Graversen

Sunday the 28 june 2009 I was at my first Openwater swimming competition. It was a competition called Viking svøm. Being a long time swimmer I did not expect the 2500 meter en Roskilde fjord as a problem.

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I punched a swimming suit to be able to swim faster and in colder water. I found one used for 1000kr for an ok model.

The swimming went well. I had some problems with my shoulder, since it was much harder to swim with neoprene around the shoulders. But I think I managed the problem as I got use to the suit. I will need to practice more in the suit to the next completion.

For the finish I did not go for the correct target. I found some tents outside the harbor, that I swam towards. This proved to be wrong and I had to swim back toward the harbor entrance. Next time I need to look more closely at the finish before starting.

I got a time of 43:04, which was ok. The only problem was that I was beaten by a 12 year kid. I could probably also swim faster at that age.

sport

This year was my first reboot. I have heard a great deal about the venue, but always too late to attend. This year thanks to twitter, I got the information about Reboot in time.

I have heard about reboot from Danish Radios Harddisken, from some of the previous conferences. They have made some great reports from the event. I got the impression that it was only IT people from Denmark, who came for the conference. That myth was blown away when I followed the twitter stream to the conference. There were quite a lot of foreigners and people from different industries.

The price was not an excuse compared to other conferences. The price was only €350 for two days compared to a standard SAP conference with a price of around €700 per day. And I did not have any consulting gig at the moment, so I did not have to take the days off.

My purpose with going to the conference this year was to get some inspiration for my startup, meet and learn from someone who have done a startup and get some inspiration for my life (Small issue). I have achieved all my goals for the conference. And what it even better, I had real fun in the process.

There were two days packed with all kind of talks. A large number of the talks were about something that I found interesting. It was difficult to pick the talks, because many of the talks, I wanted to hear, was at the same time. Luckily it was just to select one, and have fun with it.

The networking part of the conference was really easy. Everybody wanted to talk and learn from each others. I’m just starting to be a better networker, and be able to find the right people. But at this conference, it was really easy to start a conversation with other participants.

What did I learn on the conference? The reason for going to a conference is go meet new people, sell or learn something new. I did not sell anything, and it was not a goal. I have not processes my notes from Reboot yet, they are on my todo list. I don’t think I learned something, I can use on my job tomorrow. It has mostly some tools to help create, a vision for what I would like my future to be.

I think that the issue, with not learning something which can be used on the job tomorrow, can make it difficult to sell the idea of the conference to ones Boss. A way to justify the conference could be by seing this as a part of Stephen Covey’s 7.th habit. Habit 7 is about shaping the saw, get inspiration from outside. I see reboot as a way to step back from reality and get other inputs which will make life better.

I noticed some things which were different from my previous conferences.

• The conference was ideological with the idea of Action. The Action was in many of the talks and thereby giving the word meaning.
• Many presentations just had one word pr slide. This was a different way of presenting, than I have learned in my presentation courses. My previous experiences were just one slide pr 5 minutes, and then it should be a different way to paraphrase what was said or some graphics. The slides at reboot were more used to enhance the statement of the word. I have to learn more about this type of presenting, if it helps the learning experience.
• People were working the whole time on their computers. But they were not doing work e-mails. It more looked like it was blogging or twitting. I was unable to follow the twitter stream and find interesting stories and blogs, hopefully I’ll find that information now.

The last part of the conference was probably the most interesting. The After party. It was held in “Kødbyen” and was a street party. In the beginning it did look really boring, just a few people sitting on chairs, but it turned out to be the coolest party. I did not know if it was possible to get 50+ people dancing in the street. The only bad thing about the party, was that it was shutdown because of noise regulations at 1am.

Then I want to say thanks to Thomas Mygdal-Madsen and all the other creators of the conference. Also the presenters did a great job, maybe a shame that they did not get evaluated. It was a blast to be a part of the conference and I hope that I’ll be able to be there next year also.

I did not bring my camera, but would have liked to have spiced up this post with some images. Instead try to look at flickr or Marias photos.

conference, inspiration conference, inspiration, reboot, reboot11

For the last couple of years the job considering integrating legacy systems with the SAP ERP system has stayed the same. Each system is unique, so integration had to start from scratch. There could be some limited reuse between integrations, but they did not have a large impact.

Many of companies are going to use SaaS (at least that is what many company is betting on). SaaS strategies could be seen as a way to get a best-of-breed application. Some of the SaaS applications are probably going to replace old legacy applications or reduce the number of more legacy applications being created. Integration between SAP and SaaS applications are wherefore going to play a large role in the integration work done with PI.

My experience with integration with a systems, is that it takes an average of 10 days pr system (The development could be completed within 2 days, but support during testing and bug tracking is required). If the complexity is getting larger or requires the use on new services in SAP, the number of days will skyrocket. Large parts of the integration work are concern error handling, when some unexpected data is received. The price for 10 day integration is at least €10.000, but with a high uncertainty. Such start prices will many business cases fail in adopting a SaaS application, because of the initial investment.

One way to lower this price is if the SaaS vendors also use the same Enterprise Services that SAP is exposing. Then integration will just be to connect the two interfaces and will just require testing for the business functionality. From a customer perspective this would be the ideal situation, and lower the cost of integration.

If there are no Enterprise Services to cover the SaaS integration, two things should happen; Either an Enterprise Service is created or a PI integration is created. The two options can be produced by a consulting partner and then shared under some license. Open source could be an option if it was supported by the SaaS provider.

Creating reusable integration parts can be difficult, especially in small markets like Denmark. The Danish government was very keen on electronic invoices(OIOXML), using the UBL standard. That led to a race for consultancies to create templates for integrations. I do not know any company, how got a large enough part of the integrations, to have justified a large upfront investment a shrink wrapped solution.

Reuse is possible for some domains. I have been involved in project, where reuse of BPM functions lead to easy integration with the 2th and 3rd application. In this project the Enterprise Service was implemented as a ccBPM in PI. The later integrations needed some adjustments to support the new functions and integration protocols, but the overall framework proved successful.

We asked the vendors of the third party application, if they had any integration to SAP. They all did have some integrations, but for different versions of SAP and application components. Challenges like this are going to continue because of the flexibility in SAP. In some cases can different modules handle the same functions. I doubt an Enterprise Service should handle the functionality in two different modules.

With SaaS application is the marked larger since it is global and allow for packaged solutions. The packaged solutions can both be PI mappings and BPM’s or Enterprise Services and sold via Ecohub or from the SaaS vendor.

A way a business model for this could be to give a lower rate on the first implementation; then sell this integration to other customers. It will take a few iterations before a shrink wrapped integration can be released.

To have an integration for SAP must be a really interesting for SaaS providers, because it will make it easier for customers to start using their services. If the customer is going to spend a large number of days on integrating the application, it is less likely to happen. Without an integration to the ERP system, some of the benefits are removed from the application.

For consultants will it also be interesting, if you only have to produce something once and then be able to sell it multiply times. The issue is then how the global marked can be supported, but remote consulting via VPN can probably solve most of the issues.

I’m looking forward to see if, this is going to be the business model for future PI consultants.

integration, pi, saas, sap consulting, integration, pi, sap

I have the domain figaf.com where I’m hosting a CMS joomla site with some tools I have created. There is not a lot of traffic on the site. There are currently only 200 visitors a day, so it does not require a large server. The application that I’m using requires command access to run. I could therefore not use a hosted PHP plan. I therefore had to somehow get a server or use Virtual Private Server. I liked the idea of being able to scale the business after the needs.

I original choose Amazon EC2 because it was the only place I could rent servers for a low monthly rate. I did not find slicehosts plans attractive in comparison. They seem too small for what I needed, because I did not have any idea of what I needed.

I have now decided to move to Mosso. Mosso is Rackspaces name for Slicehost, after Rackspaces acquired Slicehost.

The advantages of Mosso are:

• Plans starts with just 256Mb ram while EC2 has 1.7Gb.
• Backup for small servers is done with a click in the control panel.

The Amazon EC2 solution has the following advantages:

• Datacenters in both US and Europe giving lower roundtrip times.
• Large verity of images from different vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM
• Auto scaling and load balancer application, so it is easy to customize the operation of the scalable web infrastructure.
• No cost on data to the S3 service, where data and backups can be stored.
• The ability to customize backup and additional storage capabilities with Elastic Block storage.
• EC2 has a proven API, where Mosso is just releasing their version.

The Pricing of the 2Gb Mosso and the 1.7Gb EC2 is about the same. So it should not be the reason to choose any of the services.

I have not compared the CPU speed of the two solutions. Mosso says that it will allow the extra capacity to be shared among the instance running, so you might get more CPU cycles here.

I will continue to use EC2 for testing SAP software running on windows. Because the I’m not required to purchase hardware for the tests.

hosting amazon, ec2, mosso, slicehost, vps