Getting to grips with SAP before Single Customer View 2.0

My closest interaction with SAP was in 2007 when they flew me and few other bloggers to Vienna to blog about SAP Sapphire, which was an unprecedented opportunity for enterprise bloggers. As usual, I was the wild card (no complaints). Wait till the end of the blog post for an update.

sap sapphire 2007
Whilst we, UnifiedVU have focused on cloud apps for Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) until now, its time to explore helping larger customers including multinationals on the benefits of Single Customer View 2.0 (SCV 2.0), a novel and significantly less costly way to bring your software world onto one screen than SCV 1.0, helping your team to make best-informed decisions whilst saving 30 minutes of your day.

 

Getting to grips with SAP

When I think of SAP, the first person who come to my mind is Craig Cmehil. Based on a quick call with him, here’s what I established, i.e. understanding SAP in 20 minutes, which you know is impossible, but for a novice it’s a good starting point:

  1. Traditional SAP ERP, e.g. SAP R/3 which was officially launched in 1992. Scary, but these software still run the world. Rest APIs have to be built on ABAP, the proprietary SAP language.
  2. Java based SAP Netweaver introduced in 2004 – This was the key topic when we attended SAP Sapphire in 2007.
  3. SAP Hana Platform shipped in late 2010, still as an on-premise solution
  4. SAP Hana Cloud Platform, a pure cloud offering.

Wikipedia is a good place to get to grips with some of the past technologies that SAP brought to market.

 

Single Customer View and SAP

Until now, a number of vendors have provided Single Customer View 1.0 propositions centred purely around Master Data Management (MDM) solutions for SAP customers. Among the vendors are Uniserv Smart Customer MDM and Experian Data Quality. No doubt we will come across more as we explore introducing Single Customer View 2.0 to SAP customers.

Here is an inforgraphic from Uniserv on Single Customer View 1.0.

Uniserv Single Customer View

Uniserv Single Customer View

 

SAP Sapphire 2007 – Update on Bloggers

I know I’m side tracking here, but this is as a good excuse as any to check out on my fellow bloggers who attended the SAP Sapphire in 2007.

sap sapphire 2007

  1. Axel Angeli – then and now The Mentors of the Service Oriented Architecture
  2. Craig Cmehil – then Community Evangelist, SAP and now Global Director Developer Relations, SAP
  3. Maggie Fox – then Social Media Group and now with Ryerson DMZ and Heart and Stroke Foundation having spent a stint at SAP as Senior Vice President, Digital, Global Marketing. Member, Senior Executive Team
  4. James Governor – then and now MonkChips
  5. Dennis Howlett – then blogger at AccMan and now blogging at Diginomica
  6. Thomas Otter – then and now SAP via few other entities. Still blogs at Vendorprisey
  7. Prashanth Rai – CIO Weblog
  8. Sigurd Rinde – then and now with Thingamy and blogs at Forthcoming
  9. David Terrar – then D2C and now with Agile Elephant
  10. Charlie Wood – Moonwatcher
  11. Dale Vile – then and now Freeform Dynamics but the old Blog seem to be dead
  12. Manoj Ranaweera – then doing a brain dump of EIPP at Causeway and now with UnifiedVU Manoj Ranaweera EIPP Blog – oh that’s me! Blog is no longer called EIPP though.