March, 2008

The ERP Success Checklist

A recent academic paper--Chan and Lui, "Rescuing Troubled Software Projects by Team Transformation..."--discussed the components of ERP failure. The paper presented a handy checklist for what to do to help ensure a successful ERP project. Here it is, in no particular order of...

SAP certification: not worth much?

In India, many IT newcomers, known there as "freshers," are more eager than ever to break into the SAP market, and often turn to third-party SAP certification as a way of doing so. Typical of...

SAP sued by Waste Management

Waste Management, which spent $100 million on SAP software and characterized the project as a "complete failure" in a lawsuit filed March 20, is out for blood. The company seeks damages, including punitive damages, from SAP, whose Waste and Recycling Software software was excoriated by Waste...

SAP’s Korean R&D center

SAP will establish an R&D center in Seoul, South Korea, according to Korea.net. The deal, brokered by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), will see SAP hire 53 employees and invest $21 million over the coming three years. SAP Korea will be...

CNET: SAP “second fiddle to Oracle”

An article published recently by editor Michael Kanellos on CNET described SAP as playing "second fiddle to Oracle." The phrase is buried in a post about why green technology can provide a boost to European IT, and isn't backed up by any kind of market share numbers. It'll be interesting to see how...

DTE’s $120 million SAP overrun

A recent article in Crain's Detroit Business disclosed that DTE Energy Co. of Michigan posted a $120 million overrun in the cost of its SAP project. DTE, which had budgeted $263 million towards its SAP project in 2003, finished the migration in 2007 at a total cost of $383 million. While only...

SAP and Novell’s open source initiative cuts TCO

At BrainShare 2008 SAP and Novell announced that they are taking their relationship to the next level and are making SAP enterprise applications compatible with Linux Enterprise in an attempt to satisfy the open source crowd. The companies intend to:

• Optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for...

SAP to have co-CEO again?

According to Germany’s Boersen-Zeitung newspaper, SAP is considering the elevation of current Deputy Chief Executive Leo Apotheker to co-CEO alongside Henning Kagermann.

If it pans out, it won’t be the first time SAP has had a co-CEO; Kagermann was...

Salesforce.com: SAP hasn’t innovated

According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, SAP has "not seen innovation in the last 10 years." Those comments were made in a recent interview with ZDNet, in which Benioff twice claimed that SAP has not been responsible for creating anything "unique to the industry or value-added technology."...

Partners, platforms and the SAP economy

It's important for SAP to succeed in growing its partner ecosystem. In any battle with Microsoft, for example, SAP will need to muster a credible challenge to Redmond's vast partner channel. We recently...