Drivers of development innovation

Whenever you have the opportunity to listen to a co-founder of SAP talk about innovation, it’s worth listening. SAP is unusual among the Giant Software Companies in that it’s reinvented itself many times: from a big mainframe enterprise resource planning provider, to a purveyor of massive client/server software, to a maker of a Java application server platform (NetWeaver).

Today, SAP trying to reinvent itself again, into a SOA-driven software-as-a-service company that offers whole new hosted application platform.

As the Software 2007 conference, which took place earlier this week in Santa Clara, Calif., Hasso Plattner spoke about drivers for innovation. Plattner, a former IBMer, helped found SAP in 1972, served as its CEO, and today, he’s chairman of their supervisory board, as well as their Chief Software Advisor – a great job title.

Here are seven points that I extracted from Plattner’s fire-hose presentation, which alone was worth the price of admission to the conference:

1. Focus on user requirements, instead of thinking only about business requirements. In the past, Plattner said, SAP talked mainly to high-level executives at its customer companies, and built software (like R/3) which addressed what those executive said the business needed. By doing that, he said, SAP missed a lot of features and functions that its software should have delivered. For its new SaaS products, SAP’s new emphasis is on figuring out what its users need instead.

2. Separate user interfaces from applications – and be willing to have multiple user interfaces to an application. R/3 had a single user interface for all customers, no matter how big or small they were, what industry they were, or what type of tasks the users were doing. The company has learned that it’s better to separate the UI from the core application. Have a single application, with a single code, but build GUIs that fit the customer, instead expecting that one GUI model fits all.

3. Hosted software works, and works well, even for business-critical applications. Google and Salesforce.com have demonstrated that SaaS works, Plattner pointed out. “The complete enterprise can run in the cloud,” he said, “and every year it becomes more obvious that the cloud is a viable alternative to on-site computing.”

4. In-memory databases matter. Plattner explained that with one query system they’re using as a test case, SAP consolidated five years worth of data from an accounting application – 36 million line items – from requiring a 116GB relational database to a 1.2GB in-memory database. The average time to complete a query against all that data: 1.2 seconds. “Think about machines with multiple processors, multiple cores, and a hundred gigabytes of memory,” he said, “and imagine what this can do for putting information at your fingertips.”

5. Application response time, aka speed, matters. Plattner wants what he called “Google-speed” for application response time. Enterprise software, whether it’s running on-site or in the cloud, should be as fast as Google, he said, and this will change the nature of queries, he said: if it only takes a second to get the results from a query, you can make a first query; if there are to many results, you can refine and filter, and keep making iterative queries until you get the results you want. Contrast that, he said, with older systems, which took sufficiently long to return results that it was worth putting a lot of up-front effort into constructing the query to get it right the first time. Users are very comfortable with making iterative queries, he believes – if the response time is fast enough.

6. Don’t make it pretty, make it functional. When you’re trying to convey information, Plattner insist, “the most minimalistic form is the best. The more you put colors, three-dimensional images and fancy interfaces around the information, the more you convolute it.” Again citing Google’s search engine as a ideal, he said, “Beautification is the wrong way. Google does it the right way; other companies beautify and the response time drops to 2 seconds, 3 second, 4 seconds, or worse. Google stays focused on speed.”

7. SOA will accelerate software development. A Google-speed hosted environment in the cloud, coupled with the modular reuse enabled by SOA, and widely available software interfaces, will accelerate the pace of software development tremendously. “We could come back to the speed we had in the early 1990s, when we could roll out a new release every three months,” Plattner predicted.

Stodgy old SAP as the new Google: Who’d have thought it?