SAP’s top strategist

I found good illustration to my previous post of how important for top ERP vendors to communicate their strategy. Tom Foremski writes about his meeting with Jeff Nolan, “one of SAP’s key strategists, and a former venture capitalist at SAP Ventures”:

Mr Nolan has an interesting job. He runs the Apollo Group, it is a strategy and communications organization within SAP, that is sometimes referred to as the “Attack Oracle” group–because Oracle is SAP’s largest competitor in enterprise applications. And with Oracle’s acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel, Oracle is getting serious about its so far lackluster applications business and is eyeing SAP’s huge 32,000+ customer base.

Mr Nolan’s goal is to make sure that SAP develops a strategy that enables it to compete against Oracle, whether it is through acquisitions, investments or just pure communications of SAP’s message–the goal is to rise above any noise that Oracle produces.

Mr Nolan has a key role to play within SAP, and it is one that he clearly recognizes because of his blogging activities. Mr Nolan writes one of the top VC blogs and because he is involved in the blogosphere he understands the importance of online influencers and how this process works. [That's the reason I get to have a face-to-face with him.]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison commands a lot of attention and can easily insert Oracle’s point of view into many influential publications, consulting groups, and Wall Street brokerages. But Mr Nolan’s knowledge of how ideas and conversations propagate around the internet, gained from his experience as an A-list blogger, works to SAP’s advantage.