Suddenly SAP has woken up to China. Now its CEO Bill McDermott thinks China is their second home. He is excited because of what he can do for Chinese companies in terms of management tools and real time BI.
There is a story in the Marketing "bible" by Philip Kotler that everyone reads in his/her MBA school. The story goes that once a shoe salesman goes deep into Africa and looks around for market and sends a telex saying "Nobody wears shoes here. No market. Send me the ticket for back home".
After a few years, the shoe company thinks maybe the things would have changed. This time they send an exceptionally enthusiastic salesman there. He looks around and again sees no one wearing any shoes and sends the telex back home saying "Nobody wears shoes here, Great market! Send supplies immediately!".
Now, both the telex messages show how one can look at the same market. China for BI is - somewhat - like the Rural Africa for Shoes in the above story.
The companies are mostly backed by the Government and do not start with an obvious business model or an ROI understanding and sensibility. What they have is the backing of the Government and in most cases also the patronage. If this is the situation, then where is the case for BI?
I know in India, most companies also do under-hand dealings. Its a must. Because, there are enough bureaucrats to bribe for every little thing. And that money for bribe has to come from undeclared income (or black money). So there is a stream coming in and a stream going out that is unaccounted. How do you handle that?
So, when you start creating systems to calculate the finest accounting details and cash flows, you quickly come to know that there is something amiss. That is what the top guy doesn't want you to know! :) So, systems like BI etc, aren't that useful. Maybe for some kind of management reporting but not all types. And they want some manual intervention before the figures can be visible to all. To heck with data integrity norms!
Now, let's listen into McDermott-speak:
"The potential here is just thrilling, so we want to treat China as if it's a second home," McDermott said in an interview today in Beijing. "If you look at this market, the fantasy of what we could be in this market will exceed anything that a CFO could put on a spreadsheet, so let's go for the big dream."
His excitement particularly stems from his acquisition of Sybase as an add on to the already confused stable of BI products within the SAP applications. There is BI or BW, there is BPC, there is BOBJ and now the Sybase. I understand that all serve different purposes, but that is not very often translated to the client. It took us almost 3-4 months to get the client to understand why BW is important even if they wanted to use BPC.
Sybase ostensibly enhances the Mobile BI offerings by SAP. And why is that so exciting?
By 2014, 90 percent of the world’s population will have a mobile device and there will be 6.5 billion mobile connections, according to research firm Gartner Inc. The market for mobile device management software will grow to $382.7 million in 2014 from $265.3 million in 2009, according to research firm IDC, SAP said last month.
Interesting future ahead.. :)
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