asug

New ASUG president

America’s SAP User Group, ASUG, has announced its new president: Steven Strout, former CIO of Morris Communications. In addition to president, Strout will also take on the title of CEO to become the first full-time employee of the organization.

Rod Masney, who used to run the ASUG ship, worked with SearchSAP.com on numerous occasions, leaving a rich legacy behind. He will stay on the ASUG board and continue his efforts in keeping SAP and ASUG close.

We had the good fortune of sitting down with Strout at Sapphire 2007, and we’re looking forward to continuing our ASUG relationship in years ahead. Tune in later this week for news editor Jon Franke’s interview with Strout on what’s next for him, ASUG and SAP.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

TechEd ‘07: SOA is King

SAP has officially opened registration for TechEd ‘07, inviting SAP professionals to attend one of their four locations through fall. Las Vegas is first (10/1-5), followed by Munich (10/17-19), Shanghai (11/6-7) and Bangalore (11/28-30).

These events tend to be more technical in nature than Sapphire, offering some 1,000+ hours of SAP education for beginners and experts alike. As usual, ASUG, SDN, BPX and other SAP groups will take an active role with sessions and forums to round out the regular SAP fare.

The stated theme of this year’s event is “Enterprise SOA: Put the Power to Work,” focusing on the practical benefits that can be gained from jumping on the Enterprise SOA bandwagon. This is probably a wise move. Many SAP users I’ve spoken to complain that SAP’s push to get users to upgrade has been more stick than carrot; highlighting the positives may help sinking millions into upgrades seem less of a burden and more like a wise investment. If SAP can convince Joe Customer, that is.

One way to make the case for upgrading are the new Enterprise SOA Showcase Contests, where regular SAP shops can provide SOA success stories for a chance to win cash prizes. The contest opened just last week and remains open to submissions until 9/19, after which there’s a public voting opportunity to establish a list of finalists. The grand prize winner, who takes home $10,000 cash, gets crowned at TechEd in Las Vegas.

Chalk that up as wise move number two on SAP’s part. Call me cynical, but after seven years on the SAP beat I’ve learned this: One page of customer case study is worth infinitely more than ten pages of marketing speak. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume I’m not the only one who’s a lot more interested to hear a customer talk about how things worked out in real life than read about world-class solutions set to revolutionize the core value chain through innovation leadership. (Ok, in fairness, this applies to ALL enterprise tech press releases, but you know what I mean…)

Anyway, we were there in 2006, and we’ll be there again this year. Stay tuned as we approach this exciting event!

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 under fire: Axel responds

We received a tremendous amount of reader feedback on veteran site expert Axel Angeli's recent guest editorial SAP under fire: Axel Angeli on why 2007 will be tough for SAP. Here are some of the reader comments and Axel's responses.

"I agree with Axel's assessment that Microsoft Sharepoint will give SAP KM and EP a run for its money. I, with a group of other 'pioneers', have started an ASUG Special Interest Group to investigate and influence the interoperability of Sharepoint and the SAP Enterprise Portal. Many SAP customers will license the Sharepoint MOSS solution over the next few years because it certainly wins the 'beauty contest' and gives SAP a run for its money on robust search functionality.

Where Sharepoint is falling short is tying document management to business process via workflow and transactions. This is where you use Sharepoint for the user interface and document repository, but you run SAP workflow to handle the business processes, like approving documents based on document type and user hierarchies from HR organizational structures. I do not tout myself an expert in this area as we have just begun our journey down the path of interoperability, but I do see this being a relevant space within the SAP-Microsoft ecosystem.

– Name withheld, SAP Business Analyst, Longmont, Colo."

Axel: I am happy to read this comment. I am convinced that something needed to be done in this areas. SAP has all the necessary features including a basic WEBDAV support, allowing one to map any SAP repository data source as a network drive. One should maybe make clear to the Sharepoint newcomers that Sharepoint stands for two completely different elements: the Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server. The Sharepoint Services allow reading and writing back documents to a Sharepoint enabled server, while the Sharepoint Portal is a content management system that makes use of Sharepoint Services but otherwise is just another "Portal" and competes with SAP EP in this respect. We integrated Sharepoint Services successfully to open source CMS like Joomla or DRUPAL, hence I don't see a reason why it should not comply with EP as well.

I would love to eventually read more on the progress of your ASUG SIG project and maybe participate on a blog on this.

"First of all, I think SAP didn't drop the ball. I think SAP is doing very good job. SAP has already released its major version ECC 6.0 in 2006. No major releases are due until 2010. So SAP is up to date in all areas of ERP. SAP is ready to complete enterprise SOA technology. More enterprise SOA implementation projects and SAP upgrade projects will be implemented in 2007. As a result, more XI projects will be implemented in 2007 and demand for XI skills increases. Microsoft cannot compete with SAP in the ERP marketplace. They are still far away from SAP's level. Microsoft enters every niche market. That doesn't mean they can compete with SAP in the ERP market.

– Sobhan Annepu, Sr. Programming Analyst at Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Birmingham, Ala."

Axel: Saying that SAP didn't drop the ball may certainly be a matter of how you interpret the situation. I would say that SAP exactly DID drop the ball by putting a moratorium on release upgrades for four years and hence leaving ERP in the current state. It feels like leaving the dish in the kitchen sink after an opulent dinner. A moratorium will exactly be the kind of advantage that the competition is waiting for to dash into the gap.

When it comes to the mid-sized markets, SAP ERP won't win the beauty contest. ECC is strong in features but weak when it comes to agility. For small and diversified production sites, the Microsoft AX "Hub and Spoke" concept appears to be more convincing. If I am asked to give a proper advice in strategy to SAP product life cycle management, I would opt for efforts to break down the SD/MM/PP complex into small objects that can be decorated by the customer at discretion if production is concerned that might be done on the basis of an "APO light".

The weakness of Microsoft is currently the fact that AX (formerly: Axapta) still falls out of the Office licensing scheme and the frightening low number of developers that are familiar with the software. However, the latest release of AX sports a virtual machine and a script-like programming language that speaks for a serious effort to attack the markets of SAP. It might be a correct perception that Microsoft is ready to enter every niche market, but so does SAP.

I acknowledge that there will be an XI boom in 2007 and I already have predicted a shortage in skilled XI technical people. However, I stand firm to my belief that SAP has not yet reached a practical SOA, although I am certain that they are on track and will take over leadership in less than three years from now.

Editor's comment:
As always, we welcome your input. Reply to this post or send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Start measuring ROI of your SAP apps now

The Americas' SAP Users' Group and SAP are showcasing a joint benchmarking campaign designed to measure company successes and develop a roadmap to measure the ROI of SAP applications. I recently produced a podcast, that included an interview with Rod Masney, president of the Americas' SAP Users' Group. Masney discusses the benchmarking initiative, gives his views about the latest SAP issues and provides an overview about the user group's priorities over the next year.

Analysts say that not enough companies are measuring the ROI of their technology investments. It’s been very difficult to this point for SAP customers to find independent data to conduct benchmarking projects. AMR, Forrester, Gartner and other research firms provide data at a substantial cost. Although ASUG is working through SAP in this project, Masney said the data is fairly independent and is a good step in the right direction. The data is a result of surveys of participating ASUG member companies conducted by SAP.
-Rob Westervelt

SAP admits role in bouncing NetSuite from Sapphire hotel

SAP spokesman Bill Wohl confirmed that SAP played a role in getting a NetSuite event ousted from a nearby hotel during the Sapphire and America's SAP User's Group  conferences this week. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told reporters invited to a press and analyst cocktail hour that it was quashed through some pressure from SAP executives. Nelson was scheduled to speak Wednesday at The Rosen Centre, a hotel and conference center located directly across from the SAP Sapphire user conference. NetSuite sells on-demand software suite for small and midmarket businesses. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison owns the majority of NetSuite.

Wohl said SAP is responsible for filling many of the hotels close to the Orange County Convention Center, where the Sapphire conference is being held. Events sponsored by competitors in a hotel, completely booked by SAP personnel and press covering the event is considered "poor sportsmanship."

Meanwhile, a group of about a dozen taxi cabs emblazoned with rooftop Oracle ads were devoid of passengers,  but circled around the drop off area of Sapphire earlier this week. Convention center personnel ordered the cabs to leave the premises, according to Wohl.

-Rob Westervelt

Podcast: SAP user group head explains SAP successes, challenges

ASUG president Mike Perroni talks about the latest SAP technologies, why SAP customers are slow to upgrade and what to expect at this year's ASUG and Sapphire user conferences.

Perroni discusses the current makeup of ASUG, which has grown to about 45,000 individual members and 1,300 member companies. He said ASUG has worked closely to improve SAP ' account relationship model and executive exchange program. ASUG is also working with SAP to make ROI/TCO a priority, he said.

Perroni talks about why SAP customers are slow to upgrade their systems. He discusses SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture strategy, the joint SAP-Microsoft Mendocino product and whether SAP will face tough challenges as it faces Oracle and Microsoft in the midmarket. Perroni also talked about the maturity of the SAP Exchange Infrastructure, SAP Master Data Management and whether SAP's foray into the on-demand market could be successful.

Download the podcast here