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What SAP is doing right

SearchSAP.com site expert Axel Angeli recently leveled some criticism against SAP’s leadership and technical direction. This week he offers some support of SAP’s policies.

There are areas in which SAP is making positive progress, mainly in the embedding of communities and in collaboration with customers and vendors. SAP has learned a lesson from the enthusiastic engagement of Global Communication and the community experts. SDN is doing great and discussing product strategies in SDN would give better insight than listening to internal plans for the future.

A new member in the family is the SAP EcoHub. The idea is great. It creates a marketplace where SAP third party-vendors and SAP customers can meet in a single place. The questions that remain are: Why is a marketplace not simply called a marketplace, and why did EcoHub come into being shortly after some former SAP employees started a similar project under the name SolutionsScout.com?

The business counterpart to SDN, the Business Process Expert community (BPX), is getting more and more popular. A BPXer is a knowledge engineer, an advisor who should be able to explain the technology to business and explain the real business needs to the technical staff. Here is where paths cross: Listening to the true BPX community would give SAP an idea of where they need to invest, rather than investing in something later pushed into a market that hasn’t asked for it.

SAP has established standards for certified Business Process Experts. The idea here is to deliver a canonical set of knowledge and methods as the common ground for everyone working as ERP consultants. There are plans for training and certification in order to make BPX more popular and to quickly get a critical mass of qualified BPXers all over the world.

SAP is a good company and SAP has great products. SAP customers enjoy working with the ABAP stack; not for nostalgic reasons but because it is reliable, stable, still elaborate by design and superior to everything else that competes with it. SAP ERP is also the best choice for SMBs, if it is installed and if all service is rendered by an experienced SAP partner who specializes in the SMB customer’s industry sector. SAP ERP is still the best, and only Microsoft Dynamics AX will come close.

There is still potential for SAP, but management has to understand that listening to customers and freely giving out information early — even if details change later — is better than hatching strategies in an ivory tower. SAP leaders, wake up: Listen to your community and treat customer complaints as sacred!

In part one of this blog, published earlier this week, Axel Angeli discussed why he isn’t fond of SAP CEO Leo Apotheker, SAP’s service fee increases or elements of NetWeaver. In part two, Axel criticized some of SAP’s technology decisions.

How can SAP get back on track?

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 technological direction in this guest blog.

Has SAP lost its mojo?

In the good old days, SAP was an extremely successful technology company and the darling of many analysts. This was in the last millennium, before SAP lost its belief in its own strengths and virtues.

In 1998 SAP undertook its last breath-taking act of innovation when it introduced the BAPI framework. BAPIs had been designed to transform SAP’s transaction-based system into a component-based service suite where any functionality would be programmatically accessible. Back then, SAP was already an SOA-aware software package! But this successful path was needlessly abandoned in the years to come. The old SAP crew that defined the company’s technological success — in terms of ABAP, RFC and Batch Input — was mugged by the dogma of Java.

Even though it was implemented in the mindset of assembler programming, Java is a language that decorates itself with the feathers of object-oriented programming. It is unstable, unreadable, incomplete and completely redundant, since it did not introduce a single new feature that the world had been waiting for.

How should SAP escape the Java trap? Go back to its old merits. Make a clear and non-negotiable decision in favor of ABAP. This would also mean polishing up ABAP with a more modern syntax. The new ABAP 7.2 kernel has already taken some first steps in this regard. Technically the rudders are in the right direction. What is missing is the clear commitment of the SAP board.

In terms of SOA, there is another problematic area that requires immediate action: Process Infrastructure (PI). SAP doesn’t have the power to make technology changes from the inside and needs to shore up PI by buying a standing technology as an enhancement package for the existing stack. IBM bought Mercator Datastage TX, Progress took IONA, Oracle snagged BEA and Software AG showed mercy to suffering webMethods. The number of possible candidates for purchase is limited. If looking for quality products with an inherent Event-Driven ESB architecture, there are mainly Fiorano, ActiveBPEL or the not-for-sale SAP partner Seeburger. 

In part one of this blog, published last week, Axel Angeli discussed why he isn’t fond of SAP CEO Leo Apotheker, SAP’s service fee increases or elements of NetWeaver. In the next part of this blog, Axel will explain what SAP is, in his opinion, doing right.

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.

How to get started in SAP

The demand for SAP technology and functional consultants is near an all-time high. However, if you don’t already have an SAP job, building an SAP career remains a difficult undertaking.

SAP certification and training is one way to prepare yourself for an SAP job, but recently readers are asking us how to choose between the various options available. One way to begin is by taking two classes directly from SAP:

SAP NetWeaver is SAP’s technological foundation and the core of all SAP foundations. As such, it’s a good investment to take SAPNW and SAPTEC classes directly from SAP. SAPNW is a three-day course, offered in dozens of countries, that will introduce you not only to the NetWeaver interface and fundamentals, but also to SAP’s service-oriented architecture, exchange infrastructure (XI), portal infrastructure (PI), enterprise portal, application server, Run SAP and business intelligence (BI). Aspiring SAP consultants who take this course might find that their classmates are actual SAP end users, so there is an opportunity to network.

After taking SAPNW, sign up for SAPTEC, a three-day course that digs more deeply into the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaverAS). Perhaps the most valuable part of this course is it overview of the SAP development process, an indispensable skill in the SAP world.

Together, these courses are comparable in cost to the money third-party SAP certification providers are charging for certificates in countries such as India, and add more value to an SAP job seeker’s resume.

Once you’ve caught up on NetWeaver, whether on the basis of SAP training or self-study, don’t forget to ask us your more targeted questions about developing an SAP NetWeaver career in particular or an SAP career in general.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Spotlight on job skills: Customizing the SAP look

There’s an SAP skills shortage underway, and people want to know how to position themselves to take advantage. One approach is to look through lists of the SAP skills for which employers are paying more, or which are demonstrating faster rates of growth. Another approach is to prioritize your education and training. A third approach, the subject of this entry, is to think of building SAP skills not in terms of product categories but in high-value niches.

One niche that comes to mind is SAP GUI development. As those with any exposure to SAP know, certain product interfaces are difficult to navigate — for example, because of fields scattered across various screens, or screens that don’t capture the exact flow of a business process. These kinds of navigability and usability shortcomings might not doom an SAP project altogether, but they can result in user non-compliance and data inaccuracies.

This opens up an opportunity for SAP developers who can make SAP products more usable and friendly. When you think about it, this is a universal skill, because it can apply to products across the entire SAP portfolio. There are a couple of ways for developers (and consultants) to add SAP GUI enhancement to their skill set: develop SAP GUI scripting skills, or, in an easier gambit, learn to work with third-party tools such as those provided by Synactive.

Synactive is an interesting company, as it products are regularly used to make SAP more usable in dozens of enterprise-class deployments (like Nike and Shell). I’m surprised more people don’t know about this company, especially because it’s easy enough to learn to use its products and use them to package yourself as a SAP interface fixer-upper.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP ABAP: Dead or alive?

Veteran SAP career expert Jon Reed has fielded quite a few questions from ABAP developers concerned about SAP’s apparent focus on Java over ABAP. Indeed, things have had a distinct Java-flavor lately, which Reed discusses in depth in his most recent guest column, What SAP says about the future of ABAP.

As a follow-up, he asked Thomas Jung, who presented “ABAP Development: Update Your Skills to SAP NetWeaver 7.0” at TechEd Las Vegas this year, to take a look at the column and add any clarifications. Here is what Jung had to say:

Jon, nice article. I did see one thing I thought was interesting. You said, ‘But there’s no question that when it comes to designing new enterprise services, Java is the language of choice in most cases.’ You might want to ask someone at SAP what nearly all of Business Suite and Business by Design Enterprise Services are written in. You will find that the answer isn’t Java. But you make an excellent point in this article: does it really matter if the Enterprise Services themselves are written in Java or ABAP? No, not as long as the results are ‘open standards based.’

Jung went on to add:

Yes, to the outside world, it really doesn’t matter if it is ABAP or Java, since either way, the services are exposed via open standards. That is true. But at the same time, it is important to note that we continue to leverage the investment SAP, its partners and its customers have already made in the business logic written in ABAP.

Our eSOA strategy doesn’t mean that you have to discard that investment. Quite the opposite. You can continue to gain benefit from that investment while also extending it to new and open opportunities.

Perhaps the most important point Jung wanted to get across to us, and to the readers of this blog, is that the question of whether Enterprise Services are written in ABAP or Java is not the most key issue. Jung wants us to remember Vishal Sikka’s message that the underlying programming language is not as crucial as understanding how SAP is “wrapping” the code and exposing applications via Enterprise SOA.

So how do we summarize the question of whether ABAP is dead? We can start by saying that you can’t answer it completely in one blog entry. We’ll return to this topic frequently as more information comes to light.

But for now, we can safely say that ABAP is not going anywhere. It’s also becoming clear that whether you’re an SAP ABAP person or an SAP Java person, if you don’t make a commitment to understanding the latest generation of modeling tools (CE, Visual Composer, Aris for NetWeaver, etc.), and how they fit into the emerging Enterprise Architecture, you’re going to be left behind.

As of this writing, the final word on “is ABAP dead?” is not “yes” or “no.” The answer is that we’re asking the wrong question.

Jon Reed & Matt Danielsson

Naeem Hashmi on the new visual modeling tool

Yesterday’s TechEd keynote featured a demo of the “visual modeling tool of the future,” where business process folks will be able to draw up processes like they would on a whiteboard while the SAP back-end code is automatically generated as they go. We asked several TechEd attendees what they thought about it, and the vast majority answered along the lines of: “I’ve heard this ‘fully-automatic’ tune before, and it sounds too easy. I’m not buying it.”

We caught up with analyst and veteran SearchSAP.com expert Naeem Hashmi for his take on the matter.

“For a general purpose solution, it’s the right move on SAP’s part,” Hashmi said. “I estimate some 60-70% of applications can be developed using this kind of tool, and that’s not bad.”

If SAP comes through with a final product like the one showcased yesterday, we’re really starting to tap the full power of the SOA vision, he said. Non-ABAPers can tap the repositories and do a lot of smaller-scale work themselves. This frees up the developers to focus on the remaining 30-40%, which involves working with the core. Nesting, looping, control and so forth requires going beyond painting pictures on a screen, and that will not change, Hashmi said.

“The trick is going to be avoiding redundancies,” he said. “If you let the FI guys loose to do their own thing, and the HR guys, and so on, you’ll end up with a mess. Each team should work closely with the architects to make sure the business process experts pull in the same direction.”

Matt Danielsson
Editor

SAP tip challenge

Do you have a clever ABAP workaround to share? Know a slick way to optimize the latest BI tools? Then take a few minutes to share your knowledge for a chance to win one of two great book bundles courtesy of SAP Press.

Prize option #1: SAP developer’s bundle

• ABAP Objects
• SAP Exchange Infrastructure
• SAP NetWeaver/Microsoft .NET Interoperability
• SAP Enterprise Portal — Technology and Programming

Prize option #2: SAP analyst/planner’s bundle

• SAP System Landscape Optimization
• SAP Performance Optimization Guide
• SAP xApp Analytics
• Inventory Optimization with SAP

The contest runs until October 31, 2007, and you may submit more than one entry. Click here for full contest details.

Good luck!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

The keys to ABAP success

We recently ran an article where ABAP expert Rehan Zaidi shared some best practices for breaking into professional SAP application development. But more information is always better, so we checked in with Matthew Billingham, our resident ABAP guru on the Ask the Expert panel, to see if he had anything to add. Here’s what he had to say about ABAP job prospects, certification programs and getting your foot in the SAP door.

ABAP certification
ABAP certification only demonstrates that a certain level of knowledge has been achieved. It does not give any indication of how to apply that knowledge, and certainly does not demonstrate that the certificate holder has any ability at the generic art of programming. If I was recruiting a trainee developer, then certification would be a plus, because I’d have some assurance that they at least could talk using some of the same terms as me. But the value of real-life experience quickly overtakes any certification; if you can show two or more years of good results, whether you have certification or not is completely irrelevant.

Breaking into the field
That leads us to the next issue: Getting your foot in the door. As you probably know, this is and always has been the hardest part of the SAP world. The best bet as a newbie is to go through a consultancy. Or, if you’ve already got some commercial skill, finding a company that uses that skill but also uses SAP, and angle for some cross training. ABAP is different from many programming languages in that it doesn’t just sit in a vacuum, waiting for applications to be developed. The applications are already there - in the shape of the classic R/3 modules, BW, SEM etc. Our job is to make those applications do more than originally designed by SAP. That requires understanding of those applications; the data structures, the flows etc. And you only get that through hands-on experience.

Business vs. technical SAP
Historically in SAP, the technical side and business side have been seperate. This is unlike much of the rest of the IT industry, which spawned such roles as the “Analyst Programmer” to have people who could do the technical side, and yet still communicate with the business. A programmer who doesn’t appreciate commercial concerns won’t go far within SAP. An understanding of business processes - or at least, a willingness to understand them - is key to be able to provide the customer with what they need. For clients to productively use the newer tools, such as Visual Composer, they’ll need people with development skills (programming is programming regardless of whether you use a GUI or an editor to write the program) - but these people will have to have business knowledge. I think the paradigm of “Analyst Programmer” has finally made its way into SAP!

Two distinctive traits of good ABAP professionals
In the past five years, I regret to say that while the number of developers has increased in the SAP world, my experience is that the percentage of those that are “good programmers” has declined. And so have the expectations from the more business-oriented part of the industry. Generally, I think we developers don’t have a good reputation. The tendency is to write code that works on day one. Few care what happens on day two. If you want to make a career out of SAP development, rather than just using it as the entry to becoming a functional consultant or manager, then I think you’ll need some distinctive traits to put you ahead of the majority of your programming colleagues. The first of those traits is a deep understanding of business, commercial realities and processes. The second trait is knowing the art of careful program design, so that when your programs need to be changed, you can do so quickly and easily, without introducing more bugs. Keep your focus on these traits, get as much real-life experience as you can, and you’ll be on track for a bright ABAP future.

You can submit development-related questions to Matthew here, while SAP career-related questions should be addressed to Jon Reed.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

The keys to SAP workflow success

We recently ran a news article called “ABAP development done right” that focused on how aspiring ABAP developers should take those first, crucial steps towards a fulfilling career. Well, there’s also a number of people looking to break in as a workflow consultant. Indeed, skilled workflow experts have excellent prospects and may be less in the crosshairs for being outsourced in the years ahead, making this an attractive career option.

We checked in with veteran workflow expert Alon Raskin for some quick tips using the same approach: What does a beginner need to know in order to get started on the right foot as a workflow consultant?

First off, you need to really master the SAP workflow engine. There are many different ways to implement the same thing in SAP, and each approach comes with distinct implications. An ‘under the hood’ understanding of the way the SAP workflow engine does things can be very valuable when deciding how to model a particular business process.

Secondly, a strong technical workflow consultant should also have a strong functional understanding. It may sound strange, but as a workflow consultant, you spend a lot of time modeling business processes so an understanding of those processes is key.

Finally, don’t sweat the certification programs. It’s simply not worth the money and effort. Real-world experience is what counts out there.

Bottom line: Hit the books, make a conscious effort to straddle the technical and functional sides, and above all — do whatever it takes to get your hands dirty as soon as possible.

Matt Danielsson
Editor