Five minutes with the good Doctor
Recently, Oxygenation conducted a QnA with Dr Karsten Schulz, VP of SAP Research, to find out what the SAP research unit does and to discuss some of the product prototypes it is currently trialing.
Where is the SAP Research Centre based?
We have two Australian operations. Our main office is located in Brisbane and has been going since 2001. Last year we also established a small spin-off team in Sydney. We employ around 50 staff.
What is your brief?
We are technology and business scouts for SAP. We try to identify new trends in the marketplace that are relevant to our customers and hence to SAP. As part of that brief we do long term research and product prototyping. We speak to customers and partners about their issues and where they would like to see new solutions from SAP. And then we try to build and implement them in a prototypical way.
The results of our work are then transferred to the SAP development organisation and its charter is the productisation and commercialisation of new ideas and technology.
What is a recent example of a prototype you have developed?
We have built a clever iPhone application based on SAP business intelligence technology. The application combines tweets from the general public and traffic authorities about traffic conditions and congestion in Brisbane and Sydney. We feed these tweets through our BI technology which runs on a virtual server provided by Amazon and make them available to iPhone users .
Not a typical product you would expect to see from SAP?
No, maybe not, but while many groups within the company are charged with incorporating new ideas into the work they do, SAP Research has a specific charter on innovation and it is what differentiates us from the product divisions. We have a longer time horizon to develop our thoughts and typically work on projects over a three to five year period. We push our research beyond the normal product parameters. We also partner with universities and follow ideas that are just over the horizon. We test ourselves to see if we can mature those ideas to a point that we can envisage a product offering further down the track.
What other work have you done recently?
We are also working on a financial planning and wealth management tool for consumers. We want to build an automated financial adviser that is very easy to use and would enable individuals to get a better idea on their long term finances and what the impact of short term decisions, like buying a car or going on holiday, would have on their financial stability.
Are these end user products an attempt at SAP to diversify beyond its traditional enterprise space?
SAP has set itself the objective that it wants to reach one billion users and this is one way of doing that.
What are some of the other key innovations you are currently researching?
We are currently doing a lot of work under the heading of the “Internet of Services”. This is a platform to host and broker business services. Our vision is that sooner or later every user application will be a service. At that stage, users will need a good way to describe, discover, and often, link these services together, so they can build new applications or extend existing ones.
What work are you doing to further improve the user’s experience of SAP software?
It is always a challenge to bring ongoing innovation to our customers without disrupting the way our installed base goes about its daily business. We are currently exploring a concept called “Timeless Software” which is an attempt to bring innovation to our users without costly and time consuming upgrades. An example of this in action would be our enhancement packs, which enable customers to add components and make refinements to their SAP business applications, while leaving the runtime environment in place as much as possible.
As part of this we are also doing research in the area of collective business process management (BPM). This is an attempt to tap into the knowledge of people involved in BPM and make their skills and know-how available to a wider number of users within an organisation through the use of a BPM editor. Basically, we are trying to democratise BPM so different parties involved in a particular business process can collaborate, through the use of an interactive tool, on how that particular process functions.
User experience is very high on our agenda and our approach involves much more than just creating a pretty user interface. Creating products with the user in mind from the outset is now fundamental to how we approach the research we do around new applications.
Finally, could you tell us about Yowie?
Yowie is an attempt to turn a paradigm on its head. Usually, when an SAP user, let’s say at a customer service centre representative for a large manufacturer, receives an email from a customer they have to start searching for things that the email relates to in order to make sense of it. With Yowie we are trying to automate that process and make sense of the email for the recipient so they can take action immediately and not spend too much time looking for the relevant information.
For instance, the email may contain a product name, or material number, and Yowie will go off to the relevant CRM or SCM system and pick up all the information about that product – the price, the availability, etc. It will also fetch information about the sender – contact and address details, location, etc. This information is then presented in a panel in context with the email. Yowie is an example of the work SAP is doing in providing clever ways to link business systems and unify the day-to-day actions users have to undertake to execute their duties.
