Mobility was another subject that was emphasized during the keynote. Various studies were quoted that suggested that within a few years almost every customer will have at least one mobile app, and by 2015 mobile development projects will outweigh desktop projects by a ratio of four to one. I get that, but so does SAP. I believe it was Steve Lucas (or perhaps Vishal Sikka) who said at a recent event that “Mobile is the new desktop.” I found that most folks at this event believe that MicroStrategy is currently ahead of SAP’s mobility offerings. (That’s probably not a surprise, given the venue.) The primary advantage that they have over SAP is the fact that everything has grown organically, so integration is already there. SAP is still trying to work to get Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and other content delivered to the iPad in a seamless fashion. They’re making progress, but it’s not like MicroStrategy is waiting for them to catch up either.

Both vendors (SAP and MicroStrategy) are making a lot of noise about the cloud. I can see where this would be very attractive, especially for a smaller or mid-sized company. The ability to spin up a project with minimal (or no) investment in hardware would save money but more importantly allow faster time to delivery for the project. They did a good job of spinning that advantage during the keynote, but I don’t think it needs that much “spin” to show the advantages. There wasn’t anything super exciting about this that I haven’t also seen from SAP.

After the keynote we had another nice lunch (again, the food and service at this event reminded me of the way things used to work at Business Objects events) and then it was time for some track sessions. Overall I found this event did not have very many deep-dive technical sessions, and I really missed the labs that are available at Business Objects events.

I attended one session on data “mashups” that reminded me a lot of the features provided on the bi.ondemand.com cloud site. I did pick up a few new sites that are interesting sources for public data. For example, we looked at garbage collection statistics from NYCOpenData. MicroStrategy offers direct interfaces to any URL-enabled data source but also Twitter, FourSquare, and of course Facebook. Another site that provides open data is InfoChimps.

I went to a few other sessions on day 2 and more on the morning of day 3, but nothing that I really want to cover in detail. As I’ve mentioned (more than once) I felt that at least for me this event did not offer enough deep-dive technical content. Even when a talk was interesting (see the notes about the LinkedIn talk from day 1) they often didn’t offer much about MicroStrategy.

But I did get a t-shirt.

I have had a couple of people ask me (offline) if I’m leaving Business Objects and working with MicroStrategy now. Rest assured the answer is no, I am not. But I’m excited about the opportunity to get my hands on another tool, especially when both tools have strengths. Ultimately it’s about getting data to end users in a format that they can use to improve the business, so why not have more than one choice? In fact it has been over a year since I renamed my blog from “Adventures in Business Objects” to “Adventures in Business Intelligence” in order to be able to talk about different ideas like this. I’m nowhere near as fluent in MSTR as I am in BOBJ, but I hope to fix that over the coming years. We’ll see how that goes.

That being said, try to find a bottle of water, or even a water cooler, anywhere around the place. It’s nearly impossible. I finally found some water late yesterday afternoon, after asking a number of different conference folks and getting blank looks or, “I think I saw some over there, somewhere…” comments. The wireless has been good, although it ironically dropped out (at least for me) in the room I went to for the mobility track. That track is all the way on the end of the hotel, so perhaps they need another access point.

Not only are they not handing out survey forms during the sessions, but they’re not scanning our badges as we enter the rooms. Again, for a data company I find that surprising.

But what about the content? Yesterday I attended three sessions. The first was a joint session between Teradata and eBay. The Teradata folks talked about their generic concepts for “big data” and how to let analysts make the best use of it. The eBay gentleman then talked about some specifics around how they work with their large data sources (petabytes of data). It was interesting but I didn’t see a lot of MicroStrategy stuff, just big data stuff. Next I went to a session delivered by LinkedIn. I found it to be more interesting because in this case they talked about data quality issues that I can certainly related to. BOB is nowhere near as big as LinkedIn (they have 135MM users at this point) but we still have consistency issues. For example, the presenter asked the audience how many ways we thought the job title of “Software Engineer” appeared in their database. The majority of the guesses were very low compared to the actual value of over 6,000. They have over 8,000 different iterations of the company name IBM! As you can imagine, searching is a big challenge for LinkedIn. As I said, the talk was interesting, but at the end the presenter had not talked about MicroStrategy or shown a single product during the entire talk! In fact that was the first question from the audience, “How are you using MicroStrategy in your environment?”

The last session I attended (the aforementioned mobility track) was given by a presenter from Lowes Hardware. Lowes is a big user of MicroStrategy products. (In fact their former CIO is now apparently in charge of the cloud for MicroStrategy.) He was by far the most engaging presenter and he powered through his session even after the failure of the audio equipment in the room. Lowes has purchased over 40,000 iPhones and has apparently bet big on that hardware platform along with the mobile products from MicroStrategy. He gave a great example… every store manager used to spend a few minutes each morning jotting down some notes from a sales report in order to have that information with him or her at any point throughout the day. Just a few minutes a day, but it was something they did essentially every day. The replaced the report delivery (and hand notations) with a mobile app and eliminated those few minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? They estimated that the savings (I assume based on average pay for store managers) at only $6.84. I think I have that number correct, if I’m wrong it’s not by much. When that savings was multiplied by the number of managers across all stores, and then multiplied again by the number of days in a year, the total productivity savings came out to $4.3 million dollars. Per year. Talk about a quick return on investment, yes?

The app was cool, but I wanted to know more about how it was built, what tools were used, and what the process looked like. So far the sessions I’ve attended have been very light on specifics, so I hope I pick better sessions today. Will let you know tomorrow.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you that took the time to come up to me at the conference and say how much you appreciated either BOB or my blog. As long as I have been doing this sort of stuff (on BOB we will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary next year) hearing from people never ever gets old. Thank you for taking the time to let me know that you have been helped in some fashion.

The panel will run from 12:30 to 2:30pm on Tuesday, October 11^th and will include a lunch. The Twitter hash tag for the event will be #L2dot0.

Added Information
If you’re not attending the conference, you can still participate. There is a dial-in number where you can listen, and you can post questions via the hashtag mentioned above. Here’s the call information:

Participant Access Instructions – Dial in 5-10 minutes prior to start time using the Participant Phone Number and Participant Passcode.
Participant Passcode: 690937

Toll-Free Phone Number (United States/Canada): 877-702-9054
Toll Phone Number (International): 913-312-1229

• Monday 9:30 AM – 10:30 PM Dave Building a Data Warehouse: Data Modeling
• Monday 10:45 AM – 11:45 AM Werner Building a Data Warehouse: Getting the data into the DWH database
• Monday 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM Michael Building a Data Warehouse: Building a Universe
• Tuesday 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM Dell 0106 Building a Data Warehouse: Intro to SAP Crystal Reports
• Tuesday 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM Simon 2008 Building a Data Warehouse: Report Development in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
• Wednesday 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM Werner 8012 Building a Data Warehouse: Data Quality is key for BI
• Wednesday 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM Werner 8013 Building a Data Warehouse: Enhance the DWH with external data

I won’t get to attend all of the sessions in this series, because immediately after I open with the data modeling talk I will have to jog over to another room to present my second talk titled “Universe Designer Essentials.” I’m all done with my presentations after Monday.

It’s hard to believe that I attended my first Business Objects conference in 1995 (spoke for the first time in 1996) and here we are 17 years later. I must have been 17 when I attended my first one.

Gamers solve molecular puzzle that stumped scientists

Scientists had long been puzzled by the molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme classified as a “retroviral proteases” and found in an AIDS-like virus afflicting rhesus monkeys. The enzyme helps the virus spread, and it could hold a secret about how AIDS and other diseases are transmitted.

The scientists uploaded the viral structures to an online game called “Foldit” which allows game players to collaborate on solving various three dimensional problems. The results?

Sure, that might not sound like much fun to the average Joe. But gamers on Foldit solved the puzzle in less than 10 days.

More detailed article at MSNBC.com

In no particular order…

This was the 15^th anniversary of the conference. There are over 6,000 folks directly attending, and thousands more attending virtually.

The Sybase TechWave conference is co-located here at TechEd this year. So far we have not decided to co-locate the Business Objects conference, but discussions are definitely being held in this area. If you want to have input on this decision, let me know and I will get your feedback to the right people.

The first evening keynote with Dr. Jane McGonigal was fascinating, and for that one I wrote a separate post about the concept of gamification in IT.

The morning keynote included a short video from Hasso. (He is much more interesting and entertaining in person when he’s free to go off-script!) This video was the first of many times I heard the phrase “non-disruptive” used in a sentence. Hasso’s point was that HANA has become proven and tested on a number of extensive customer evaluations over the past 18 months, and now it’s time to start using it. I believe his phrasing was something like HANA is not only viable but extremely desirable.

Vishal Sikka had a number of comments that I found interesting. First, he said his focus was on renewing the SAP suite while at the same time simplifying the system. HANA clearly plays a role here (more on that in a moment).

Vishal’s three focus areas were mobility (everywhere), cloud, and in-memory, which sounded just like the message from the last two years. On the one hand there wasn’t a lot of excitement being generated with this repeated message. But on the other hand, stability is something that IT looks for.

Speaking of stable, BI 4.0 should be out on Friday. That message was loud and clear, from all levels of SAP.

Vishal touched on three major events that took place earlier this year, including the Google purchase of Motorolla, the resignation of Steve Jobs, and HP’s decision to abandon the tablet and personal systems market.

Dr. Christoph Kollatz took the stage to address the question, “Where are we on Hana since sapphire?” He said it had been ten months since the launch, and 3 months sing HANA has become generally available. HANA has the fastest growing pipeline that any product from SAP has ever had. In another briefing one of the SAP executives said that the HANA pipeline is measured in thousands, not hundreds of customers.

Why the continued focus on HANA? It’s not just about performance, it’s about the simplification that can come about as a result of the performance. Vishal referenced Nicholas Negroponte’s vision on one slide which said:

“Bits are increasingly replacing atoms
Value is being created by dissolving layers and structures
Fueled by a cycle of connectedness, disintermediation and ease-of-use”

What does all of that mean? Because HANA has pushed the performance envelope, eventually all of the different layers can be dissolved. The apps and the analytics will all run on the same platform. Eventually.

Of course we had a couple of customer success stories. What made these different was they were no longer showing proof of concept results but live systems.

First up was Yodobashi, a retailer from Japan. They have millions of customers, and a large percentage of those customers participate in a customer loyalty program. It used to take days to run the incentive payment process. After switching to HANA they can generate the same results in a matter of seconds.

Later on during the week in a session with Steve Lucas he took that concept a step further. He proposed a system where a retailer could instantly gain access to a customer’s purchase history at the point of sale system. Based on prior purchases and a number of other criteria, the retailer could tailor a special offer that fits his behavior. This is possible – even with tens of millions or tens of billions of transactions – because of the speed of HANA.

Next up was Nongfu Springs, one of the largest bottled water (and other beverages) companies in China. They had three goals leading to their HANA deployment, and they were able to deliver on all three. Reports were 200-300 times faster than before. They converted 50 stored procedures from Oracle to HANA, reducing run times from 24 hours to 37 seconds after they were optimized. And finally they are able to access data in real time, as their ETL processes no longer incur a 24 hour delay. (Watch a video from Nongfu Springs.)

With this and other “improvement” stories I have to wonder: how much was a result of HANA, and how much came about because of new strategies or processes that were created during the conversion?

Next up? Is HANA better or worse than chocolate cake? Roll the video…

More HANA, the next release due out in November will support BW.

Next topic Net weaver. I tuned out. Sorry, but it’s not my area.

Next topic: BI 4.0 – time to pay attention again. There wasn’t anything new since last year, or since the BI 4.0 launch party that took place earlier this year. Once again they touted the total overhaul that was done on the BI products, which I am sure contributed to the lengthy ramp-up process. I for one am not disappointed that it took so long to get to the GA date, as I remember the fiasco (and no, that is not too strong of a word) that was the original 4.0 release back in the late 1990’s. Vishal did reconfirm 9/16 will GA BI 4.0, so look for it tomorrow.

Later in the keynote the “non-disruptive” nature of HANA was mentioned once again. I think SAP is really trying hard to overcome some issues in the past, where upgrades to the core were time consuming and – dare I say it – highly disruptive to enterprise operations.

Overall this year did not offer any really revolutionary new concepts. HANA is fast. Mobility is hot. Clouds are around somewhere. Sybase did show up a lot more in the smaller briefings, both because of the new release of Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) as well as their Afaria product getting more interest.

Golf was another example she used. Golf really is quite an unusual way to spend time. Suppose that golf didn’t exist today, and someone came up with the idea of putting a little ball into a small hole. Weird idea, right? The most obvious solution is to pick up the ball, walk over, and drop it in the hole. Of course that’s not how golf works. They make it far harder by starting from a long way away, and using various different sticks to hit the ball towards the hole. Pretty ridiculous, right? I can only imagine what the first conversation was like as folks were inventing golf… it probably did not go as Robin Williams imagines. (Warning: includes strong language, definitely not safe for work without headphones.)

Here’s a quote from one of her slides:

Games are unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle

Golf certainly fits that description. With apologies to golf fans everywhere, it’s certainly not a necessary obstacle. The same could be said for many sports. Yet today golf is a multi-billion dollar industry. Folks spend hundreds or thousands of dollars buying equipment, spend hours out of their day, just trying to get better at putting a little ball into a little hole. What are they getting out of it?

Games can be frustrating, certainly golf fits that description. But when we’re successful at overcoming the obstacles (unnecessary or not) it turns out that we can experience certain positive emotions. Those emotions (with golf annotations by me) are:

• 10. Joy – I’m happy I got the ball in the hole
• 9. Relief – I’m so relieved I got the ball in the hole
• 8. Love – I love this game because it lets me put a ball in a hole
• 7. Surprise – Did I really just get the ball in the hole?
• 6. Pride – Yes! I got the ball into the hole!
• 5. Curiosity – I wonder if it’s possible for me to get this little ball in that hole?
• 4. Excitement – Woo hoo! The ball went into the hole!
• 3. Awe and Wonder – What an amazing thing, to get this little ball into that small hole from so far away…
• 2. Contentment – I got the ball in the hole, now I’m happy. (Perhaps the 19^th hole has something to do with this…)
• 1. Creativity – Let me think about all of the different ways that I can get this little ball into that hole.

As she was talking through this list I started to think about how I felt when I was working on a programming problem. I don’t program so much in my job anymore, but I still love to do it. It’s one of the reasons I love working on BOB so much as it gives me a creative outlet for my coding energies, and a certain amount of price and contentment as I see the new code in use by so many people. Now let me repeat that statement with some words emphasized.

It’s one of the reasons I love working on BOB so much as it gives me a creative outlet for my coding energies, and a certain amount of pride and contentment as I see the new code in use by so many people.

There are four of the key emotional states provided by game playing that showed up in that statement, but programming isn’t really a game, is it? It turns out that it can be, and if it is, Dr. McGonigal suggests that we would all be happier and more productive at work. Who wouldn’t want to go to work for forty hours a week (ha, only 40? ) if we could play games all day? But she suggested that it is not just about being more productive at work, but saving the world.

Refocused Efforts

Many folks would say that’s not going to happen, that game playing is simply a waste of time. Dr. McGonigal said that worldwide 3 billion hours a week are spent playing online games. The entire wikipedia, including both content and the underlying code to run the system, took 100 million hours to create! In other words, if we could harness some of the energy and enthusiasm poured into online gaming (it takes 300 to 500 hours per person to get to 80th level in World of Warcraft, which is where the game starts to get fun), we could create 30 wikipedias. Each week.

What does this have to do with IT? Dr. McGonigal presented a number of statistics that showed how gamification or “Game IT” is becoming more interesting to companies around the globe. Most companies will tell you that their people are their most important resource. Gamification is the idea that if we can turn those people into a more energized and engaged workforce, that we will all benefit.

I get it, I think. There have been plenty of times (in my younger days) when I stayed up all night playing games. There have also been plenty of times when I’ve stayed up all night (still in my younger days) solving a particular coding challenge. What did the coding challenge have to do with playing a game? In each case I have an obstacle to overcome, either code that won’t work, or monsters occupying my space station on Mars. In each case I had to exercise creative thinking and try to apply different solutions. Sometimes my code didn’t work, and sometimes the monsters killed me. In each case I got to start over and take a different approach. When I finally solved the problem (code works, monsters eradicated) I felt a definite sense of accomplishment. These feelings can be powerful motivators. Dr. McGonigal calls this “epic wins” and they’re the primary source of those ten positive emotions listed earlier. As she says in her video, “There’s no unemployment in World of Warcraft.”

Gamification In The Real World

As a final point she presented two scenarios where gamification or game play is being used in the real world. The first scenario involved a speed camera at a particular intersection. If you’re not familiar with the concept, a speed camera is essentially an automated policeman that is on duty twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It includes a radar or other speed measuring device, a camera, and access to the database that contains your license plate number as well as all of your personal data. If you exceed the speed limit through the area covered by the camera, your picture is taken (because they have to show it was you driving the car; they cannot ticket the car itself) and a ticket is sent off in the mail. That’s the normal process. At this particular intersection they reprogrammed the speed camera. Not only would it take pictures of speeders, but it would randomly take pictures of folks that were driving under the speed limit. Why?

Because each of those folks was awarded a bonus for driving under the limit. The amount of the bonus depended on the amount collected from speeders over the same period! It essentially became a game where safe drivers could win a share of the fines paid by those that were speeding. Over some period of time (I don’t think she said how long) the average speed through that intersection dropped 18.5%, resulting in a safer environment. Speeding tickets alone were not able to do that.

Dr. McGonigal went on to say that she didn’t feel like this particular game was a sustainable model, and I agree with her. What were speeds like in the area outside of this particular intersection? Were people slowing down overall? Or just at that one intersection? Were people going out of their way to drive through this intersection, therefore increasing traffic congestion, just for a chance at a winning ticket? One thing I’ve observed over the years is that human nature is quite predictable: if you provide an incentive or reward, especially a cash reward, then a certain subset of the population immediately goes about looking for ways to – can I say it? – “game” the system.

The second scenario she presented was also quite interesting, and as far as I can tell not really subject to abuse. It’s really a heart-warming story, and it involves kids playing the most popular sport on the planet: soccer. Yes, I can call it soccer, I’m an American. Of course the rest of the world calls it football.

I’ve seen pictures of kids all over the world playing soccer. Even if they have to make up a ball by wrapping a bundle of trash with tape or string they’ll do it. There were some undergraduate students at Harvard University that came up with this – quite literally – brilliant idea. Why not take the fact that these kids love to play soccer, and help them derive some tangible benefit from it? To do that, they figured out how to put a kinetic energy generator inside a soccer ball. (Read more at www.sOccket.com.) As the kids play soccer during the day, the ball is capturing the motion and using it to charge a set of batteries. During the evening, the kids’ families can plug in a small light that uses this energy and use it to see to cook, or read, or any other activity. The light attachment is an LED light so it lasts a very long time. It also draws very little power which means it couold last up to 24 hours. The sOccet can also power a small fan or – and for most people that could benefit from this I imagine this is by far the most useful benefit – a water sterilizer. All of this just from kids playing a game. The idea turns something that people want to do into a potentially life-saving event. Play some soccer, get clean drinking water.

Get Super Better

During her talk, Dr. McGonigal mentioned that her latest effort into social enhancement via game play was going to be coming out soon. The site is www.SuperBetter.com and the intent is to promote personal health.

SuperBetter is a game that helps you recover from any illness or injury — or achieve any health goal — by increasing your personal resilience. Resilience means staying curious, optimistic and motivated even in the face of the toughest challenges.

…

We believe that instead of being diminished by obstacles in our way, we can grow stronger—much stronger. In fact, science tells us that dramatic, positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of facing an extreme challenge—whether it be coping with a serious illness, daring to quit smoking, or dealing with depression. We call this getting SuperBetter!

I can see many of the attributes she mentioned in her talk in just that one paragraph. Instead of saving the world, we’re saving ourselves. By playing games. Epic Win.

Related Links

• Dr. Jane McGonigal on TED
]]> http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/15/sap-teched-2011-gamification-keynote/feed/ 1 http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/13/does-this-application-need-to-be-mobile/ http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/13/does-this-application-need-to-be-mobile/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:30:15 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=405 As mentioned earlier, one of the key themes mentioned in the morning keynote was (once again) mobile applications. Later on I saw a brief marketing video from SAP that showed off some of their mobile apps, and I started to wonder: were some of those apps mobile because they needed to be? Or because they were simply re-positioned from a desktop? And if so, where is the value? For example, one of the sample apps shown appeared to be an HR app used to approve expense reports. I can honestly say that I’ve never heard a request from our HR department saying they needed to do that via a mobile device. The same could be said for many of the other applications shown (however briefly) in the video.

Years ago I had a friend who started a company that was going to be based on the Internet. His idea would have been a very early front-runner in the social media space, although we didn’t know that at the time. Like many, his company disappeared during the “dot bomb” collapse. What really intrigued me about his idea, though, was that it was not a company that could be built on the Internet, it was a company that required the Internet in order to function. (The same could be said about most social media companies today which is why I said he was a front-runner in the space.) During the same time he was launching his idea, many other companies were trying to simply re-platform their brick-and-mortar offerings on the web, with various degrees of success. They didn’t require the Internet to function, they were just using it as a delivery device.

Today I’m starting to feel like I am seeing the same thing with mobile. Everybody seems to want to show off their mobile apps, but what they’re showing (at least a large percentage of the time) is a desktop app or common function that has been repositioned as a mobile app. It’s something that could be done equally well on either type of hardware. I don’t think anyone with a smart phone is going to be interested in giving up mobile access to their email, and that’s clearly a desktop app that has been re-platformed very successfully. Blackberry probably would not exist as a company today if not for the success of their mobile email devices. When I go out shopping, I frequently use Amazon or eBay as a price guide to see if a locally available item is priced competitively. That’s not a mobile app, though, that’s simply mobile access to data. I could do my comparison shopping at home, but it’s certainly convenient to have it on a mobile device.

I can get sports scores on my phone. I can get the same thing at home. Again, it’s convenient to have mobile access but it’s not mandatory.

Today I can deliver Web Intelligence documents over the Internet with the mobile platform in BI 4.0. That’s not really a mobile application, it’s an alternate delivery path for desktop content. The same thing could be said for the mobile version of Explorer.

In fact, I personally can’t think of a single thing that I currently do with my Blackberry that requires mobility. I just have a bunch of desktop applications in my pocket. There is value in that, but it’s not a very compelling (at least to me) mobility story.

How about you? Do you have any true mobile apps? Something that would not be possible any other way? Or are they simply desktop apps on a different device? Spreadsheets were the “killer app” for desktop computers. Email may have been an early force behind the growth of smart phones, but what’s the true mobile killer app that we can’t live without?

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