We were invited to be in the Web 2.0 in the Enterprise think-tank session hosted by SAP yesterday. It was a way for SAP to engage the enterprise-oriented web 2.0 companies, exchange views and learn. The SAP folks are well-connected and know exactly what is going on in the industry - in fact, I came across a couple of companies I hadn't known before. Here are some things that I learnt from this event:
- Enterprise software has been about process automation, the new web software is about enabling many-to-many collaboration and collective intelligence
- Most existing enterprise software is about "normal" business processes, but most people within enterprises are handling exceptions most of the time
- The value of "good-enough" software in the enterprise - in the sense that not everything is highly transactional requiring high reliability, scalability and so on. As an example, a corporate internal blog is a really useful medium to enable informal collaboration, but that doesn't have the same reliability needs as their ERP system, and it doesn't need "Big IT" to care and feed it
The personal highlight for me was that Craig Cmehil, active in our Zoho Creator forums was mentioned as leading the charge for scripting languages for SAP. I had interacted with Craig through the blogs and our forums, but didn't know he worked for SAP, so that was a surprise.
Comments