Soon after Jonathan Becher (congratulations to Jonathan on his recent promotion to Executive Vice President) took the stage at the recent SAP Analyst Summit in Boston it was apparent that this was not going to be a typical bullet point laden PowerPoint presentation on "here's what's coming in our next release".   Later, in a one-on-one discussion with Jonathan, he clarified that SAP was due to provide analysts with a "5 year vision" which explained the futuristic opening to the event.


SAP's Version of HAL
Jonathan set the stage for a  "futures" oriented session by virtually sharing the stage with the voice of a computer named "Teri", SAP's version of a equally omnipotent but less menacing version of HAL (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) to show the audience how easy and powerful analytics will be in the future.

Analytics & Cloud at the Forefront of SAP's Strategy
Jonathan, John Schwarz, Jim Hagerman Snabe, and Vishal Sikka spent the rest of the morning discussing how "this is not your grandmother's SAP" and how SAP is planning to embrace the cloud and continue to exploit analytics to drive growth.  They acknowledged that the days of counting on 7-figure deals to drive growth are over and how SAP will deliver higher volume, lower cost solutions to the market place.


The Cash Cow vs. Innovation
This is the big challenge for SAP.  Their cash cow is big honkin' on-premise solutions.  Their clients continue to use (and will for years to come) these solutions and pay the hefty maintenance that goes with them.  SAP's partners do and will continue to drive significant services revenue from these solutions.  SAP's stance is that they have "prepared for the cloud", have embraced it with several solutions that are available on-demand, and will deliver new solutions via the cloud.  They will deliver new modules via the cloud which will significantly reducing time to value; as well as reduce the frequency, cost and disruption of on-premise platform upgrades.  This will be a fine line to walk but is necessary to prevent penetration into the SAP client base by SaaS competitors in a changing market place.

Will clients think of SAP when they think of the cloud?  They don't yet but SAP is trying to change that.