Talk with Michael Gerber

November 17, 2010 at 11:19 am · Filed under Just For Fun and tagged: Lalit Ramchandani aka Leo

Written by: Lalit Ramchandani aka Leo

Recently at the Information Systems department of Georgia Southern we had a guest speaker by the name of Michael Gerber who is from The Baer Group which is a privately held SAP consulting and staffing firm in Atlanta.
Mr. Gerber is a dynamic presenter with never a dull moment in his presentations. Michael talked about the consulting  lifestyle and his work experiences. He also updated us on a few of SAP’s position as an ERP seller and from an industry perspective where they seem to be headed among other things. His background has been with work experiences from SAP North America, SAP Germany, various large and small System Integrators and has successfully delivered work both nationally and abroad.
Michael talked about the recent SAP Tech Ed conference as well as the SAP Sapphire Now conference which is held annually in May. For those who don’t know, the SAP Tech Ed conference is the more technical side of SAP, more for the true IT level people and consultants and folks who do a lot of hands on work. The SAP Sapphire Conference is dedicated a sales and marketing event geared more towards the executives and senior managers. Two current solution based themes he touched upon were SAP’s recent ”Sybase” acquisition and the “In Memory” solutions which refer to on-demand solutions or cached solutions. This is where the folks out there in the field have most of the data on hand with them to make decisions on the spot (usually on proprietary hardware). There was also a more in-depth talk about customers and the different industrysegmentations and what the move to SAAS (software as a service) has meant for “legacy” customers. Additionally, he even gave us information on what companies now expect from consulting firms and the return on investment expected within more limited time frames compared to previous industry-wide practices.
Mr. Michael Gerber has been a very informative speaker about some of his real world experiences and I am thankful to him as well as the Information Systems Department at Georgia Southern. Finally, as a parting tip when it comes to business dealings, he offered us advice about developing skills to become good consultants and future leaders by focusing on asking the “right” questions, practicing “listening” skills and to avoid rushing to offer answers without knowing the facts.

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Tablets for $500, anyone?

October 21, 2010 at 10:24 am · Filed under Just For Fun and tagged: Lalit Ramchandani aka Leo

Written by: Lalit Ramchandani aka Leo

Recently I heard Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs speak in on the Quarterly Earnings conference call with analysts on the company’s first $20 Billion quarter and he implied that Tablets below 10 inches in size are not really going to be able to compete with the iPad because the comfort for the user isn’t quite there when considering a combined software and hardware experience.

Knowing how Macs are considered superior and “no frills” due to their user experience, I had a feeling that maybe he is right. However, we will not really know until we see a widespread adoption of either items and in that case just like how PCs spread because of their low cost, I wonder if will we see history repeating itself? Perhaps, apple has first mover advantage at an aggressive pricing?

Of course, I related this back to accounting and started thinking, what it would be like to play with numbers on a tablet? What do the folks reading this think about it? Would you want to have something that portable that touch based and assumably easier to use than to work on your laptop and get that tactile feedback from the keys?

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