SAP

SAP skills: Is your job on the chopping block?

There's a major shortage of SAP skills in the marketplace, thanks to the inevitable lag time between SAP's aggressive debut of new products and IT workers' ability to master the associated skills. That's the message from Foote Partners' upcoming report on IT skills and compensation. The report is...

Why did you go to Sapphire?

The show floor was electric this year at Sapphire 2008 in Orlando. With over 15,000 attendees, the vendors had their work cut out for them. I saw booths that featured magicians, Guitar Hero, and a 2008 Porsche. A handful took the sex appeal approach. With all these distractions, people were...

SAP’s BPM Roadmap

For most industry watchers, ‘SAP’ and ‘BPM’ go together in the context of ProcessWorld, SAP partner IDS Scheer’s annual Business Process Management (BPM) shindig. But at Sapphire 2008, SAP showed signs of wanting to address more BPM capabilities via NetWeaver BPM.

Burnaby: another SAP cost overrun

The city of Burnaby, British Columbia (B.C.) is a small Canadian town that could furnish the next big SAP cost overrun story. In 2005, Burnaby committed $10 million (in Canadian currency, which is currently close to even with the U.S. dollar) to an SAP financials system. Now, in 2008, an article...

Where SAP is going

ORLANDO—One of the general anxieties at this or any other SAPPHIRE is about SAP’s strategic direction. The perennial question for customers old and new, as well as for prospects, is: “Where is SAP going, and how will it impact me?”

A new report...

The changing role of the finance organization

SAPPHIRE is not only a place to hear about the latest SAP developments but also an important source of business strategy news. For example, today IBM released its Global CFO Study 2008 at SAPPHIRE today, with the CEO study to appear tomorrow. IBM’s CFO Study, executed in cooperation with The...

SAP’s Q1: The shape of things to come

SAP's Q1 results just came in at the lower range of SAP's guidance. The Americas software and services business was down 13 percent from Q1 2007, indicating that the U.S. recession is registering a meaningful impact on software spending across the board (since Oracle's and Microsoft's numbers were...

Business Objects and data quality problems

Business Objects works... right? That seems to be the general consensus from its customers. Frank Dravis, back in 2005, wrote about categorizing data quality problems. In this blog he...

SAPPHIRE preview: Cool ASUG sessions

This is the second SAPPHIRE in which SAP and ASUG will present together. For attendees, this means a wealth of sessions, networking opportunities, and demos in the same location, but at the possible cost of creating some scheduling complexities. How do you decide which of the hundreds of sessions...

SAPPHIRE’s top 10 sessions

With SAPPHIRE ten days away, this is a good time to list the top ten sessions--not by any objective quality, but by how I see them based on what's hot 1 . Today's Business Process Expert--What You Need to Know. This daylong event aggregates a whole posse of consultants,...