How ASUG Impacts SAP Customer Investments: Podcast Transcription
Jon Reed with Steve Strout, ASUG CEO
Podcast Interview Date: December 3, 2007
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Jon Reed: Hi, welcome to our latest podcast from JonERP.com. I'm your host, Jon Reed, and joining me is our special guest, Steve Strout, who is the CEO of ASUG, the SAP Users' Group. Today we're going to talk with Steve about his role as ASUG's first CEO, grill him about some of the challenges SAP customers are facing, ask him about ASUG's plans for 2008, and anything else that might come up during our discussion.

This podcast is hosted by my site, JonERP.com, and was made possible by a joint collaboration between my site; B2B Workforce, an SAP Premiere Partner; and ERPGenie.com, The Ultimate ERP Website.

It's great to have a chance to sit down with Steve today. I first met Steve during a wine-and-dine shindig at SAPPHIRE/ASUG 2007. Right after I was introduced to Steve, I'm pretty sure someone spilled a drink on him, so I'm hoping Steve doesn't still associate me with conference mishaps and wine spills.

It's interesting that so many people in the SAP community take ASUG's presence for granted. But anyone who remembers the early days of ASUG has to be impressed at how ASUG has evolved from a small thorn in SAP's site to a true collaborative partner.

So I'm hoping Steve will have some good insights on these topics today. And with that, I'd like to formally welcome Steve Strout to our podcast.

Reed: So Steve, why don't you step back for a moment and tell us how you originally got involved in the wacky world of SAP and then how you found yourself in the current role as the first ASUG CEO.

Strout: Well, I gotta say, I just love this organization. I started coming to events back in 2002, which doesn't seem like a long time ago to some people, but for me, I was just going and beginning an implementation of ERP. For me, that's like a lifetime ago.

But one of the things I noticed back then - and I see it every time I talk with volunteers and other members today - is that every time I go to one of our events, the people are just so passionate about the organization, and it's that they feel that it's their organization, that they have lots of commitment associated with it.

We were a media company putting in the first set of IS-Media in North America, so we were the first ones to go live with that application suite. and so I started the media SIG for ASUG back in April of 2003.    

Eventually, they asked me to join the board of directors back in 2006. Obviously, this provided me some insight in what the organization was and how it operated and who the people were. And as I looked around, I had ideas on how to improve it, and while it's gotten better over the years, after starting as basically like a little club, it's now close to a 20-million-dollar operation and has a bunch of people working on it.

It's kind of exciting. And I'd been a CIO, a CTO at a bunch of medium-sized companies and Fortune 500 companies, and for me it was just time to do something different. So when the board decided that they wanted to have a CEO, I stepped out of the room, put my hat in the ring, and let them finish the conversation. But I knew that from my perspective that this was the job for me; I feel like I was born for it. So, I'm excited.

Reed: You're now several months into this role, and in an earlier podcast, SearchSAP.com Chairperson Rod Masney indicated you would have about that much time to come up with a roadmap of next steps for ASUG. Without putting any undue deadline pressure on you, how is that going, and what are the key steps you're focusing on now?

Strout: I'm just completing the 2008-2010 strategy documents, and I'm scheduled to deliver those to the board later this month. But basically the goal is to redefine what a user group is, and I want to make ASUG what I call the center of the SAP ecosystem, where people automatically know to come for information and advice, and to be the trusted adviser of a company, whether an installation member, an associate member, or a university alliance, etc.

We have tens of thousands of members who have real world experiences, and that allows them to be able to converse in a very educated way. And being able to share that knowledge with others and learn something of themselves at the same time I think is pretty cool, so. And we have an education system that provides content and structured learning materials, etc., but for me it's about working with other people, building relationships, etc.

I want ASUG to be the center of that community. And while we don't all have the answers all the time, we certainly know who does, and being able to reach out into a group of over 50,000 members is pretty cool.

Reed: Absolutely. And as we wrap on the 2007 year we can look back to a successful TechEd event, back to the second combined ASUG/SAPPHIRE conference last spring. So in your view, what were some of the biggest accomplishments and milestones of ASUG this year?

Strout: It was just a tremendous year for attendance at our events, both the face-to-face as well as the virtual ones, and we've just had some really great accomplishments. We created and delivered on a successful new event format for bringing together several of the process- and industry-focused events in one location: our PLM, SEM, EAM events were co-located with SAP's adaptive manufacturing.

We've collaborated on other large-scale events like the annual conference with SAPPHIRE, obviously, and TechEd. And these things are just getting better as time goes on: SAPPHIRE and annual conferences are getting to where there were almost 16,000 people at this last one.

While that can sometimes be daunting, it's also a tremendous opportunity to meet and find other people that have your same interests or can provide you information. It's also been an opportunity for our associate members, our vendors, to help them showcase their wares into our audiences.

We launched a record number of influence councils this past year: we had 26 new ones, including Business Process Management within Enterprise SOA. This is  around 40% more than what we had in 2006, and this whole influence council continues to impact the products and services that SAP provides.

And being a little self-serving here: the hiring of me, and I recently hired a lady named Cyndi Leamon, who is a board member, to lead up our education and events areas. And she will be hiring a CIO.

We're an organization based around technology and around education and around networking. And putting in place people to manage that have a lot of background and a lot of history with SAP is a big win for us.