Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.
Hasso Plattner Video Panned By Workday Co-CEO BhusriHasso Plattner Video Panned By Workday Co-CEO Bhusri
Actually, Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri liked the video itself: he called it "enjoyable and amusing." But he didn't care much for the core messages and strategies imparted in the video by SAP's founder and chairman. In fact, he wrote a blog post skewering Plattner and SAP for being five years behind the times and called it, "Welcome to the Present."
2 Min Read
Actually, Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri liked the video itself: he called it "enjoyable and amusing." But he didn't care much for the core messages and strategies imparted in the video by SAP's founder and chairman. In fact, he wrote a blog post skewering Plattner and SAP for being five years behind the times and called it, "Welcome to the Present."As a relatively small but very fast-growing competitor in the enterprise apps space, Bhusri can be expected to take some shots at SAP's strategies and direction. But in unusually blunt language from the typically measured Bhusri, he unloads on SAP's and Plattner's contention that in-memory technology is a hot new thing that will give SAP unique advantages. (You can see the Plattner video in question and an analysis of it at Global CIO: SAP's Hasso Plattner On Databases And Oracle's Larry Ellison.)
From Bhusri's post:
But I don't pay any attention to what SAP does on the innovation front as they're really the dinosaur of enterprise software. . . . To quote the famous Yankees manager Yogi Berra, "it's like déjà vu all over again." My first reaction was that this video MUST have been produced at least 5 years ago and had somehow just been released on the Internet.
For Hasso's benefit, I am happy to share with him that yes, in-memory database technology delivers on all the promises he describes in the video. How do I know? Since the founding of Workday in 2005, all our applications have been built using a pure in-memory database architecture that has done away with the relational model. We have been using this technology for more than 5 years, and have been in production with global, Fortune 500 customers with it for the past 3 years.
I guess this is an example of just how far behind the legacy providers like SAP are in terms of innovation. I wait, with baited breath, for the next installment of "Hasso on Hasso." Might it be "The iPhone: the Next Big Thing?"
Bhusri then goes on to pan SAP's proposed purchase of Sybase-"legacy apps + legacy database + legacy middleware =?"-and, again, that's what competitors are supposed to do.
So it will be fun to see how quickly SAP is able to incorporate this new/old in-memory technology across its vast product line-if it can do so quickly and seamlessly, then by Bhusri's own contention, SAP will have caught up to Workday's state of the art architecture.
But if it doesn't happen quickly-or even if it does-look for Workday and others to continue to try to portray SAP as a company whose video-production technology is slicker than its database technology. Either way, this in-memory flap is shaping up to be quite, well, memorable.
About the Author
You May Also Like
More Insights
