February, 2012

Develop a strategy for SAP HANA patches

Last week I wrote about the need for companies running SAP HANA to bring those job skills in-house, in order to maximize their ROI.

But that’s not all they need to do, according to Vijay Vijayasankar, a consultant who specializes in SAP business analytics at IBM Global Business Services in Phoenix.

Even though the technology is maturing, companies need to have a plan in place for how they deal with the patches to the software. Although they are not as frequent as they used to be, patches are still coming once a month on average, according to Vijayasankar.

Whether or not to apply the patches as they come in, or more infrequently depends on how well their IT personnel can handle the changes, as well as what they’re using HANA for, and how much of a company’s operations it’s planning on putting into HANA.

If it’s just using HANA for its CO-PA Accelerator (for costing-based profitability analysis) for example, constant patching is less necessary than if a company is running a slew of in-memory applications.

“If you’re not going to develop anything new, you’re just in maintenance mode. [For many companies] the idea is to put more and more functionality into HANA, and then it becomes like ECC support where you are constantly developing and maintaining the system,” Vijayasankar said.

Customers use social media to get SAP’s attention

Not long ago when I had a problem with my Internet service, I tweeted that I that my Comcast service wasn’t working and heard back from a representative via Twitter shortly afterward. Comcast fixed the problem but set up a house call with a representative just to be sure.

Okay, so the technician never showed, but the experience at least shows that big companies are watching social media channels for feedback from customers-even if some are clearly better than others when it comes to follow-up. Comcast is just one of the most high-profile organizations offering customer service via Twitter, thanks to an outspoken early evangelist and Salesforce.com.

Brian Ellefritz, vice president of Global Social Media for SAP, says his company is also focused on monitoring media channels for comments or feedback from customers on how SAP and its applications are being perceived globally.

So far, it’s yielded some interesting results. Ellefritz told me the team had picked up on a tweet from one customer complaining about how difficult it was to do business with SAP. When SAP responded, the customer explained that he had been trying to get Crystal Reports from one of SAP’s partners but was finding the partner to be largely unresponsive.

“We quickly resolved that and got someone to reach out to him,” Ellefritz said, adding that SAP is looking for ways to use the information to improve how SAP operates.

“This isn’t about can we ‘one-off’ help somebody with a given pain point.  What we should be doing as a business is trying to figure out is what [business processes are presenting challenges].”

Not all comments come from customers, Ellefritz added.

One developer wrote directly on SAP’s Facebook page telling them about a security flaw in their website, which he had written about on his blog.  SAP responded asking more about the issue, but also asked him to take the blog down - which he gladly did. The developer then asked SAP for a job working on security issues. It worked, Ellefritz said. SAP is currently in the process of finding a place for him within the company.

Compared to engaging with SAP support or navigating Walldorf’s human resources department, communicating via social channels seems remarkably effective. Is Twitter now a more appropriate channel for dealing with SAP?

What SAP job skills are most in demand?

Last year I wrote a piece that looked at what a slowly improving economy meant for spending on SAP projects and software.

And while the figures were mostly anecdotal, it seemed companies were spending more. Since that time, the economic news has mostly been good, with a dropping unemployment rate and rising stock market.

Yet, while the U.S. economy added 243,000 jobs in January, only 3,100 jobs were added in IT, at least according to the government’s definition.

Why is the trend so anemic?  If the economy is improving, shouldn’t those IT number be higher? And what’s going on with SAP customers?

I asked David Foote, president of Foote Partners LLC, which studies the IT employment market, about his take on the numbers. According to Foote, a large number of companies still have to outsource much of their hiring because they aren’t having much luck in bringing people on full-time.  There’s still a shortage of skills.

The same is going on in the SAP job market, as companies require more specialized skills and demand is outpacing supply.

So what’s on the rise? Foote pointed to a number of skills that are in increasingly high demand, including those in  XMII (xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) development,  SAP GRC (governance, risk, and compliance), and SAP Workflow. Foote said that SAP PM (plant management) skills are also highly sought-after.

“Manufacturing’s coming back strong,” Foote said.  Not surprisingly, skill having to do with SAP supply chain management are also in high demand. Business analytics and BusinessObjects skills are also near the top.

Foote said that the highest paid skills, however, are for those for HANA, SAP’s in-memory technology, suggesting that HANA is beginning to catch on among its customer base, in no small part because of SAP’s relentlessly marketing the technology.

“SAP’s been pushing it big time now,” Foote said. “They’re generating the interest, but it’s become a hot technology.”

Oracle to SAP: See you in court. Again.

You could almost hear the collective thud of SAP’s attorneys banging their heads against the wall over Oracle’s decision to ask for a new trial in its intellectual property claims against SAP.

Not that it’s any surprise, of course.  I’m sure SAP could see it coming.  It’s just that SAP would love to close the books on the roughly five-year-old court case.

“We are disappointed that Oracle has passed up yet another opportunity to resolve this case,” SAP spokesman James Dever said, putting it mildly.

During the trial, Oracle accused SAP and its long-defunct subsidiary TomorrowNow of intellectual property theft on a massive scale, and asked for $1.7 billion in damages. Oracle said it arrived at the figure by calculating the actual cost of the licenses that TomorrowNow would have had to purchase to legally acquire the software it downloaded.

The jury largely agreed, awarding Oracle $1.3 billion in damages. The judge subsequently reduced the damages to $272 million. Instead of taking the deal, Oracle is opting for a do-over, hoping for a better outcome this time.

But as Digital Trends’ Geoff Duncan points out, SAP’s guilt wasn’t in question, and still isn’t:

Oracle isn’t risking that SAP will be found innocent of infringement in a second trial-SAP basically threw itself on the mercy of the court last time around-but it hopes for an interpretation of the law that would see it awarded the full $1.3 billion. And maybe then some, with interest.

What might this mean in terms of the continued animosity between Oracle and SAP?  All Things Digital’s Arik Hesseldahl wonders:

The case has caused a lot of personal enmity between Oracle and SAP, as well as with Hewlett-Packard, especially during the 11-month period when former SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker was CEO of HP. Apotheker’s first days on the job at HP were marred by his apparent absence from HP headquarters, in what couldn’t help but look like an attempt to avoid being served with a subpoena. Maybe Oracle will try again.

Although SAP would prefer not to see Oracle’s lawyers in court anytime soon, it can at least take solace in that it’s not alone.  As Fox Business points out, Oracle is still trying to stick it to Google.

SAP begins laying out smaller, faster, enhancements to Business Suite

As I wrote last fall, SAP will roll out enhancements to its Business Suite software on a quarterly basis as a way to deliver newer technologies faster, and with less disruption.

On Monday, SAP announced the first round of the “incremental updates” it’s going to make available to SAP customers.

The changes include, according to SAP:

• Improved analysis of suppliers’ performance within the SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SAP SNC) application
• A new marketing user interface (UI) that allows users to interactively compile target groups for marketing campaigns from multiple high-volume data sources
• A new UI in the SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM) application that includes enhanced functionality for worker safety and risk management
• Simplified receipt submission processes within SAP Travel Management
• Better batch handling, cost planning, and label printing for manufacturers
• Embedding of consume-to-cash processes within the CRM application

SAP did not say when the changes will be made available to customers, only that they’re currently in ramp up. That said, though this initial list doesn’t yet include enhancements involving some of their newer technologies around mobility or in-memory computing that SAP said would make its way into the rotation, it’s a pretty solid start. Will the quarterly enhancements pay off as a way to increase satisfaction among its customer base? We’ll see.

Are SAP Solution Manager users missing out?

More SAP customers are finally beginning to manage their SAP landscapes with Solution Manager (SolMan) even if it’s for limited scenarios.

Roughly 42% of respondents to a recent SearchSAP.com survey are using SolMan as opposed to third-party tools, nearly twice as many as in last year’s survey.

Tony De Thomasis, the SAP NetWeaver practice lead at Acclimation, an Australian IT consulting firm, whom I recently spoke with about the Service Desk application within Solution Manager, said he’s also seeing growing adoption of Solution Manager as companies try to rein in the total cost of their SAP environments.

“Everyone’s trying to reduce the amount of money that’s being spent on third party solutions. They’re looking to consolidate on to the one infrastructure management platform,” De Thomasis said.

The newly released Solution Manager 7.1 — which De Thomasis contends is a vast improvement over previous versions — is another driver behind the change, he added.

“There’s also been a lot of development in the new Solution Manager 7.1, from an enhanced tools perspective, a nicer user interface, and there are a number of new benefits around testing, monitoring alerting perspective, and for change management,” De Thomasis said.

But despite the growing number of bells and whistles available in Solution Manager, half of all respondents indicated they’re using Solution Manager only for internal support and communicating with SAP global support. Usage falls significantly when it comes to change management when implementing new functionality (38%), upgrading to ECC 6.0 (35%), adopting new enhancement packages (33%), lifecycle management (33%), application performance management (32%).

Customers not fully utilizing Solution Manager are nothing new, of course. Back in May at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla., I ran into Tim Smoker, a Basis administrator for the High Cos., a construction company out of Lancaster, Pa. Even though SAP had just announced that Solution Manager 7.1 was newly generally available, Smoker said he was at the conference to learn how to get more out their existing deployment.

Smoker guessed his company is only using roughly half of Solution Manager’s functionality, mostly for basic monitoring and issue tracking. Smoker told me he wanted to use Solution manager to manage overall system performance.

So, why aren’t more customers using Solution Manager for a broader range of purposes?

De Thomasis thinks that it’s mostly an education issue. “There’s a lack of knowledge.  People just aren’t up to speed yet on 7.1 and what it offers,” he said.

Solution Manager’s relatively unsexy nature tends to get less attention within company walls compared with other technologies., he added.

Yet, compared with some of SAP’s other technologies like HANA and Gateway, which forces customers to learn things like the JQuery JavaScript language, the impression that Solution Manager is difficult to use is a tad unfair.

“These things are hard,” De Thomasis said.  “In comparison, Solution Manager is a walk in the park. A lot of this stuff is based in BW and CRM offerings, commonly known disciplines and initiatives that have been around for years. For someone to say it’s hard, I mean, come on.”