Review CeBIT 2013 - What (maybe) remains

For the most part, exhibitors remained in their familiar places, making it easier for CeBIT veterans to find their way around from year to year. In Hall 4, SAP, Telekom, Microsoft, Bitkom and Software AG were joined by a number of SAP partners such as Cormeta.

This makes sense and shortens distances. The proximity of SAP and Telekom as well as T-Systems was striking and seems to be strategic. Reference visits were made to each other and Ferri Abolhassan, member of the T-Systems Board of Management, was seen with his staff at SAP CEO Gerhard Oswald's office.

Whether there was serious negotiation or just handshaking was not known, because the visually successful SAP booth was extremely loud. Whereas last year it was comparatively quiet at the same stand - 40 years of SAP was celebrated with dignity - in 2013 action was the order of the day.

Gerd Oswald could hardly find a quiet minute to work or discuss in his office on the second floor, as his room was almost directly behind the large SAP stage.

RŽD is looking for Hana

And yet CeBIT was a success because hectic visitor diplomacy prevailed - and not just between the individual booth crews. Maybe CeBIT would also be a success if they just put comfortable office containers in the halls and served good coffee?

Definitely the size of the booth has no influence on interesting visitors: At the very small Metasonic booth in Hall 3 was the Russian railroad, one of the largest SAP customers worldwide. They were interested in subject-oriented BPM (Business Process Management) and the new, multimedia game table for designing business processes.

Of course, the delegation also dropped in on Gerd Oswald and SAP EVP Bernd Leukert - after all, there are numerous challenges: Rossijskije schelesnyje dorogi (Russian Railways, or RŽD for short) have over one million employees, close to 20 SAP systems with more than 100,000 users, and a great many ABAP in-house developments.

Every release change becomes an obstacle course. A switch to new versions and perhaps a Hana-based system seems interesting. Surgutneftegas is already a Russian Hana customer with IS Oil and Gas and Business Warehouse on Hana.

So a talk at CeBIT can never be wrong. One just wishes for a little more business atmosphere and less of a fair. Despite Xing, LinkedIn and Facebook, a trade show is important (see also in-house message on page 4), but perhaps it works more seriously.

Metasonic Touch

Hana is a loud revolution and Hana is here to stay as other database vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM upgrade their products with in-memory technology.

What Hana will also bring is a new business process reengineering. The positive features of Hana have a direct impact on the organization of structures and processes: it was therefore no coincidence that RŽD was at SAP and Metasonic. They presented the BPM modeling table Metasonic Touch for the first time.

With tangible building blocks, employees in all areas of the company are able to model business processes directly at the table without IT or programming knowledge. The finished models are then transferred to Metasonic's BPM suite and executed immediately.

"Metasonic Touch is a new modeling interface. This simplifies the creation of business processes many times over. This in turn increases the acceptance of introducing new business processes".

emphasizes Herbert Kindermann, CEO of Metasonic.

This significantly increases the agility of companies. In addition, the gap between the IT department and the business departments is closed. Users can move the individual modeling modules from Metasonic Touch directly on the table surface. These have unique coding on the underside.

An integrated camera automatically detects this coding. If one pushes two of these blocks against each other, their connection is projected onto the surface of the table. In this way, the individual employees model their behavior (subject behavior) in the business process.

Metasonic, founded in 2004, offers a solution for dynamic business process management (BPM). It is based on the patented, subject-oriented BPM method (S-BPM).

Aris is still alive

BPM in the form of IDS Scheer's Aris is also still around, even if the parent company Software AG was much quieter than the neighboring Microsoft, Telekom and SAP booths.

Things don't seem to be going well for Software AG: The CeBIT booth was large, but mostly staffed only by the company's own employees. Committed discussions like those at Telekom and T-Systems were in vain - although the company also focuses on in-memory computing and continues to maintain webMethods, which was once very popular in the SAP community.

The latest version of the webMethods platform enables customers to integrate cloud, social collaboration, mobile and Big Data technologies in one platform. With webMethods 9.0, the focus is on integrating big data from any data source.

Terracotta's in-memory technology is integrated into webMethods. Terracotta is used by over two million developers; in total, there are over one million installations of this in-memory product.

Software AG also does not seem to be able to take advantage of the incipient business process reengineering in the in-memory computing era with the acquired IDS Scheer: The Aris workstations at the CeBIT booth were deserted most of the time.

Although the availability of the new Aris version 9 was announced at the trade fair. Aris is intended to deliver a platform for business process management that covers the entire range of customer requirements from business and IT areas, even beyond corporate boundaries.

Aris addresses role-specific expertise and individual requirements by providing the right tool environment, product view, user interface, and information and data for each of the stakeholders in companies and government agencies - obviously aiming to connect to Metasonic's S-BPM (subject-oriented business process management).

Aris 9 is said to be easy to learn and use due to an intuitive and browser-based look and feel. In addition to the new functionalities, Aris 9 will feature a new patented symbolism for the visualization of process contents, which allows for a particularly comfortable and simple user guidance.

"Agile enterprise architecture that enables IT that is aligned with business goals is central to our strategy to generate maximum value for our customers"

emphasized Wolfram Jost, Chief Technology Officer and member of the Executive Board of Software AG.

"Aris offers high performance, user-friendliness and extensive functionality and supports cross-company collaboration. The consistent further development of Aris in the direction of social, cloud, mobile and big data/analytics is attracting a great deal of attention from our customers."

Suite on Hana

What started on January 10 this year, confirmed at CeBIT and will remain: SAP Business Suite powered by Hana. Some SAP partners announced that they would be relying on Business Suite powered by Hana to operate their IT landscape in the future.

Suite on Hana is an integrated enterprise application that captures and analyzes transaction data in real time on a single in-memory platform. This acceleration of IT processes is the preparation for the Realtime Enterprise initiated by Prof. Hasso Plattner.

SAP Business Suite powered by SAP Hana provides an open environment that enables real-time business management: Data analytics and predictions based on current transaction data accelerate business processes, enabling easier collaboration in the business environment.

Innovations can be better tested for their market readiness and feasibility. Q-Partners, an industry-independent SAP consultancy, has decided to rely on Business Suite powered by Hana for its own business processes.

As one of the first medium-sized German companies, Q-Partners is thus taking on a pioneering role. The contracts were signed between SAP Germany, ITML and Q-Partners on March 8 at CeBIT.

In line with the introduction of the Suite on Hana, its mobilization will also be taken into account. Q-Partners will develop apps for SAP processes that are suitable for mobile use and make them available to employees via an internal app store.

Q-Partners & IMCC 2013

"We will now have the infrastructure provided by our outsourcing partner OEDIV in the next few days and then start implementing the Business Suite powered by Hana. The planned go-live date is right on time for the start of the In-memory Computing Conference on June 5 in Frankfurt".

says Markus Stretz, one of the managing directors of Q-Partners. His co-managing director Matthias Kneissl adds:

"With our pioneering role, we also expect to serve as a role model. As one of the first consulting firms in Germany, we can competently serve SAP customers and interested parties with information and implementation experience from Hana conception to operation."

Matthias Kneissl will give a presentation at IMCC 2013 and will be available for further discussions with interested conference participants (www.in-memory.cc). Q-Partners, often early adopters of new SAP technologies, follows the motto: What we sell, we want to use.

With the start of CeBIT 2013 in Hanover, holistic consulting is now being offered. For existing customers who want to benefit from the new Business Suite, SAP provides a service pack (EhP). For the migration of legacy databases to Hana, SAP has developed a rapid deployment solution for fast implementation.

Eat Your Own Dog Food

SAP has migrated the CRM system to "powered by Hana". The project was completed in record time, according to the company itself, and it is now the first customer to introduce the new solution.

Thus, Walldorf was more exciting than Hanover: SAP database chief Franz Färber was supposed to lead a panel discussion with EVP Bernd Leukert, but was not available for journalists and analysts due to the CRM/Hana release change.

The transformation process took about two and a half months and was completed at the same time as CeBIT, but there was no proof of this!

"Real-time insight into our customer pipeline gives us the opportunity to continuously analyze our business. This way, we know exactly where we need to schedule additional resources.

SAP Global Customer Operations is strongly committed to ensuring that SAP regularly delivers innovative business applications based on Hana and actively deploys them itself as a committed internal customer"

said Robert Enslin, President of Global Customer Operations and member of SAP's Global Managing Board.

"By migrating our own CRM system to CRM powered by Hana, we benefit from a faster solution that we were able to implement without interrupting business operations.

Another benefit is that we now have visibility into valuable information anytime, anywhere - from the customer level up to senior management. This data helps us make informed decisions."