In this episode of ASUG Talks, we talk with Vin­nie Mir­chan­dani, founder of Deal Archi­tect and the pro­lif­ic author of the ​“SAP Nation” books. Vin­nie walked us through how he got into writ­ing in the first place and his thoughts on the changes in the SAP ecosystem.

ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Con­ver­sa­tion with Vin­nie Mirchandani

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Okay. All right. I’m excit­ed to be joined today by Vin­nie Mir­chan­dani, the CEO of Deal Archi­tect, Inc. Vin­nie, thank you so much for join­ing me today.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Thank you for hav­ing me.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

So Vin­nie, I want to start off with your time… You have a very sto­ried career. You’ve been in the IT land­scape indus­try for a while, and I’m excit­ed to dive into that, but I want to start with your time as a con­sul­tant at PWC, where you start­ed your career. We’d love to know how did you wind up in that role and how did it pre­pare you for what you’re doing now?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

So out of school, I want­ed to go into con­sult­ing. It was a young pro­fes­sion back then, tech­nol­o­gy con­sult­ing, but I joined an account­ing firm, Price­wa­ter­house. And back then they had you got to pay your dues. You got to go to the audit side. You got to get your CPA. Oh, by the way, it’s going to be good edu­ca­tion. You’re going to learn about busi­ness process­es and all these audit clients. It was about half true what they told me. A lot of it was drudgery, and audit­ing is not much fun. So I could­n’t wait to get out of that and get into consulting.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Even­tu­al­ly had my chance. They said, we’ve got good news and bad news for you. You got an assign­ment in Sau­di Ara­bia. This is not exact­ly a plum assign­ment. You want­ed to get into con­sult­ing, and I jumped at the oppor­tu­ni­ty. And the first project was we were putting in pack­et soft­ware for a bunch of dif­fer­ent oil and gas com­pa­ny oper­a­tions in Sau­di Ara­bia. So that was a great start for a young con­sul­tant. And it intro­duced me.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Back then peo­ple used to cus­tom devel­op a lot of func­tion­al­i­ty. So that was my first expo­sure to pack­et soft­ware. And since then I’ve done noth­ing but pack­et soft­ware, SAP being obvi­ous­ly a very dom­i­nant form of pack­age soft­ware. So no, it was very good intro­duc­tion and allowed me to see a lot of dif­fer­ent prod­ucts, end­ed up being my Gabriel Gart­ner and all the things I’ve done since.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Let’s get back to your time as a con­sul­tant and then obvi­ous­ly, your time at Gart­ner where you were an ana­lyst. Where were you? Were you at PWC or were you at Gart­ner when you first encoun­tered SAP? When did you first encounter SAP?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

I first encoun­tered SAP in 1989. So part of what I was doing in Lon­don was help­ing the UK oper­a­tions get into pack­et soft­ware. So they had just put in a data cen­ter in the Dock­lands area. I don’t know if you… Dock­lands were unde­vel­oped back then, but it’s become a major finan­cial hub cen­ter. And they put a data cen­ter there and it was like noth­ing there in the data cen­ter. Right? It was like peo­ple were rat­tling around in that build­ing, noth­ing there. So they came to me and they said, hey, look, Vin­nie, why don’t we put two pieces of soft­ware here so we can do demos, we can do pro­to­typ­ing, and so on. Pick an Amer­i­can soft­ware and pick a Euro­pean software.

So the Amer­i­can soft­ware was pret­ty easy. McCor­ma­ck & Dodge was a dom­i­nant ven­dor back then. And so we said, we pick McCor­ma­ck & Dodge. Euro­pean, we go, my God, what are we going to find? So some­body said, hey, there’s this promis­ing ven­dor called SAP. So I had two teams set up demos and pro­to­types on both pieces of soft­ware. The US one, that team loved me because it was like I had done it before, I could coach them and so on. SAP, the team hat­ed me because not only did I not know much about it, all the man­u­als were in Ger­man. There was no sup­port in Lon­don. Oh, my God. The con­trast was quite…

But you could see back then it was a very, very com­pre­hen­sive sys­tem even back then. And you could see the promise. So when I came back to the US in 1990, I said, guys, we’ve got to invest heav­i­ly in this piece of software.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

With that in mind, this is, I guess, an epic ques­tion. But since you first encoun­tered SAP back in 1989, what are the main ways SAP as a company-

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

What are the main ways SAP as a com­pa­ny has changed and its focus­es have changed? What are some of those pro­nounced changes that you’ve seen over the years?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Oh my God. That’s 30 years, right?

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Yeah.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

It’s prob­a­bly gone through five or six iter­a­tions. Back then the prod­uct was green screen, ugly, ugly, ugly. I mean, very dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate. Some of the help was still in Ger­man. So from a US per­spec­tive, it’s a mir­a­cle they’ve done as well as they did. To their credit.

I mean, they made a lot of invest­ments to make it much more usable for the US mar­ket and so on. But that was one iter­a­tion, right? At Gart­ner, I saw their sec­ond iter­a­tion, which is peo­ple were look­ing for a Y2K solu­tion and they were look­ing for a glob­al solu­tion and they were look­ing for an enter­prise wide, not just a one mod­ule at a time solution.

And so they real­ly took off like a rock­et. So I joke with SAP folks, I go, ​“I prob­a­bly sent you a thou­sand cus­tomers in that time­frame. You owe me a lot of com­mis­sion for those five years.” I would say that was the sec­ond, prob­a­bly the most impact­ful of the iter­a­tions they’ve had.

I would say the next 10 years, ver­ti­cal­iza­tion became a major focus. So the dif­fer­ent IoS solu­tions start­ed to come out. They start­ed to become much more inter­net savvy, because they were very, very main­frame up to that point. So that prob­a­bly was the third iteration.

The fourth iter­a­tion was when McDer­mott start­ed mak­ing all the cloud acqui­si­tions, because by now they were look­ing data in that they did­n’t have a cloud solu­tion, mul­ti-ten­ant solu­tion and so on. And so all the acqui­si­tions you start­ed to make of suc­cess fac­tors and so on would be anoth­er iteration.

And by the way, around the same time they were push­ing HANA very heav­i­ly. So that was anoth­er part of that stage. And then in the last few years S/4HANA has been a major focus, along with the cloud appli­ca­tions matur­ing, becom­ing more inte­grat­ed and so on.

So I would say that’s the iter­a­tions I’ve seen them go through. And I’d like to see them go through a cou­ple more. So we talk about that. I mean, I admire com­pa­nies that can rein­vent them­selves that often.

You’ll talk to some peo­ple and they’ll say, ​“Oh my God, SAP’s such a bor­ing main­frame, dirty, ugly UX com­pa­ny.” I just give you a very nuanced view of it’s been evolv­ing every five years.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

You said that you would like to see them take some oth­er iter­a­tions. Do you have an iter­a­tion that you would like to pitch on this podcast?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

No. I mean, in the last book I wrote about them. One of the things I brought out was I used the exam­ple of how the US expand­ed. When Jef­fer­son bought the Louisiana pur­chase, it dou­bled our landmass.

And then the dif­fer­ent pio­neers, the Ore­gon Trail, the Mor­mon Trail, the 49ers just grew and grew and grew grad­u­al­ly, right? The slo­gan back then was man­i­fest des­tiny. So my book actu­al­ly, the sub­ti­tle was man­i­fest des­tiny, because that was like SAP.

You’ve done great, but there’s so much more you could have done. Face­book and Google did­n’t exist 15 years ago. Google’s become $100 bil­lion com­pa­ny. You missed the whole dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing opportunity.

Look at Ama­zon or Microsoft Azure. The infra­struc­ture has a ser­vice oppor­tu­ni­ty. So I had sev­er­al hun­dred bil­lion dol­lar mar­kets that SAPs kind of like. That’s not us or it’d be too dif­fi­cult. Some­thing has kept them very focused, which in a way is good. But then if you miss out on a hun­dred-bil­lion-dol­lar market.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Yeah. You men­tioned your book. I think that’s a nice tran­si­tion to sort of the next part of our con­ver­sa­tion that I want to have SAP Nation. Beyond SAP Nation, you’re a pro­lif­ic author in this space and writer. I’m also a writer. So I like ask­ing writ­ers this ques­tion. What got you into con­sis­tent pro­fes­sion­al writ­ing? What was sort of your writ­ing ori­gin story?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

I think it was a moment of mad­ness. Every time I fin­ish a book, I go, ​“Nev­er again.” I’ve writ­ten sev­en books. You real­ly have to be very pas­sion­ate. It takes a lot of work to be able to deliv­er one.

Kind of like when I left Gart­ner, I did a start­up and after three years kind of we hit the dot-com bub­ble and it failed in the end. So, I had to make a deci­sion whether I go back to a job or start anoth­er com­pa­ny. And I start­ed a Deal Archi­tect, which is part­ly an ana­lyst firm, it’s part­ly and advi­so­ry firm, it’s part­ly a pub­lish­ing firm.

And so, I said, well, if we’re going to call our­selves a pub­lish­er, we need to pub­lish some­thing. So I start­ed to write a cou­ple of blogs in 2005. And now blogs are rel­a­tive­ly easy, right? It’s one or two pages at a time.

But if you look at what I’m made up for, in the 15 years, I’ve writ­ten about 7,000 blogs. So at the end of five years, I was writ­ing so much and some­body said, ​“Vin­nie, why don’t you write a book? Take this and make a book out of it.”

So that’s when the moment of mad­ness came. A book is quan­tum more dif­fi­cult. Just because you’ve writ­ten blogs, it does­n’t mean that trans­lates into a book.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

I’m sure a lot of our lis­ten­ers are at least famil­iar with SAP Nation, but for those of them who aren’t, can you tell us a bit about SAP Nation and how the project and the book itself came about? I know there have been a few dif­fer­ent ver­sions too.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Absolute­ly. Absolute­ly. Again, evo­lu­tion. There have been three episodes of SAP Nation. The first one came about, SAP was­n’t hap­py that it came about was, hav­ing come from Price­wa­ter­house, I under­stood the whole sys­tems inte­gra­tion game. When I was a Gart­ner, I was already start­ing to see inte­gra­tors, the qual­i­ty was­n’t very good. I mean, it is very dif­fi­cult to scale peo­ple’s busi­ness­es because every­one is so dif­fer­ent. The qual­i­ty was­n’t very good. The over­runs were start­ing to show up. This is already in the late ​’90s. Every chance I got to sit down with SAP, I would say, ​“Guys, you need to pay more atten­tion to this.” They were like, ​“Well, Vin­nie, it’s not our com­pe­tence. I mean, come on. It’s not that bad.” It was always they would always be polite to their part­ners. I said, ​“I don’t expect you to be hos­tile to them, but put guardrails around them because real­ly it’s cost­ing your cus­tomers a lot of mon­ey and a lot of qual­i­ty issues.”

Well, for 10 more years, so this was in 2000 I left Gart­ner, 10 more years as an advi­sor, I was see­ing that I was help­ing clients pro­cure SAP appli­ca­tion man­age­ment or SAP upgrades or SAP host­ing. I was see­ing all the qual­i­ty issues con­tin­ue. In 2009, I had an oppor­tu­ni­ty. A client said to me, ​“Esti­mate for me what the oppor­tu­ni­ty is in the SAP ecosys­tem.” I built a very detailed mod­el of how many peo­ple does Accen­ture have? How many peo­ple Ernst & Young have? How many peo­ple does IBM have? How many staff sup­port ABAP for cus­tomers? I mean, so it was a very elab­o­rate mod­el. How much have peo­ple spent on hard­ware? How much have peo­ple spent on tele­com in the SAP world and so on?

When I crunched the num­bers, I was shocked. The cheap­est of the ver­sions, I’d had dif­fer­ent assump­tions. The low­est cost assump­tion mod­el made SAP Nation if there is such a thing, 48^th largest GDP in the world. I go, ​“This can’t be right.” I looked at it every which way, but I went to SAP and I said, ​“Guys, I’m going to write a book about this, but I want you to val­i­date it. And, I’ll give you 30 pages at the end. You guys I want to edit it. It’s your voice. Tell me what you’re going to do to change it.” I thought it was fair. I gave them to val­i­date it and tell us what you’re going to do. They did take me up on the first one. They have a cou­ple of strat­e­gy con­sult­ing folks, ex-McK­in­sey folks who looked at it. They nit­picked a lit­tle bit, but they said, ​“Look, Vin­nie. I mean, can’t argue with you too much. It’s your assump­tion. The num­bers look okay.”

The sec­ond part they kept say­ing, ​“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll set­tle. They did­n’t set­tle.” I don’t think they thought I was going to pub­lish this, hon­est­ly. But when it came out, all the pan­ic but­tons went off. But I had to keep telling them, ​“Guys, this is not about you. This is about your ecosys­tem. Don’t take this per­son­al­ly. This is meant to just show­case how much mon­ey is being wast­ed in the ecosys­tem.” I had strate­gies for cus­tomers on how to reduce the spend­ing, and how to ring-fence around SAP. I had a whole bunch of them. I had a lot of cus­tomer case stud­ies of peo­ple who had made some progress toward con­trol­ling their spending.

The book was pret­ty suc­cess­ful, most cus­tomers bought it. Some of them wished I had­n’t writ­ten it because their CEOs were say­ing, ​“What the hell is going on? Why are you spend­ing on this?” But most of them appre­ci­at­ed the fact that I had shown them how to try and man­age that cost. SAP hat­ed it. They were like, ​“Oh, you’re mak­ing us look bad.” I was like, ​“Guys, it’s tak­en me 15 years to tell you this. I did­n’t spring a sur­prise on you.” That was the first one. Around the time they had announced S/4HANA, but they missed their oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk about it in the 30 pages. I did­n’t know it was com­ing out. With­in three months of my book com­ing out, they announced it. I said-

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Oh, no.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

I released SAP Nation 2.0, which was my view on how mature S/4HANA would be and how long would it take and so on. What I did there was I said, let me com­pare to oth­er next gen­er­a­tion prod­ucts, Ora­cle Fusion, Microsoft had its own. It’s a look at four or five oth­er com­pa­ra­ble soft­ware ven­dors and how long it took their next-gen­er­a­tion prod­ucts to mature. I was­n’t far off. You could see S/4HANA is still going through its paces. It’s tak­en a while to become main­stream with­in the SAP cus­tomer base. But, that was more of a com­par­i­son. It was more of show­cas­ing of what oth­er ven­dors had done.

SAP Nation 3.0, which came out about four years ago, was much more gen­er­ous to SAP because this reflect­ed SAP. I avoid­ed the ecosys­tem. I said, ​“That is still not solved, but I’m not going to focus on that. I’m going to focus on all the good stuff SAP has done around S/4HANA, around its cloud prop­er­ties, around dif­fer­ent prod­ucts they don’t talk much about, asset infor­ma­tion net­work and so on.” SAP helped me get a lot of cus­tomers at ESA. Jeff intro­duced me to a num­ber of ESA cus­tomers who became case stud­ies in the book and so on. It was a much more pos­i­tive book about SAP.

Some peo­ple were very dis­ap­point­ed. Some peo­ple thought it would be anoth­er ham­mer SAP book. ​“What hap­pened to you, Vin­nie?” I’m like, ​“Why should I always be nasty? SAP is a very pos­i­tive com­pa­ny that does a lot of good stuff.”

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

I’ve got to ask, is there a part four in the works?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Well, there is a ver­sion that’s going to come out, but it’s not going to be part four. That’s all I can see for now. I’ll be able to tell you in a few months what’s com­ing up.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

When you’re ready to talk about it, let me know and you can come back on the pod­cast and talk about it.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

I’ll be hap­py to. I’ll be hap­py to, but let me just as a glimpse, it is look­ing at what has hap­pened in the last three or four years. The world has gone through a lot of shocks. We’ve had a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion shock in some com­pa­nies, I mean, dra­mat­i­cal­ly. I mean, when you change busi­ness mod­els, when you dra­mat­i­cal­ly do trans­for­ma­tion, it’s a shock to an enter­prise. COVID has been a huge shock to dif­fer­ent indus­tries. Cli­mate change is affect­ing a lot of indus­tries in terms of cir­cu­lar econ­o­my think­ing, sus­tain­abil­i­ty and prod­uct design. I mean, every aspect is being chal­lenged. Now, the whole ener­gy tran­si­tion as a result of what’s hap­pen­ing in Ukraine, that’s a huge shock to the glob­al economy.

Giv­en all these shocks, what I’m work­ing on is look­ing at how is that affect­ed indus­tries, tech­nolo­gies, process­es, and how are SAP cus­tomers far­ing, giv­en all these shocks. Actu­al­ly, SAP, if I were to remove some of the sus­pense, SAP is such a glob­al, such a cross-indus­try, such a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-savvy com­pa­ny that actu­al­ly SAP cus­tomers are cop­ing bet­ter than many others.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

We’ve found that, too, in our Pulse sur­vey that we do every year. The Pulse, the SAP cus­tomer. I don’t want to make you tip your hand too much on this new upcom­ing release, but out of curios­i­ty, pure­ly from a writer’s per­spec­tive, obvi­ous­ly Rus­sia invad­ed the Ukraine, was that a moment for you when you were writ­ing where you were like, ​“Oh, man, this project has changed, and I have a whole new edi­tion that I have to add in?”

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

No, but I think two or three things became very, very, very acute­ly … Came into focus. We are going through this back and forth on fos­sil fuel is bad, and we need to move to renew­able. Well, I’ve been try­ing to tell any­one who lis­tened to me, only about less than 10% of the world’s ener­gy is fueled by renew­ables. About 80% is fueled by fos­sil fuels. Coal, gas, and oil. And 10% comes from nuclear, geot­her­mal, hydro­elec­tric, and so on. And so my point has been till the bot­tom two can scale up to 50, 60%, we should not be demo­niz­ing fos­sil fuels. Sure, there’s fos­sil fuels and they’re fos­sil fuels. You can demo­nize coal, maybe oil, but nat­ur­al gas has been a pret­ty clean solu­tion, right?

Very few peo­ple real­ize US green­house gas emis­sions in 2020 were the same as in 1990. Not because you’re a clean tech leader, but because our util­i­ties have moved away from coal to nat­ur­al gas, right? So I think we’ll have to be a lot more prag­mat­ic about we are not there in terms of renew­ables or oth­er alter­na­tives. How do we make that tran­si­tion? That tran­si­tion becomes huge­ly impor­tant, and we can’t politi­cize it. We got to plan for that very, very carefully.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

SAP Nation – a project like that – it sounds like you start with a cen­tral the­sis, which is great to start with a the­sis like that. How do you go about tack­ling a project like that though? What are the specifics? Do you sit down and sketch it out? Do you already have it mapped out in your head?

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

It evolves. The research takes about six months on a giv­en book, and it evolves quite a bit. But my style has been case study heavy. So every book ends up with 15 or 20 case stud­ies, so that is often the gat­ing fac­tor. Not so much the team, it is will I be able to get good brand names, a vari­ety of indus­tries, a vari­ety of coun­tries in the case studies?

If some­body brings those to me … I’ve writ­ten a book for a CEO where he orga­nized all the case stud­ies. It was much quick­er. I did it in three months for him. So I think the team comes togeth­er, but for me, the meat on the bones is can I get cus­tomers to pas­sion­ate­ly talk about what they’ve done? Because my voice, I’m an ana­lyst. Of course I can talk for­ev­er, but it’s bor­ing stuff. When the cus­tomers talk, it’s much more in the voice of what the read­er wants to hear.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Vin­nie, last ques­tion for you. We’re run­ning out of a lit­tle bit of time. I’d like to give you an oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk a lit­tle about Deal Archi­tect Inc. Tell us a lit­tle bit about what the orga­ni­za­tion is and what you all do.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

So Deal Archi­tect is part­ly an ana­lyst firm. So I get invit­ed by SAP, Work­day, Sales­force, most of the lead­ing enter­prise ven­dors to their events. I get briefed by them a lot. And a lot of small­er ven­dors do the same, have a video series where I let them present in what’s called the ana­lyst cam. So in dif­fer­ent ways, I get infor­ma­tion flow from most of the major soft­ware ven­dors and out­sourcers. So that’s my ana­lyst role.

I have an advi­so­ry role, where we work with both ven­dors and buy­ers typ­i­cal­ly in next gen­er­a­tion stuff. ​“Vin­nie, what are you see­ing that is going to be dif­fer­ent for our indus­try?” Or ​“We’re look­ing at next gen­er­a­tion automa­tion. What should we be look­ing at from a strat­e­gy per­spec­tive?” Or buy­ers will hire me to do due dili­gence. Some attor­neys have hired me to do expert wit­ness­es, tes­ti­mo­ny for lit­i­ga­tion. So the advi­so­ry role tends to be … It’s hard to just say, ​“Hey, look, I only do this.” It tends to be projects, and it tends to be very, very focused on the indi­vid­ual clien­t’s needs. And gen­er­al­ly pret­ty high val­ue for 3, 4, 6 weeks of work. That’s a typ­i­cal project.

The third one is pub­lish­ing. So cou­ple of blogs, and I’ve writ­ten sev­en books so far. So that takes a fair amount of time. Now, you’ll say, ​“When do you sleep?” Actu­al­ly, these feed each oth­er. I will not pub­licly ever dis­close if I do some­thing con­fi­den­tial for a client. I’ll nev­er share that pub­licly. But I can glean some infor­ma­tion for that. That may come up in the blog. The blogs feed the books.

I always go back to ven­dors and say, ​“Give me the case stud­ies for books.” So it’s kind of [inaudi­ble 00:37:51] cir­cle. They feed each oth­er. Dif­fer­ent ways of dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent, if you will. Dif­fer­ent forms of con­tent, if you will. Some of them shows up as advice. Some of them shows up as print­ed books. Some of them shows up as video. There a lot of dif­fer­ent chan­nels that the intel­li­gence I gath­er gets out.

It’s nice to get paid. In the social media world, unfor­tu­nate­ly, every­body expects every­thing for free. So we got to do some bal­anc­ing on what goes where.

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

Yeah, cer­tain­ly. Vin­nie. I real­ly do appre­ci­ate your time here today and being able to talk us through your career and what you do, and your author­ship of a lot of great books. So thank you so much for join­ing me.

Vin­nie Mirchandani:

Thank you for hav­ing me, Jim.