September, 2008

Has SAP conveyed the value in Enterprise Support?

 I spoke with Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin yesterday for an update on their third-party support offering for SAP R/3 customers.

Rimini Street will begin rolling out the service to a pilot number of SAP R/3  customers - between six and 12, Ravin estimated - in January of 2009. And the service will be generally available by the second quarter, or late March to early April, of 2009 at the latest.

But Ravin said yesterday that while the rollout of the ambitious SAP support program is still on schedule, the majority of R/3 customers, many of whose SAP support contracts run out in January and are clamoring for support now, will have to be patient.

Rimini Street wants to test out service on a few SAP customers, in order to figure out what is really needed, Ravin said.

“You’ll see a very modest move into SAP for 2009,” on Rimini Street’s part, he said. “What we’ve seen is a much more rapid acceptance of the concept and the idea. A lot of those customers would love to be in contracts already, but the service just isn’t going to be ready by then.”

Ravin wouldn’t say how many customers he eventually aims, or could, sign on for the offering, only that he’s been inundated with calls. And those customers are looking for value, he said -value they’re not seeing in Enterprise Support, SAP’s new, enhanced offering which will cost customers 22% of net licensing fees, up from 17%. Rimini Street promises support at half the cost of SAP.

“They felt like this has really been a dance,” Ravin said. “It’s not value that a lot of customers want.”

Ravin’s remarks underscore a claim made by many bloggers and analysts recently that SAP still needs to prove to its customers where the value is in Enterprise Support, particularly for small and mid-sized customers.

SAP’s support fee hike is all over the web again this week -including in these blogs by AMR Research, consultant Josh Greenbaum and InformationWeek.

SAP, for its part, has been trying to make its case. Here in the United States, SAP’s been doing a  webcast series through ASUG and hosted a forum on the topic at ASUG’s recent conference in Nashville. Another forum on the topic is planned for ASUG’s conference in Dallas in October. 

But some think SAP has more work to do. Jon Reed of JonERP.com put it this way in a recent blog posting.

“SAP customer dissatisfaction with the maintenance fee increase is a bigger story, because it threatens to pose a setback to the impressive strides SAP has made with its customer base in recent years,” Reed wrote.

How SAP is making friends, and Web 2.0

Famed former CEO Jack Welch singles out SAP in this article in the latest issue of BusinessWeek, as a beacon of how to boost customer loyalty, specifically, by building user communities and getting people together physically at events like TechEd.

The article made me think back to a conversation I had last week at SAP TechEd with some of the SAP executives who are heading up SAP’s ecosystem, or rather, the “customer-focused ecosystem.” They insisted it was, and would continue to be, a major competitive differentiator for them.

We’ve started to see, over the past week, an example of this assertion.

Such a strong, and large, user community would seem to come in particularly handy at a time when enterprise application vendors are trying to figure out how to develop, and sell, Web 2.0 for the business.

By now, you’ve likely heard of the SAP development challenges being offered through InnoCentive, a Waltham, Mass.-based company that brings developers together to solve business problems.

One is drawing particularly strong interest.

A total of 688 “project rooms”– individuals or groups who have expressed interest in solving the challenge — have been opened for SAP’s Web 2.0 challenge so far. SAP’s asking developers to find uses of social networking to enhance business applications in corporate computing environments.

That’s in only the week and a half since it has been offered, there’s still another month to sign up. InnoCentive tells me that is a very high number for a challenge that’s been open only a week and a half.

It’s a great example of how SAP’s working these days, and why their attention to this “customer-focused ecosystem,” could in fact further separate them from their competitors.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, and what SAP does with the winner’s solution.

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor

SAP’s new Microsoft .NET-compatible NetWeaver tool

The SAP-Microsoft partnership, so momentous on paper, is actually quite modest, limited as it is to Duet. A recent SearchSAP.com readership survey indicated that many SAP customers are either unfamiliar with Duet or aren’t clear about what kind of real business value it can add to their companies.

This year’s TechEd offered signs that the SAP-Microsoft partnership is going deeper. Specifically, SAP offered a preview of the SAP Enterprise Services Explorer for .NET (call it SESEN for short) that will jazz up the partnership by offering .NET as well as ABAP developers a way to create interoperating services.

To understand SESEN better, remember that one of NetWeaver’s goals is to be a single interface to, and environment for, all of a company’s SOA-based services. Since services can be created by a number of different tools, this requires NetWeaver to be able to interact with other UDDI-based registries, such as those provided by Microsoft. SESEN functions as an add-in within Microsoft Visual Studio that effectively lets .NET developers more easily invoke and utilize SAP enterprise services in a Microsoft environment.

What does this mean in practice? SAP’s TechEd demo offered a thought-provoking use case. Imagine a scenario in which employees can choose their own company cars from a list of approved models (hardly a common case, but it made for a flashy presentation). With SESEN, you could use a Microsoft tool, such as Windows Media Player, as a front end from which to see a view of the cars. Clicking on the car invokes Microsoft Visual Studio logic, which would then pull up the SAP HR system to allow the employee to make a request to have a specific car assigned. This request would effectively go into the SAP workflow by being routed to a manager for approval.

That’s an example of an SAP service (call it “choose and approve company vehicle”) being consumed by a .NET application, but SESEN would allow you to go the other way as well, by calling a Visual Studio-defined service into the SAP environment. For SAP end users, this means easier access to services created in Microsoft and vice versa, and it should take Duet further by offering meatier integration between SAP and Microsoft.

SESEN, currently available on a trial basis from the SAP Developer Network, will be generally available at the end of the year. You can download it here.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Connect, collaborate and co-innovate

Amidst talk of upgrades, Business Objects and excitement over the racecar demo in the Community Clubhouse, SAP has been encouraging professionals here to join the SDN and the BPX communities.

It brings up this year’s TechEd theme — connect, collaborate and co-innovate, one that seemed to really resonate with attendees.

A few attendees remarked to me that they were impressed with how open everyone at TechEd was, and the community-feel that the event had. Several said they were really benefiting from the opportunity to come together and learn from their peers.

To that end, SAP put out a new challenge for you to solve this week.

SAP announced at TechEd that it’s reached an agreement and put some money into a Waltham, Mass.-based company called InnoCentive. The company creates development challenges and offers prize money in return for solutions. InnoCentive is offering $25,000 in prize money for three SAP-related development challenges -  the use of social networking in enterprise applications, another on unified heterogeneous web server handling and another on the creation of a video regarding the benefits of community networks.

About 1,000 new members join SAP Developer Network every day, making it the equivalent in numbers to the 8^th largest city in the United States, according to SAP executive Zia Yusuf.

And if you look at the next statistic, you can see why your participation is important - a total of 50% of the world’s business transactions go through an SAP system, with 12 million users in about 120 countries.

“There’s not much economic activity that happens without somehow going through the SAP system,” said Zia Yusuf, the global vice president of Global Ecosystem and Partner group. “Collaboration is a cornerstone of building software. We are all here to build bigger, better, cheaper solutions. You can learn a lot not just from SAP, but from each other.”

It’s one case in which, at least SAP hopes, what happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas.

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor

Get ready to fall into Business Objects

News from SAP this summer centered around three topics — TomorrowNow’s closure, the maintenance fee increase and Business Objects.

Summer’s end leads to “conference season” and SAP seems to want to make sure this season belongs more to Business Objects.

Next week Business Objects CEO John Schwarz is headlining TechEd in Las Vegas.  He’s also the keynote speaker at ASUG’s Fall Focus conference in Dallas, along with Business Objects executive vice president Doug Merritt.

ASUG also announced this week it’s starting a user group devoted to Business Objects — the Global BusinessObjects Network. It’s hosting a Business Objects User Conference concurrently with ASUG’s Fall Focus in Dallas.

Amidst it all, it’s worth noting that Business Objects was a significant shift in the way SAP has done business to date. Acquiring Business Objects was a shift in SAP’s organic growth strategy and the results stand in sharp contrast to the failure of TomorrowNow.

Since the acquisition in October of 2007, it has released new products and further integrated the Business Objects line with SAP NetWeaver. In a conference held in Boston in August, Business Objects executive vice president Marge Breya told our sister site SearchDataManagement.com, “we’re exceeding our expectations on almost all measures.”

So does Business Objects’ success, and the attention SAP seems determined to draw upon it, signal a permanent change from SAP’s traditional approach of organic growth to growth by acquisition? Could more product-centered acquisitions — analysts agree the Visiprise acquisition was a win as well — be in the cards?

It’s obviously the approach championed by rival Oracle, which by the way, just announced another acquisition this week — ClearApp, a company that helps manage applications that combine two or more SOAs.

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor 

What to do when you can’t get an SAP job

The SAP skills shortage has been conclusively documented by research from Foote Partners and AMR Research as well as by independent consultants such as Jon Reed and Justin Burmeister. However, it is also true that a number of people who would like to work in SAP are unable to do so. One such reader wrote a particularly strong message to us that included what amounted to a death threat.. Here is an excerpt:”You are spreading lies and wrong information.

This is very serious crime, you are commiting[sic]. I know a number of my friends[sic] are SAP Ceritified[sic] and experienced in BI, Nwtweaver and Web Dynpro etc. But they are struggling. They can’t find a job. Even job agencies are surprised.”

This letter demonstrates the intensity of feeling generated by those still having trouble finding work in SAP, but it is also helpful for demonstrating how to respond to your personal SAP career search in times of adversity. Ask yourself the following five questions:

1. Have I honestly evaluated my skills? You, your friends and recruiters may not be the most objective judges of either your talent or your prospects in the workplace. Are you active on SDN and, if so, how do you compare to your peers there? If you attend SAP events on your specialties, do you feel left behind in the technical workshops? It’s painful to say, but SAP certification is not a one-time process like getting a medical degree — your skills have to be continually honed, expanded and practiced to be valuable.

2. Am I in the wrong location? The reader above writes from Sydney, Australia. Could it be that the local economy is slumping, thus impacting all IT projects? In IT, you have to be willing to follow the money, which is why so many non-native techies and business people have relocated to places like Bangalore and Shanghai over the past decade. Your home town may not always be the best place in which to find SAP work, or be recruited for SAP work, given your local economic conditions.

3. Am I in the wrong line of business? Ed Tittel, a contributor to the IT Knowledge Exchange, began his career as an anthropologist and later became an IT person specializing in writing books. IT in general, and SAP in particular, isn’t for everyone. If you aren’t enjoying your career and find yourself deeply frustrated by the feast-or-famine conditions of some kinds of IT, you might be temperamentally suited for a more stable job, such as teaching.

4. Am I networking? Some job leads don’t come from recruiters — they come from friends or acquaintances. IT can be an asocial profession, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to expand the number and quality of your contacts. They could give you your next job.

5. Am I properly utilizing negative emotions? When Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, his reaction wasn’t to issue his coach a death threat. It was to use his failure as motivation to work harder. Later, Jordan actually thanked his high school coach for providing that motivation, without which Jordan may have remained a mediocre player rather than become an all-time great. Joblessness and underemployment can wreak havoc with your morale but, taking Jordan’s example, you should do something positive with those emotions.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP introduces BPX certification: Bridging IT and business

SAP’s upcoming TechEd event in Las Vegas will see the debut of an official BPX certification. BPX, SAP’s shorthand for Business Process Expert, will officially take its place alongside SAP’s technical certifications in areas such as NetWeaver, ERP and SOA.

What does this mean for working SAP consultants and for those interested in breaking into SAP? If you’re a technical SAP expert with extensive background in a specific industry or module — such as HR or manufacturing — then getting the BPX certification will be a way to let SAP hiring managers know that you pack a double punch: All-important industry expertise as well as IT chops. Meanwhile, if you’re trying to break into SAP with a strong background in a specific industry’s business processes, your certification may open the door to future SAP consulting opportunities (although it won’t replace solid IT education or experience.

SearchSAP expert Jon Reed recently conducted a podcast (listen to it here) with SAP’s Mario Herger, who has an extensive wiki defining business process skills in the SAP context. Jon learned that, in SAP’s estimation, “Certified BPXers can be the ‘marriage counselors’ between IT and business users and help to ensure the success of IT projects.” Given the high rate of failure of IT projects, BPXers are very much needed to ensure that SAP projects go well.

For those of you who are particularly interested in business processes and SAP, be sure to look through this master list of business process workshops at TechEd, and don’t be shy about asking SAP how the BPX role can help to build out your career as an SAP consultant.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor