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Podcast Transcripts

Transcripts from select JonERP.com podcasts are posted on this page. We do not transcribe all of the podcasts our our site, but all the transcripts we do have available will be posted here. For text "overview briefs" of all the podcasts available on JonERP.com, check out our podcast descriptions blog.
Jon Reed Interviews Krishna Kumar: Podcast Transcription PDF Print E-mail
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Reed: One of the reasons I wanted to talk briefly about your product is that it seems to me that your product leads the way for a different kind of Enterprise Services roadmap. I’m not going to knock the official roadmap of getting governance structures in place and upgrading to the latest and greatest functionality, but your roadmap - and correct me if I’m wrong- seems a little more focused on getting your Business Intelligence or your Business Warehouse solution up to speed, gathering your transactional data.

Once you have that data, you’re in a position to then leverage it and mash it up with best-of-breed content providers of different kinds that can give you insights on your data you wouldn’t be able to get with content that you wouldn’t be able to easily develop internally; for example, extensive demographic information. Is that an accurate assessment of what you’re trying to do and what some of the opportunities are for companies?

Kumar: Absolutely right. For example, if I need to fix a roof, there are two ways to do it: either I fix it by myself or I get the best guy to do it. So the best-of-breed is key. The fact that now services are eSOA-enabled allows me as a company to delegate responsibility to people who can do best, without investing heavily in my internal infrastructure.

Going back to the market demographics example, I can build a very strong database of my prospects either by hiring twenty cold-callers who build my database or by going to ACNielson and using their capability and pre-built database of sales prospects. The power of eSOA now is the fact that I can go to ACNielson and embed the data into my ecosystem almost as seamlessly as though it is hiding inside my firewall. The fact that it’s now best of breed as part of my ecosystem is really what eSOA is all about.

Reed: Your product is an example of a few rare products that I’ve run into that don’t actually require you to be on NetWeaver 7.1 and ERP 6.0. You basically require at least some version of NetWeaver and BW, but I think it’s 3.x onward, right? Or is it 3.1?

Kumar: It’s pretty much 3.x onward. Any BW application that is capable of expressing what is called an MDX - stands for Multi-Dimensional Expression Language - is pretty much compliant with our Magma product. Basically all we need is a BW system that can talk the global language. What you need is a NetWeaver system that can talk the RFC language, and you’re ready to build the plumbing.

Reed: That’s excellent. You and I discussed before this podcast that our plan wasn’t to focus in on, “Oh, this is the only product that can do these kinds of things.” It was more of an illustration of a different way of making some of the SOA opportunities practical and usable for SAP customers, and to look at it from the vantage point of leveraging the analytics you’ve already developed versus the need to run on the latest and greatest stuff.

And we’ve seen this approach work in the marketplace: I know you have a number of active customers, and i actually talked with some Home Depot management folks who had not used your solution but had found some similar value in these kinds of third-party mashups. I was hoping we could give listeners a chance today to get a feeling for what kinds of things companies are doing now beyond the hype of eSOA, and I thought those were some great insights. Did I leave anything out along those lines that you wanted to cover?

Kumar: No, I think that’s a great point, and when viewers get a chance, they can go to Zillow.com. It is not an SAP-based solution; it is purely a product that uses a map to overlay data of housing prices. And how much easier can it get? By looking at a map, we’re going down to a street level. If you can get to know the house prices, that’s really the power of eSOA: being able to mash up data from disparate data sources, to come up with new business ideas, new business models that are almost game-changing.

Reed: And one of the things I don’t want to lose track of there is just how the spatial analytics and how the visual elements can really pay off. You’ve talked about this before, and we’ve talked about one of the benefits of eSOA is that it seems pretty abstract, hard to quantify, so the value is being able to show an executive a visual representation instead of asking him to dig through another white paper to try to make sense of these terms.

And one of the things I liked in your presentation was the illustration of a company evaluating opening a new store front. It was literally a visual representation of different neighborhoods populated by the demographics they were targeting, so they could see, “Ok, here’s where the competitors are, here’s where the key pockets of the demographics are that we want to target.” And you could see how if you could go to a CEO with something like that, you’re going to get so much more attention than you are if you’re going to hand them an Excel spreadsheet and say, “The opportunity’s in here somewhere.” So that’s something I think you got across really well.

Kumar: Again, if you look at mashups and eSOA, they’re pretty interchangeable terms for the most part. Mashups and eSOA have found maximum adoption in the visual community. So the visualization could either be a web log or it could be a map or in our case it’s Google Earth, and the fact that it’s a map makes it so much easier because now you have one dimension - the geography dimension - out of the box. You can throw a time dimension in there, out of the box, and you have pretty much taken care of two dimensions purely from a visual standpoint.

What that means is that now you’re opening up the possibilities of other dimensions for analytics. So I can view the context of, in your case, store-fronting: store-fronting, time-animated, let’s say as a function of weather, or as a function of demographics. The fact that now there are a lot more visual components opens up the opportunity for other kinds of analytical layers to be thrown on top of this dashboard. That is really the power of mashups and eSOA.

Reed: Well, that’s excellent. I wish we could talk even longer today. We’ve covered so much ground, but this is all new stuff and there’s so much to cover here. One thing I hope we’ve gotten across to our listeners is things that companies can do to take advantage of these technologies sooner rather than later, and also giving SAP professionals a little bit to think about in terms of their next steps, and I think we can cover that perhaps more in a future podcast as well.

So on that note, I want to thank Krishna for showing up for our podcast today and giving us this great information. Once again, this podcast was a joint venture between B2B Workforce, SAP Tips, and my site, JonERP.com, “Bringing you career answers for SAP professionals.” I’d like to thank you for being a part of our podcast today. Check back soon for another podcast from JonERP.com, the only podcast series that takes you inside the SAP consulting market.

Editor’s Note: This interview is not a verbatim transcription of the podcast. It was edited for clarity and readability; however, no content from the podcast conversation was removed.

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