Today I came across a splendid post about corporate communications at last week’s SAP Influencer Summit by Barbara French, of SWAY blog. Barbara is a really smart thinker on new influencer models for business to business communications. The post should be essential reading for anyone that runs events for influencers – whether they be financial or industry analysts, bloggers, customers, software developers or folks with a 100k twitter followers. So I asked Barbara if I could replicate it in full here…  she graciously agreed. My recommendation? Read this post and subscribe to SWAY. You might also check out this companion post from SAP’s own Timo Elliott. And this one from @gapingvoid, which is as relevant as it ever was.

Oh yeah: one last point from me. Don’t have anything under NDA unless it needs to be. Identifying your trade secrets before the event will help sharpen up your messages. Blanket NDAs prevent useful feedback.

Barbara Says

The SAP Influencer Summit dominated tech media and Twitter backchannel conversations about SAP all week. The event offers a good example of real time influencer relations management. If you’re planning an influencer summit for 2010, consider these 3 points:

1. Open discourse. Several tech providers nixed live blogging and live micro-blogging (Twitter) during their influencer events this year. SAP set an important precedent by keeping all social media channels open and participating in conversations in real time. Live sessions were blogged, reported, tweeted and debated by people in attendance and by virtual attendees around the world. Follow SAP’s example: Limit NDAs to the situations where they make sense, such as the strategy development work leading up to an event like this. When the content doesn’t mandate an NDA, don’t curb use of social media.

2. Employee engagement. Many SAP employees expanded on speaker and audience comments via Twitter. Creating a wider circle of employee commentators makes perfect sense. And you know what? The press, analysts and consultants were likely to contact their “unofficial” employee sources anyway. It’s a much better idea to involve more employees by design, than to pretend that exchanges are limited to the featured spokespeople and handlers in the room.

3. Diverse attendees. SAP invited a diverse group of influencers to participate. Among tech industry influencers, big brand analysts and media dialogued side by side with solo opinion leaders and every size in between as well as customers and bloggers. Gathering diverse opinion leaders together to share the same information at the same time at a flagship event is smart on several counts. One, it’s efficient. Two, it sets up diverse, multiple touch points with marketplaces. It also helps build enough momentum to flow directly to offline conversations. In other words, no single point of failure and lot of juice.

For more on the SAP Influencer Summit, check out:

• Timo Elliott, an evangelist for SAP. He offers light commentary on what was going on behind the scenes here.  He also links to a PDF document of Twitter feed from #sapsummit.
• Jonathan Becher, SVP marketing at SAP and official SAP blogger for the event, posted here.
• R Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, offers one analyst’s summary of the event themes and SAP’s performance here.

Update December 14th: Adding 2 more links to analyst reactions. Please feel free to add more attendee links in the comments. – B

• Jon Reed, a fellow with PAC , weighs in on the experience and resulting expectations among attendees here
• James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, gives a candid analyst viewpoint that was widely accepted among other analysts here

I just got back SAP’s Influencer Summit for 2009 in Boston. The company seem to be finally emerging from what can only be described as an annus horribilis. 2009 was not a good year for SAP. Sales are down, perceptions are more negative than they have been in a long time because of potential maintenance fee hikes, and Cloud looks like a weak spot because the firm still hasn’t driven any volume through its Business ByDesign platform.

To be fair to new CEO Leo Apotheker he was dealt a pretty tough hand – who wants to take the reins just as the world economy goes into meltdown? That said a more consultative, less confrontational approach to discussions about the maintenance changes could have paid dividends. So what’s been happening?

SAP has been reengineering its operations and focus after the Business Objects acquisition, with the rise and rise of the a free-wheeling culture of information integration and analytics. The most obvious signs of change are new company leaders – at board and VP level.

Things have taken longer to shake out than I expected when I wrote “There’ll Be More Change at SAP in the Next 6 Months Than The Previous 30 Years”. But shake out they have.

SAP wants to get into situational, unstructured apps that cross boundaries but it will need a new mindset to get there. The company doesn’t currently think in terms that allow for uncertainty- every process must be tightly bound. But managing knowledge is an inexact science.

Marge Breya is now executive VP and general manager, Intelligence Platform and SAP NetWeaver Group. Think about it. A non German woman is running Netweaver. I love the fact she does all her down demos. No need for Ian Kimbell. Here is a video interview:

Another executive that has been repeatedly promoted in a very short space of time is Jonathan Becher, now EVP of Marketing. Jonathan is a very different animal from your normal Walldorf marketer. I should point out that I consider him a friend, as well as a client, if I am to say good things about him. I mean how many analytics marketers do you know that would argue against collecting more data.

We have descended into measurement madness using the motto “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”. Our obsession with metrics means we’ve lost sight of business outcomes. “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts”. Perhaps organizations would be better served to focus on what they are trying to achieve than to just keep score.

Not your granny’s SAP then. So what is the lanyard thing in the photo? Its a weird device called an nTag for conferences. It can be used for spot polls during sessions, or to track which sessions are attended, or to swap contact details. What made me chuckle though was that SAP chose not to enable the nTag web site for data sharing due to privacy concerns. The device seems like a great metaphor for the old SAP. Proprietary, heavyweight (seriously, the thing weighs a ton), a data roach motel. Some potential for innovation but too much of a closed network to really do the business. Vinnie likes to think he has a nose for innovation, but the nTag is not it.

Build a web app next time, chaps. Use PhoneGap (client) so you can write an app that runs on Blackberry, iPhone or Android. Lets take the millstone off our necks and start innovating.

I am on the record as saying SAP Business ByDesign, the company’s SaaS suite for medium-sized businesses is going to be a huge success, a somewhat contrarian position.  Three pieces of news from the Summit confirmed my thinking

• Blades powerful enough to run the system at reasonable cost are now available
• SAP has decided to get into bed with Microsoft and an army of .NET developers and VARs by tightly integrating ByDesign with Visual Studio.NET for model-driven development and UI work and customisation. Think about it – SAP now sees Microsoft code as part of its Platform as a Service play for ByDesign, extending the Java/Netweaver based back end and creating margin opportunities for firms that want to sell, say, Carpet retail apps, or other micro-verticals.
• SAP is now finally saying multi-tenancy is solved.

Everything is in play. We’re likely to see a new Information Worker brand, and product set. Netweaver is now just plumbing. A means to an end.

Meanwhile John Wookie, ex-Oracle, is running SAP’s On Demand offerings play. He is not focusing on plumbing, but business apps.  SAP made some big claims for this business, so I need to drill into the customer base, but the new blood has brought a lot of confidence to SAP’s play here. And what a wasted opportunity by IBM- I always felt On Demand was a brilliant play. I mean do business people want to hear about “Cloud” or On Demand? I think the latter.

I am not saying the 2010 is going to be a bumper year for SAP, but it at least feels like some hygiene factors are being worked out, and there are some cool new products to sell if SAP can work out the business model.

There is more to say based on the summit, but for now, that’s a wrap.

SAP is a client, and paid T&E for the event. Microsoft is also a client, as is PhoneGap.

Talend is a French outfit looking to shake up the expensive, largely proprietary world of data integration and analysis with a coherent suite of tools and with a MySQL-like dual licensing strategy. I caught up with VP of Marketing Yves de Montcheuil earlier this week. The really big question is- are enterprises ready for open source data management tools, which spurred an interesting conversation over at Andreas Bitterer’s Gartner blog after Yves accused the analyst leviathan of being overly conservative.

But I don’t need to rehash those arguments. What struck me clearly is that Talend has a solid momentum story, and in this economy pretty much every software license should be reassessed in light of open source alternatives.

• Talend claims 3.3m downloads. So what?
• More interestingly it claims 200k active users, as measured by activities on forums, for example, and downloads of user documentation. Meh.
• The most interesting number – is that Talend has 400 paying customers. That’s a pretty good number for any enterprise start up.

35% of paying customers are Fortune 500 organisations including eBay, Yahoo and Virgin Mobile. Yes there is clearly a bias to web companies in that number, but eBay for example, is a massive Oracle shop –its hardly OSS uber alles.

Another really interesting stat, one that surprised floored me -  55% of its implementations are in operational data stores, rather than ETL.  Its one thing to use OSS to clean your data up, its quite another to rely on it in production. Or is it? One thing I know for certain is that Talend and Bitterer would both agree different categories in data integration have been different for too long.

Another guy that knows a thing or two about data integration and building a company is Bernard Liautaud. Who he? Oh just the guy that founded Business Objects- which SAP acquired in 2007 for $6.8bn, somewhere near the top of the market. Nice exit! Bernard is now managing partner at a little VC company called Balderton, which is funding Talend. Balderton funded Bebo, Betfair and Setanta, so it has a pretty solid record of supporting early stage European businesses.

So what comes next?

Yves says growth- the firm now has sites across Europe [the briefing was ostensibly about the new UK office]. Talend expects revenues to double or triple this year, but of course that’s off a fairly small base.

Like MySQL Talend has an enterprise version of its tools which includes extra goodies not available to the community edition, such as tools for monitoring jobs, or a new data profiling tool.

Why the UK now? Mostly because post Blair the UK is waking up to open source economics, finally catching up with France and Germany in terms of government imprimatur.

“Things have changed, says Monteuil, “Large corporations were “looking down at open source with a sympathetic eye “but its not ready for us”. But now CIOs see it as a full component.” What he said…

Before wrapping up, there was one other data point I found very interesting. The company’s localisation and multi-language strategy is based on crowd sourcing through Talend Babili. Open source beats the hell out of proprietary on multi-language support – see OpenOffice, for example, which supports languages that Microsoft Office doesn’t, such as Basque. So the community may not be contributing code, but its creating really useful documentation.

Another area the community has helped is in providing connectors (Talend now has more than 400). But when customers asked for SAP integration Talend stepped up to the work. Sensible in Europe, good use of capital.

All in all Talend seems in pretty good shape to go after organisations looking to cut costs in the recession. Open Studio is a solid piece of work.

disclosure: Talend is not a customer. Neither currently is SAP.