upgrade

SAP customers: What’s your Unicode strategy?

What is Unicode? Until fairly recently, you had to be a techno-geek to know, but now it seems that all SAP customers had better become familiar with it.

In a nutshell, Unicode is a text encoding standard. For example, when you enter the letter ‘A’ into a computer, the letter is transformed into a certain number of bytes — 2, in the ASCII standard. The purpose of Unicode is to shrink the space (and complexity) associated with traditional character encoding, even when complex non-Western characters such as Chinese ideograms and ligatured letters are being represented.

Let’s consult SAP’s Unicode support policy to learn why that’s such a big deal.

“For new SAP software products and new releases of existing software products new installations will be possible only with Unicode.”

Historically, it’s been possible to do workarounds for non-Unicode systems, but there’s undoubtedly some time and expense involved. Imagine if some of your SAP data is encoded in Unicode UTF-16/UCS-2, in which all characters consist of two bytes while other data encoded in a system friendly to more complex languages will require more than two bytes. If you want to access information on one of these databases via the other’s character set, you’ve got a problem that requires coding and workarounds to solve.

Many SAP customers are global companies maintaining global data in more than one language. In a business environment that demands frequent exchange of data across geographic and linguistic boundaries. Unicode is a way of guaranteeing basic standards that make exchanging and storing SAP data simpler. SAP hasn’t had good experiences with mandates — consider the recent response to Enterprise Support and NetWeaver –and may never officially ask customers to move to Unicode, but SAP’s own Unicode policy is a mandate nonetheless.

In our recent podcast with Unicode expert John Visser, we learned that you can’t install some of the newer SAP modules unless you have Unicode capabilities. That makes it all the more urgent for new and existing SAP customers need to get up to speed on Unicode.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP: What went wrong? Blame marketing, NetWeaver

SearchSAP.com site expert Axel Angeli isn’t one to pull his punches when it comes to SAP and he makes no exception in discussing SAP’s recent earnings in this guest blog.

SAP has seen better times. The company’s quarterly revenues have declined and SAP is tightening its belt accordingly. What’s really to blame for the tension in Walldorf?

Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker blames the financial crisis. This is an attempt to avoid mentioning the turmoil ignited by the raising of annual SAP service fees from 17% to 22%. Customers haven’t shown the least bit of understanding for this decision. As a consequence, many customers have put their SAP purchases on hold. For example, the German SAP User Group (DSAG) decided in a common action to withhold any SAP purchases until next year.

The new enterprise support is a marketing disaster. The way it was communicated left the impression that SAP makes decisions behind the backs of its customers. Since Apotheker is the SAP marketing guru, he has turned into a burden for all of SAP. There is no one he can blame for this unfortunate move, and I have no idea how Apotheker will be able to escape from this trap. I myself am a techie and therefore feel indifferent towards Leo Apotheker; he is simply not my kin. But the analysts, also, do not seem to like him very much, which makes it difficult for him to explain his position. If this mishap would have been linked to Henning Kagermann, he might have escaped with a simple “Sorry, we meant it differently!” But the contract of the congenial, bright-minded professor is ending soon and he seems to be partially retired, like many of the old SAP crew. 

The explanation given by SAP for the steep increase in support fees is the same old story: Due to the increasing complexity of the full NetWeaver stack, the costs invested by SAP into support rose heavily and now need to be recouped. Customers see it differently. The higher costs stem only from the new dimension of components that SAP introduced in the past decade, against customer wishes.

High support costs and a high frequency of support requests are signs of low quality or a depreciation of support-friendly design. And the same products that have been under fire for years have caused the problems. These are the products that require the Java stack, with the biggest culprits being Enterprise Portal (EP) and Process Integration (PI). PI is awkward to use, costly to install and operate, difficult to examine for causes of malfunctions and no longer based on state-of-the-art Enterprise Service Bus technology. There is no time to pimp up PI into a full featured, modern Event-Driven-Architecture process engine.

In part two of this blog, Axel Angeli discusses ways for SAP to get back on track.

Great SAP Leaders Among Us contest update

Just a quick update on the Great SAP Leaders Among Us podcast contest. As you may recall, the topic is BI/BW challenges and how regular SAP users like yourself overcame those obstacles. Now we have whittled the field down to two strong candidates, but we need you to cast your vote to decide who wins the grand prize. There’s plenty of useful tips to be gained, yet both podcasts clock in at just five minutes each. Tune in today!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

How SAP can improve: upgrade edition

DENVER — The last session at ASUG's mySAP ERP Upgrade Symposium was a panel made up of users who had completed upgrades and SAP executives. We took this opportunity to ask what SAP could have done to make each customer's upgrade easier. Here are a couple of the responses:

Scott Petrack, Bayer Corporation
One of the things Bayer struggled with was trying to make decisions about the external environment around SAP. The company has 17 or 18 different third-party, complimentary software products that are interfaced or integrated with the SAP environment. So, it was a struggle for the team to determine whether these third-party products were going to be compatible in terms of the company's SAP upgrade.

"You go to the vendors and they say, ‘Oh, just go to the latest release of our product and everything will be OK,'" said Petrack. "I'm sorry, but that doesn't work for me."

As for what SAP could do to help solve this issue, Petrack said, "I would very much like to see, maybe as part of the certified partner program, SAP step up and say, ‘OK, here's the latest release of the product, and here's what we can report to you in terms of vendor compatibility.'"

Ian Wyatt, Cox Newspapers, Inc.
When Cox was entering into the upgrade, it wasn't entirely clear what it needed, what was recommended, and what options it had around support packs and stacks. This issue reared its head during the upgrade when the project team looked at some functionality in HR testing. That functionality changed with mySAP ERP 2005. But Cox had a problem with the new functionality that required implementation of a support pack — it wasn't available as a single node.

"Well, we didn't want to [implement the support pack] because we would have to go back and repeat a whole lot of testing," said Wyatt. "If we had known up front that we needed that support pack, no problem, we'd put it on up front and it would have no impact whatsoever. But, we didn't know, so we had to go back a bit."

"One thing I would like to see from SAP when going into an upgrade is more guidance around what support packs and support stacks you are going to need before you can start," he said. "You know, it wasn't a huge deal, but it did cost us some time." 

Steven Passer of NASA and Stefan Kneis, vice president and ASUG executive liaison at SAP, also responded. We'll have their take soon as well as something on Enhancement Packages. If you have your own ideas on how SAP can improve the upgrade process, please email me at jfranke@techtarget.com. 

Until then, we have to find a place to watch The Office in the Denver airport.

ASUG's influence on SAP

DENVER — We made it to the ASUG mySAP ERP Upgrade Symposium in Denver with no problems. There are about 200 attendees at various stages of upgrading to mySAP ERP 2005 — from just considering upgrading, to already done (granted, most of these people are presenters).

Since we're at an ASUG event, we asked for a couple specific examples of how ASUG had influenced SAP products or strategy in our interview with Stefan Kneis, vice president and ASUG executive liaison, and Martin Riedel, head of SAP's global upgrade office. Kneis's reply was:

Well, there's a lot, it happens on a regular basis. Influence councils are running on a monthly basis, and there are many real examples. An exciting one to me was the new xApps around sales operations planning which was really a story where ASUG told SAP to build a new product if you will. That's on the level of the influence councils.

Another example of influence from the group is the maintenance strategy. The 5-1-2 strategy [mainstream maintenance for all SAP products will for five years from the general release date. After that, customers can extend maintenance for one year for an additional 2% and for two additional years at a rate 4% above the annual maintenance fee.] was heavily, heavily driven by ASUG a few years ago. We had all kinds of maintenance strategies for different products and it was somewhat confusing for customers. ASUG really influenced our cleaning up of the maintenance strategy.

We're planning a couple more posts this week. We attended and interesting session that shed some light on SAP's enhancement packages strategy, so we're planning to post some information (and, if all goes well, pictures) from that. We'll also get some attendee comments on their upgrades and the conference in general.

ASUG president talks Kagermann and upgrade event

Weather permitting (we are flying Jet Blue), SearchSAP.com will be covering the ASUG (Americas' SAP Users' Group) mySAP ERP Upgrade Symposium in Denver Wednesday and Thursday. In advance of the event, we spoke with ASUG president Rod Masney about SAP CEO Henning Kagermann's contract extension and what to expect at the conference.

Masney was very positive about Kagermann's new deal and said he extended Kagermann congratulations that evening. Kagermann personally responded with thanks and good words for ASUG the next day. So, it's probably not surprising that Masney sees the extension as a good thing.

"We [ASUG] see it as a positive because of the relationship we've built with him and his team over the years and the programs we've worked on together. Henning has articulated his commitment to all the user groups, not just ASUG. He has articulated that there's value that groups such as ours bring to his customers. He shows this through SAP resources, time at our events and his personal time meeting with us."

Masney views Kagermann as atypical among CEOs in his willingness and interest in working with user groups. Kagermann generally meets with ASUG leadership face-to-face twice a year, once at Sapphire and once in Germany.

The co-location of the ASUG annual conference and Sapphire is a prime example in Masney's mind. He also mentioned that ASUG developed the "voice of the customer" program (where ASUG surveys members about SAP products, services and relationship with SAP) at Kagermann's request, as well as a book that ASUG and SAP are working on jointly.

"The board extending Henning's contract is a testament to the strategies he's put in place and the leadership he's demonstrated within SAP, the growth they've experienced and the commitment to the strategy around ESA and where they're taking the platform with the customers."

Masney indicated that ASUG really doesn't care who succeeds Kagermann, and mentioned the organization's relationship with Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, and Léo Apotheker, president of SAP's customer solutions and operations, have grown in recent years as well.

"It's not a beauty contest. For us it's about having the right relationships and having the opportunity to have influence in SAP, as well as to demonstrate that we're delivering value by educating our members and giving them an opportunity to network and learn from each other."

Masney also talked about the upcoming upgrade symposium. He said the attendees will represent the whole spectrum of the upgrade process from just thinking about it to already in the throes of it. (Earlier this year, Masney said he was starting to see an uptick in users considering upgrades.)

"The whole idea behind a symposium is a very small [200-250], very focused, very intimate event. There is a real good opportunity for education and peer-to-peer networking. This is not for giving them big-picture, esoteric information, if you will. But more to deliver concrete stuff that attendees can take back and use in their business."

We're bringing our digital camera to the event, so we'll aim to have some thoughts and pictures posted on the blog late Wednesday or early Thursday. We'll also have a couple items up on the main site by later in the week. If there's anything specific you're interested in, please shoot me an email (jfranke@techtarget.com).

SAP trends 2007, part three

Following the predictions of Logos GmbH founder Axel Angeli and Ventana CEO Mark Smith, it is now time for veteran SAP expert Dale Young to put forth his take on the major SAP trend of 2007. Like Axel's most recent post, Dale chose to do it in the form of a guest editorial.

The key question
Why is the upgrade to mySAP ERP different than those that came before it?

Many SAP customers are at a crossroads for supporting future business needs and realizing the next wave of value from their SAP investment. First of all, today's business environment is VERY different from when they originally put in R/3. There is an increasing amount of business competition, collaboration, globalization, standardization, commoditization and change.  They are likely are faced with new competitors, markets and products and their enterprise solutions must serve a new generation of customers, employees and partners (from generation Y) for whom technology is a normal life skill.

More complexity
Secondly, their original application strategy and enterprise architecture are likely more than five years old.  The ideal "clean" hardware, software, OS and database environments that were targeted with the first install have likely been more complex and less heterogeneous.  Business needs have changed; technology and Web services have matured; and SAP has entered into the architecture, Web enablement and integration space.  Computing infrastructure capabilities have also evolved.  There are significant new opportunities to optimize your enterprise infrastructure. 

Finally, SAP has undergone a "Step Change" in its architecture and solutions.  NetWeaver and Enterprise SOA have emerged as the foundation for all SAP solutions; there are increased capabilities in the areas of data and information management; and new third party capabilities such as Microsoft Duet and Adobe IAF have been introduced. For the first time, the core business content that has been developed over the last 30 years by SAP will be available for an open, standards-based world. Also, SAP functional solutions have evolved and matured.  There are opportunities to take advantage of new functionality across the entire SAP solution suite and to simplify your overall enterprise architecture through additional legacy solutions retirement.

What does all this add up to?
When looking at all these factors together, you can see that this upgrade is different.  SAP customers are at a unique point in time where they can set the direction for their enterprise solutions for the next decade.  At first, this may seem to be a daunting task and very few enterprises have the luxury or can afford the risk of a wholesale rebuild.  Most organizations are following an "evolutionary" approach to dealing with this business revolution.

Dale Young, Vice President
North American SAP Alliance Leader

Editor's comment:
Do you agree with Dale on this being the number one trend for 2007? Is it really that vital to upgrade? Do you trust the new lineup of feature-packed NetWeaver toys, or do you prefer to sit back and see what happens? Sound off and send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com today!

Matt Danielsson
Editor