern explained how the NetWeaver team were delivering innovation without disruption into existing landscapes. Everything is now on the same release level, worked hard on maintainability, scalability, and performance – for example, reducing the downtime needed to install enhancement packs from several hours down to just a few minutes.

Next Vishal talked about the importance of Business Intelligence, and the upcoming release of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (project name “Aurora”). For the first time, all the clients tools have a common look and feel, and there’s improved integration with SAP Netweaver (identity management, BW, etc.).

The next subject was mobility. With Sybase, SAP is now the clear leader in enterprise mobility. There are now more than 4 billion mobile devices in the world, and Sybase is essential to using them. Over 2 billion messages are sent through Sybase systems every day (SMS, etc.), and Sybase recently crossed the threshold of a trillion messages through their servers. And Sybase also brings other great technology – their CEP (complex event processing) platform, the ASA and IQ databases will all be integrated into the NetWeaver framework.

He then invited Sam Yen on stage to show you how NetWeaver, BusinessObjects, and Sybase can work together.

The demonstration scenario was a series of Norwegian oil rigs, where there are sensors recording almost 600,000 events per minute, but there’s very low bandwidth between the rigs and the central offices, so  a lot of the processing has to be locally, and intelligently.

Suddenly, the oil production drops, and we can see the information in real-time using an Xcelsius (now BusinessObjects Dashboards) dashboard.

Let’s drill into the detail. We can see that Gate A was in the danger zone, and has been shut down.

What’s going on behind the scenes? Here’s the CEP development environment, that lets people easily create and change the real-time events that they would like to track and monitor

This is a very real need in oil and gas organizations today, but it takes a lot of painful programming. Because these systems are connected to NetWeaver, people can have these types of dashboards, running on top of Event Insight, as part of their enterprise portal.

Sam demonstrated the new SAP Enterprise Workspace, that users can customize with their own content, without any help needed from IT.

For example, he added the previous Event Insight dashboard, by choosing from the available applications…

And then simply dragging and dropping the module into the workspace.

Users have full ability to customize their experience including information from the outside world, etc.

Another example could be choosing vendors based on their carbon footprint. We look at the list of vendors:

And then he added a a sustainability module, using the functionality available in Carbon Impact.

Here’s the current version of Carbon impact shown within the portal:

Soon, SAP will be extending this functionality, with some of the products from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, such as Social Intelligence, in this case used in order to find sustainability experts inside my organization. People can easily do a search:

Find out how they are related to the rest of the organization:

And then invite them into the Enterprise Workspace.

Sam explained that the same portal and content can be made available for business partners outside the organization – Enterprise Workspaces in the cloud:

Vishal Sikka then moved from the improvements to existing products, such as NetWeaver, and BusinessObjects, to “New Horizons”, the new possibilities available in the future, with cloud computing, mobility, and in-memory computing: “On the one hand, we need continuous evolution. On the other hand, there are new possibilities – how to we bring fundamentally new solutions to the existing landscapes?”

Vishal outlined three big changes to technology possibilities:

(1) Cloud. There have been advances not only virtualization, but also in the ability to provision new services in public clouds. We need have the integrity of existing systems, AND improve the ease of consumption. How can we do that?

SAP want to bring the benefits of cloud computing to everyone, and the flagship product is Business ByDesign, which is not only a full suite for mid-size companies, but also the basis of the applications that SAP will deliver in the cloud.

Having a cloud platform lets us build applications, such as SAP StreamWork for collaboration and Carbon Impact, which runs on the Amazon Cloud.

(2) Mobile. Mobile internet use is already seven times the use of broadband. There are lots of new devices poised to join the market, including the RIM “PlayBook”. Users want a great experience. Vishal: “The screens want to be liberated from the tyranny of the desktop!”. What is possible?

There’s the Sybase Unwired platform that allows you to write applications once and deploy them to multiple platforms. And beyond the mobile devices, there are other platforms, such as SharePoint, Facebook, and Lotus Notes. The Gateway project was designed to make it easier to access SAP applications from these environments, as well as existing SAP systems back to R3 v 4.6C. It will be generally available later this year – you can already sign up for the ramp up program.

Microsoft and Cap Gemini recently worked together on an HR system for Microsoft that used the new Gateway functionality.

Representatives of the two companies explained that it enabled them to easily and quickly implement a new HR hiring application – something that is a critical application for Microsoft.

They explained that the application took about one-sixth of the time it normally would have done to implement, thanks to the Gateway functionality.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give a demonstration of the technology working together

He showed the end to end traceability of the SAP application within a SharePoint portal:

He explained that Gateway makes it easy to consume SAP data, no matter what front end you are using – for example, using a Macintosh.

Sam showed how you could create and start consuming SAP data on an iPad in less than two minutes. First, you choose the data you want to expose:

And in what form you would like to expose it:

Then you can use the standard Apple environment to compile an application:

And make it available to the iPad – in this case a simple employee search using information from the SAP HR database:

The last topic was in-memory computing, described by Vishal as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

He explained that the current hardware possibilities were pretty much unimaginable ten years ago. With multi-core processing, software vendors have to rewrite their software to take advantage of parallelism, but once they have, the possibilities are amazing: real-time access to information, at a lower cost.

He gave an example of what’s possible, explaining that at a previous event in Berlin, in July, the CTO of one of the largest CPG companies in the world had challenged him to help them predict demand for their products at a row level – they had 460 billion records. Vishal put a team on it, and found that not only was it possible to access the data, it could be done 20x faster than anything the customer had previously tried. 460 billion records of data was about 45 terabytes. Compressed into a column database, it was around three to five terabytes. They put together a machine with ten server blades for around $530,000 using standard Intel parts.

The new HANA product is available for ramp up on November 30th, and he invited the audience to take part. One of the first customers is already in a pilot, running live. Vishal explained that the future direction is to “revitalize our entire product portfolio, starting with new applications – planning, forecasting, simulations”. He gave the example of utility companies using it to monitor and react to information from smart meters in real time.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give some examples.

The first was accessing over 4 billion rows of data in less than 0.03seconds, using HANA and the BusinessObjects Explorer front end.

The second example showed how you can get real-time access to live application data. He showed an SAP internal application for pipeline data. Here’s the initial view, seen on an iPad using BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad:

He then went into the SAP system to change some of the pipeline values, in a database containing half a million records. The data is then replicated to the HANA box in real-time using Sybase Replication services.

The simulation would normally take several hours to run, but now the data is reflected on the iPad in seconds:

Vishal finished with a high-level summary of the themes of his presentation: Innovation without disruption, through the new NetWeaver and BusinessObjects products, and the new possibilities afforded by the cloud, mobile use, and in-memory analytics.

Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

Early press coverage:

• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 8, 2010
• Q&A: Timo Elliott, BI evangelist at SAP, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 9, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, TechCentral (Ireland), July 12, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Leo King (Computerworld UK), Network World, July 9, 2010

Evernote is a great Web 2.0 application that is focused on “helping the world remember everything”. It lets you grab information on the fly, such as notes, web pages links, photos, etc. from a variety of different devices (PC, Blackberry, etc.) and let you store them in your Evernote account. Everything you upload is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable (for example, if you take a picture of some text, Evernote automatically uses text recognition and makes the text searchable). And you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

The Evernote API allows other applications to integrate with the Evernote platform. This was used by the SAP StreamWork team to allow you to bring information from your Evernote account into a StreamWork activity

Now Evernote has launched the Evernote “Trunk” of applications that extend and connect to the “Evernote memory platform”. SAP Streamwork is the first application featured on the new site.

Evernote have put together a blog posting on how to use the two applications together, and there’s a StreamWork tutorial video available:

Press coverage:

• Evernote Launches Trunk Productivity App Platform, Fritz Nelson, InformationWeek
• Evernote Trunk To Add Hundreds of Apps and Features, Robert Strohmeyer, PC World
• Evernote Launches ‘The Trunk’ to Showcase Integrations Built on the Evernote Platform, TMCNet
• Evernote Turns Itself into a Platform with “Trunk”, Liz Gannes, GigaOm
• Evernote, the Startup that Augments your Memory, Launches an App Store, Kim-Mai Cutler, VentureBeat

[UPDATED]. Apologies. This used to be a quick, irreverent overview of the brand-new cloud-based, software-as-a-service ERP offering from SAP, featuring the graphics you can see above.

But the video was declared off-brand, and has been deleted from YouTube by SAP. The following video is offered instead, with all of the original humor deleted.

It’s now official: SAP has released its brand-new Web 2.0 product called StreamWork. The project was initially called “Constellation” within SAP, and was first exposed to beta customers on the web site 12sprints.com, as covered in earlier postings on this site.

Why the name? It’s a variant on “workstream”, which according to Wikipedia is:

“A flow of output, the activities and transactions, that a worker produces as they go about their daily work activities. Workstreams are flows of largely unstructured data that workstreaming technologies seek to capture, document and repackage in more intelligent ways benefiting individual workers, managers and corporations.”

And the article goes on to say:

“…tapping into and mining these workstreams presents tremendous opportunities to companies in terms of collaboration, agility and collective intelligence.”

Other research seems to back this up. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, 36% of company performance is determined by organizations’ “collaborative index”:

“This is more than twice the impact of a company’s strategic orientation (16%) and more than five times the impact of market and technological turbulence influences (7%). This is a key finding because it empirically demonstrates that increased high-quality collaboration can improve business performance.“

The Power of Collaborative Decisions

Every person in every organization makes many decisions every day. Many of these are so small that we don’t even recognize them as decisions. Every time a sales person calls a customer, she is “deciding” to prioritizing that activity over everything else she could be doing. Of course, a sub-optimal decision may not make much difference. But over time, and across a large organization, these small decisions pile up and have a huge influence to corporate performance.

Of course, computer systems have been promising Improved business decision-making since at least the 1950s, by providing more information about company operations. And they have largely delivered, enabling corporations of breath-taking complexity. But you can give everybody the same facts, and still end up with completely different views about what the data means, and what should be done about it (just look at any group of rival politicians!).

Decision-making is a core business function of every organization, and has been extensively studied by scientists and management theorists. But despite all the advances in theory, real-life decision-making is still dominated by people, personalities, and endless emails and meetings.

Decisions still tend to be made in messy, non-repeatable, “are-we-really-sure-about-this?” ways, relying heavily on “gut feel”. People often spend more time and effort making decisions as they do on actually trying to execute them, and reviewing / reversing decisions that have already been made (every new politician and executive feels honor-bound to reverse the decisions of their predecessors).

Collaboration or “Enterprise 2.0” platforms, including Jive and Cubetree and Google Wave have helped, by letting employees work together on projects, but they typically don’t directly support goal-oriented decision-making.

Introducing SAP StreamWork

StreamWork helps you bring together:

• All the right people needed to make a good decision (executives, influencers, experts), across different corporate functions and geographies
• All the information relevant to the decision, from inside or outside the organization, both qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective (and reformat it, if necessary). Integration with Evernote and Scribd makes it easy to upload and share documents.
• All the right methods that should be brought to bear in order to consider all the aspects of the decision (cost/benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Pro/Con charts, responsibility matrices, etc.)

See this link for a summary of StreamWork features and view the StreamWork YouTube Channel for an extensive set of how-to videos.

By putting all this in one environment, and letting people collaborate and comment and add data and add documents, and explain their reasoning, organizations get:

• More clarity about why decisions are being made
• More engagement from employees, who can see a direct link between their suggestions and the final result
• More commitment to decisions (research shows that we care more about fair process than we do with final decisions. If we feel our voice has been heard, we’re far more likely to comply with the final choice, even if we didn’t agree with it)
• Better results. Measurement and tracking of the decision-making process, allowing you to optimize the process over time (faster decision cycles, better outcomes)

On-Demand, Extensible Architecture

StreamWork uses an on-demand architecture, so you can be productive immediately without any software installs, and you can easily invite people from inside or outside the organization without having to worry about access problems. And it provides an open REST API, making it easy to extend StreamWork functionality and integrate with other systems.

Here’s a look at some of the add-ons that have already been built, including integration with InfoView, Text-to-query, Android, YouTube, and others.

Here’s a great example of the integration possibilities from OffiSync:

And SAP is busy integrating other prototypes such as Gravity, covered in an earlier post, with StreamWork.

Pricing

The basic edition is free, with up to five activities, 250Mb of storage, and the unlimited ability to collaborate in others’ activities. The Professional Edition costs $9/month for up to 100 activities, 5Gb of storage, and more control over user security. An Enterprise Edition is in the works, with more details to be announced later this year.

Sign up Now!

Signing up for StreamWork is easy and free — click here.

Other Coverage and Links

• Alex Williams, ReadWriteWeb: Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP’s Future?
• Bob Thompson, Customer Think: Will StreamWork get SAP out of its Innovation Funk?
• Chris Kanaracus, IDG News: SAP’s ‘Virtual War Room’ Tool Gets a Name: StreamWork
• Jon Brodkin, Network World: SAP Targets Online Collaboration Market with StreamWork
• Larry Barrett, Datamation: SAP Debuts Cloud-Based Collaboration Apps
• Xavier Lanier, GottaBeMobile.com: Evernote’s Incorporated in SAP Collaboration Tool
• B-Eye-Network: Formerly Known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork is now Generally Available
• Rich Hoeg: 12Sprints Tutorial

I believe SAP is an under-appreciated leader in the Web 2.0 space, and this blog attempts to explain why. First, I should first point out that there are three distinct categories you can talk about SAP interacting with Web 2.0 technology:

• Web 2.0 by SAP – Web 2.0 products and services SAP provides to customers
• Web 2.0 with SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 techniques to interact with our customers and partners
• Web 2.0 at SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 technology within SAP

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Web 2.0 by SAP

The term Web 2.0 means different things to different people, but generally people use it to encompass one or more of the following categories:

Easy, Powerful Interfaces

Web 2.0 products have simple, interactive, attractive, and intuitive interfaces that let people access information and carry out tasks without training.

SAP is a strong believer in design thinking across all aspects of the product solutions. Technology examples include:

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated, that lets you browse through billions of rows of corporate data as easily as you browse the web, using innovative memory-resident analytics coupled with an interface that automatically proposes appropriate analyses.
• SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, providing attractive, interactive dashboards that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday business activities. For example, a presenter can show the effect of changes to forecasted variables in real time, directly within a PowerPoint presentation.

On-Demand, Mobile, and Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 applications are available on-demand, with a variety of different devices, with an internet-based platform that scales smoothly as demand grows.

SAP has a clear on-demand and cloud strategy:

• John Wookey and Peter Lorenz have outlined a clear on-demand strategy
• SAP Business ByDesign is now achieving wide recognition as a well-designed, flexible, on-demand business application, and its intuitive user interface now enables users to customize their own KPI dashboards and integrate third-party Web services such as GoYellow, Google Maps, or Map24.
• The SAP BusinessObjects on-demand platform has long been the clear leader in business intelligence as a service, letting organizations cleanse, store, analyze and share information effectively without having to install any hardware or software.
• SAP partners provide on-demand extensions to existing in-house functionality.

Collaboration

Web 2.0 tools let people work together to achieve common goals, frequently crossing traditional fault lines such as country, culture, or company boundaries.

SAP believes that collaboration tools should be aligned with business process. Example of technology include:

• The SAP Netweaver Portal provides discussion forums, lets users comment on, rank, and tag content, and integrate SAP content seamlessly into other platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
• Collaboration can be analyzed and optimized, like any other business activity. Jive software, the leading independent vendor of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, provides SAP BusinessObjects’ on-demand analytics as an integrated part of their product offer.
• Data from SAP systems can be used to augment conversations on platforms such as Google Wave.
• The SAP Gravity prototype lets users of Google Wave bring together technical and business experts to collaborate on business process
• The new SAP BusinessObjects 12sprints prototype supports directed, collaborative decision-making.

Social Networking

Web 2.0 tools let people make connections and share status updates.

SAP gives organizations the tools they need to monitor and optimize social networking inside and outside organizations.

• SAP’s text analytics provide organizations with the ability to do “sentiment analysis” across social media, and automatically integrate
• SAP’s CRM solutions provide a seamless customer experience across networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• The Social Network Analyzer prototype lets organizations bring together and analyze the relationships that are created between employees, and between the company and its customers. It makes it easy to mine the the wealth of data stored in existing corporate systems, such as the organizational hierarchy from a human capital management system, informal organizational information stored in email distribution lists and project systems, the sales relationships from the customer relationship management system, inquiries made through the support platform or web site, etc.
• Twitter is fast becoming a platform for crowd-sourced data gathering. SAP prototypes allow people to avoid traffic in Australia and make presentations an interactive, collaborative experience by showing the “backchannel” twitter feed directly within the presenter’s slides, and allowing voting via twitter.

Mashups

Web 2.0 tools are open and easily integrated with other solutions.

SAP is the clear leader in real-life business process, and realizes that it’s essential to bridge systems and combine information from multiple sources

• SAP is a leading proponent of services-oriented architectures, that allow organizations to easily and seamless provide an end-to-end business process across multiple different application architectures.
• For individuals, the SAP rooftop marketplace prototype lets business people easily integrate information from multiple different sources and applications using open interfaces.

Web 2.0 with SAP

SAP Community Network

The SAP community network site (SCN) is rated as the best in the industry. It gives the SAP ecosystem of customers, partners, solution providers and employees a platform to share questions and expertise. A wide range of different business, solution, and technical areas are covered, and it is . A full set of Web 2.0 tools are provided for members, including discussion forums, blogs (over 5,000 contributors, of whom only 30% work for SAP), e-learning, wikis, and reputation and recognition programs, and there are tight links with other platforms such as LinkedIn and the SAP Social Media page
The site has dedicated spaces for the developer network, the business process expert (BPX) community, a Business Objects community, a university alliance community, a community career center, an interactive documentation space called docupedia, an Innocentive innovation challenge program, EcoHub, a community-driven online marketplace, and a soon-to-be-launched code exchange area.

SCN has over 2 million members, who post around 6,000 messages a day in over 200 different discussion forums, and over 250 blog posts each month. People from 229 countries and territories visited the site over 28 million times in 2009, and viewed over 200 million pages.

The growing involvement in these communities helps SAP get closer to customers, partners and stakeholders for product and service innovation. For example, SAP product marketing managers use the BPX community to share product information and best practices for product use and get product feedback. And SAP customers share their own best practices with their peers and get unbiased advice.

SAP’s Community Workspace platform provides customers and employees with the ability to set up invitation-only collaboration forums to discuss common interests, such as “business process in the Oil and Gas Industry”. Over 60,000 people from over 2,000 different customers participate in over 3,500 different forums, visiting the site more than 260,000 times each month.

SAP Influencer Program

SAP provides what many consider the gold standard program for industry analysts, journalists, and bloggers. The program involves regular meetings and virtual events, and a hosted platform for quick answers to questions. It is famous for providing exceptionally open access to senior executives, company directions, and product plans, and for openly accepting and integrating regular critics of the company.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

SAP is taking an increasingly Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Modeled on the Google Labs, the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center lets customers trial early prototypes and give feedback, long before traditional product development lifecycles. The center receives thousands of pieces of feedback each week that are used to adapt and improve products.

Web 2.0 at SAP

All SAP employees have access to full collection of Web 2.0 tools through the internal corporate portal, including blogging, wikis, discussion forums, collaboration areas, and microblogging.

SAP was one of the earliest members of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group dedicated to collecting and sharing best practice use of Web 2.0 to improve employee productivity and collaboration. Employees are encouraged to participate in external social media, and have been provided with a clear set of social media guidelines.

SAP and Web 2.0

In the end, it’s all about bringing together the best of SAP and the best of Web 2.0

For more information about any of these topics, please browse the other posts on this blog.

[UPDATE: See this post for the soon-to-be released prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center]

Here’s an example of “augmented corporate reality” based on the Layar platform and the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand.com platform, running on a Google Nexus One Android phone.

These are all screenshots taken from a working proof of concept, shown as an example of the type of functionality business users might have access to in the future — not with any promise of such a product in the future.

Open the Layar application, look at the list of available “layers”, and choose the SAP Web 2.0 Augmented Corporate Reality Example
The application opens the camera’s phone, and connects to a business intelligence server to get information about the customer businesses closest to the current location. This information is shown in the small radar screen in the top right, and an icon for each customer is shown on the screen. As the phone moves, the icons appear to stay in one place, hovering over the physical location of that customer’s building. Each icon indicates the customer’s sales performance (the arrow direction shows the trend, the color indicates whether or not sales have reached my target or not). The size of the icon indicates roughly how near or far the office is. The application automatically highlights the location closest to the center of the display, and shows more information about that business (name, distance, photo, current and previous sales, and sales target)
Users can click on the selector in the top left to see the customers as a list, ordered by distance from the current location (realistically, this is likely to be the easiest, most popular location-aware information use)
Alternatively, we can see the customers, and their performance icons, shown overlaid on a map.
When the user clicks on one of the icons, they see more data about that business, and can click on the “Get Data” button to drill in for more information.
This takes them to a live report hosted on the SAP BusinessObjects on-demand business intelligence environment…
…where they can drill into the numbers, open other reports and charts, etc.

We hope to open up the prototype for use by others, with the ability to add other example locations, etc.

What could businesses really do with this? Well, maybe you’re a branch manager, and you want to get the latest sales figures as you visit the branch:

Or a factory manager who wants to see the maintenance records for a particular machine:

Or you’d like to compare performance of goods displayed inside the store with the goods stored in the shop window:

What you can do with this technology is currently restricted by the location services: realistically, it works well for identifying building locations outdoors using GPS, but is not yet precise enough for most indoor use. However, this is changing fast as vendors offer new location services, based on cell-phone, wifi, and other forms of signal triangulation.

How far could this go? Well… take a look at this video:

SAP’s decision-focused collaboration project, 12sprints, is now in “open beta”, so that anybody can sign up. Here’s the blurb from the web site explaining what it is:

Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly. Collaborative decision-making brings together:

• People – Get everyone on the same page
• Information – Share documents and data all in plain view
• Methods – Provide structure with business tools for brainstorming, strategizing, and decision-making

And it’s built for speed – use for free and be up and running in minutes!  Learn more

For an introduction to a typical activity structure, and a real-life example, please visit this post on TimoElliott.com