In this post I am linking two research projects performed in the first quarter of this year:

  • The March 21st SAP Jam Session, where Forrester analysts Bill Band, Paul Hamerman, Mike Gilpin, John Rymer, Roy Wildeman, and I discusses SAP’s product  strategy.
  • The March 5th report with Connie Moore on the evolution of the business process professional role .

Paul Hamerman provided a crisp summary of the Jam Session, which he structured as follows:

  • Business growth – including support, analytics, SME solutions, CRM and sustainability
  • Technical innovation – including product releases, agile development, in-memory computing, SaaS, mobile and interoperable components

In February, SAP announced a major management shakeup. Since then, SAP’s strategy hasn’t materially changed, but we expect a few announcements to happen at SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference in May. The attached matrix maps SAP’s strategy areas to the six business process professional role profiles identified in our research: The business growth areas target mainly the “stakeholder”, “change agent” and “guru” roles, while the tech innovation strategy focuses more on the “prodigy”, “operator” and “wannabe” functions.

 The matrix defines a baseline for analyzing the expected announcements. What do you think – Which segment will the SAP strategy upgrade possibly target?