soa

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.

SOA delayed

One of the most interesting, and neglected, stories to come out of SAP’s just-concluded TechEd event in Berlin was how slowly some end users are moving towards service-oriented architecture (SOA), despite the investment that SAP has poured into eSOA. Blogging on site, Andy Hayler noted one of the reasons why SOA adoption is still delayed, over half a decade after its appearance on CIO agendas. Hayler, founder of MDM vendor Kalido and now an MDM analyst, spoke to a German utility company running an SOA pilot, and noted how “difficult it is to do debugging across a Web services application which touches a whole series of different applications in its wake. If something goes wrong, then they have found it is a lot more fiddly to trace where exactly the fault lies, given the cross-application nature of the project.”

Normally, the cross-application nature of SOA is touted as an SOA advantage, so it’s refreshing to hear from an end user willing to offer a new perspective on SOA’s complexity. Hayler, for one, isn’t drinking the SOA Kool-Aid. He described the Germany utility company’s SAP project as “this is a project driven by the IT department as an exercise in proving technology, rather than one with a quantified business case.”

Given the current IT spending atmosphere, it’s a strong bet that the tolerance for sandbox-style projects is down. However, there are plenty of folks who think that SOA is very much about the business: consider Forrester’s latest SOA survey, which shows SOA adoption rising impressively, and globally.

To judge by SAP’s user base, SOA certainly has some momentum. TechEd Berlin’s Enterprise SOA Experience Workshop, priced at $1,000 per attendee, was one of the few sold-out conference activities. But what are the prospects for SAP end users to move beyond sandbox-style experiments and truly commitment themselves to SOA, a la Volkswagen? Our SAP expert on the scene, Axel Angeli, is going to be digging more deeply into SAP and SOA issues in the coming weeks. Watch for his guest blog entries for more insight.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

How SOA matters in SAP environments

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been a major background piece of SAP’s product architecture since the debut of NetWeaver. However, SOA took a front seat in 2008.

SOA is, strictly speaking, middleware — a platform that allows software systems to connect to each other, use bits of each other’s functionality/interfaces and draw from a common library of reusable logic. As such, SOA can lie at the heart of both an application infrastructure paradigm such as NetWeaver and specific developer tools. For example, consider the way in which SOA is now enabling SAP developers to work in Microsoft environments and vice versa. SOA was also behind one of the hits of TechEd, a spell check program for SAP.

But SOA is also very close to both the tools and techniques of business process management (BPM). It’s impossible to succinctly explain how these domains overlap, but one of our recent podcasts examined the interface between SOA and BPM in more detail. If you develop a stronger understanding of why SOA and BPM overlap, you’ll be well equipped to approach SAP’s new Business Process Expert (BPX) certification. Both SOA and BPM are fundamental components of the BPX curriculum and, if you want to call yourself a BPXer, you’ll have to master basic concepts that apply to both.

If you’re not sure whether you have a decent baseline of SOA knowledge, take our SOA quiz. It covers topics ranging from foundational concepts in Web services to SOA’s application in specific product components, such as the Enterprise Portal.

Finally, because SOA is right at the heart of both business processes and enterprise applications, it brings together what you might call the suits and the geeks. SOA is making these disparate communities speak each other’s languages, as you can discover on SAP’s BPX forum.

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know how we can continue to educate you on matters related to SOA.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

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

Web Dynpro: A surging SAP career opportunity

SAP’s resident NetWeaver expert, Axel Angeli, has answered a flurry of reader questions lately, and one of the emerging themes is the strength of Web Dynpro as an SAP career skill. Web Dynpro lies within NetWeaver and is the programming model for Web-based business applications. Axel sees a strong market for it, even though some readers have the mistaken impression that SAP’s Business Server Pages (BSP) is going to replace Web Dynpro. However, Axel points out that learning Web Dynpro can be essential to SAP job success in NetWeaver (click on the link to see what he has to say about BSP).

There are two flavors of Web Dynpro: Web Dynpro Java and Web Dynpro ABAP. Axel has a strong preference for one of these two based on what he sees in the market, and what he considers the strategic direction of SAP. While you should read Axel’s tip to learn more, we won’t be giving anything away by reminding you that Axel was happy to see Java supporter Shai Agassi leave SAP.

If your interest is piqued in Web Dynpro, there are further actions you should take. Begin by discovering what is Web Dynpro, according to SAP itself, and learn how and where you can get training in Web Dynpro if you are interested in taking the next step. If you want to know why Axel argues that Web Dynpro for ABAP is a superior career path, read the ABAP versus Java white paper and also get the Java perspective from consultant Lynton Grice.

Finally, bear in mind that SAP’s commitment to service-oriented architecture (SOA) is further transforming the career skills required to excel in NetWeaver. Stay ahead of the curve by learning more about SAP and SOA.

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

The skinny on SAP SRM 2007

There has been something of a slow burn recently on a couple good blogs about SAP SRM 6.0. The word around is that the product, also referred to as SRM 2007, won’t be released beyond those customers currently in the ramp-up phase. Obviously, this isn’t great news for SAP, but how bad is it?

To clear some things up, we talked to Andrew Bartels, an SRM (supplier relationship management) analyst with Forrester Research.

SAP says between 10 and 50 companies are in the ramp-up phase for SAP SRM 6.0 (Bartels puts that number closer to 10 or 20). Bartels said these companies will be able to continue implementing the product, but SAP will not be taking any new customers. Rather, the idea is that SAP will focus on getting SRM, SCM (supply chain management) and all its “alphabet soup” products on SOA (service-oriented architecture) by the fourth quarter of 2008.

So, is this a disaster for SAP? Not according to Bartels.

On the plus side, the SRM 2007 product itself doesn’t have a lot of new features and functionality, according to Bartels. Rather, most of the improvements were in usability, and SAP may have some service packs in the offing to help in that area.

SAP will also continue developing the areas that have needed the most attention — spend analysis, CLM (contract lifecycle management) and e-sourcing — all of which will be available for sale separately.

However, with the next SRM product now likely debuting in the fourth quarter of 2008, that puts a large two and a half year gap between major SAP SRM releases. Also, some customers were counting on the usability improvements and will be disappointed. But we shouldn’t expect a mass customer exodus for SAP, Bartels said.

The bottom line?

“This is not good for SAP,” Bartels said. “But it is not, by any means, too bad for them — they still have competitive products out there.”

Jon Franke
News Editor

New SOA blog

Now you can learn more about SOA from a big-picture perspective, in SOA Talk, the new blog at our sister site SearchSOA.com. While not SAP-specific, it will provide plenty of general SOA strategy, governance, infrastructure and data architecture information. Check it out today!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

NetWeaver 7.1 is here. What will NetWeaver 7.2 be like?

As mentioned in yesterday’s TechEd keynote article, SAP has now announced the availability of NetWeaver 7.1. Renee Boucher Ferguson on ZDNet summarized the key improvements in her article earlier today.

“[NetWeaver 7.1] brings the discussion around the integration and development platform full circle—back to business process orchestration, where it started when NetWeaver was announced in 2003,” Ferguson said. “There are three main pieces being added to the NetWeaver stack in version 7.1: Composition Environment, Enterprise Services Repository and NetWeaver Process Integration. By incorporating the three elements into NetWeaver, SAP [...] hopes to lay the foundation for business process management in the world of SOA.”

Practically all the attendees at TechEd we talked to were upbeat about the announcement.

“The improvements are tremendous,” said Oliver Kaluscha, independent SAP consultant from Frankfurt, Germany. “I mostly work with Mobile technologies, so this is absolutely helpful to my business.”

Peter Thiele, senior consultant with IDS Scheer in Philadelphia, Penn., echoed the sentiment.

“This is going to put SAP technologically on par with other EAI leaders like WebMethods, Tibco and others,” Thiele said.

What’s next for NetWeaver? Surely, the SAP folks who created NetWeaver 7.1 aren’t spending their days playing Tetris, so what are they working on now? We asked Aiaz Kazi, VP of Solution Marketing at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. what to expect from NetWeaver 7.2.

For new features, Kazi was tight-lipped. “Our internal NetWeaver road map stretches 12-18 months into future,” he said. “The public road map is typically less than a year.” Today, Web 2.0 technologies like wikis are all the rage, he said. Tomorrow is papier mache — who’s to tell what’s going to be hot?

What he could say, however, was that we can rest assured CE will drive the front end. It’s what happened with NetWeaver 7.1, and that’s what will happen in the future, he said. Furthermore, the focus will remain on maintaining and improving stability, Kazi said. He largely agrees with Ferguson’s full circle-comment, referring to the CE/ESR/PI as the “holy trinity” on which the future rests, although there’s always room for improvement.

Matt Danielsson
Editor