TechEd

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

SAP implementation/upgrade tips

Implementing or upgrading SAP can make or break not only a CIO’s career but also impact the financial position of a company. This is a major issue going into TechEd 2008, where plenty of discussion will be devoted to the finer points of ensuring a successful SAP implementation or upgrade. We looked back through the SearchSAP archive to find five particularly helpful pointers on this topic. Whether you’re a CIO, an SAP consultant, or a member of an SAP project team, studying this content will give you a leg up on understanding — and avoiding — the pitfalls while executing on the best practices.

Important points for planning an R/3 upgrade project: These 10 tips, ranging from the big picture (understanding your system landscape) to important details (dealing obsolete ABAP statements) offer a conceptual foundation for SAP R/3 upgrades.

Ten critical steps when undertaking an SAP upgrade: This high-level overview of the SAP upgrade process gives you tips on everything from how to prepare your organization to how to handle the SAP graphical user interface front-end.

SAP consulting versus SAP support for upgrades: Partners are one of the most important success factors in an SAP upgrade or implementation. This article will clue you in to the distinct services you can expect from SAP consulting and SAP support.

SAP implementation challenges, potential pitfalls: SAP end user Rosenthal USA achieved a successful SAP implementation by avoiding common pitfalls and adopting best practices. As a smaller company, Rosenthal USA offers helpful tips for negotiating with VARs and other strategies for driving down the price of an SAP implementation or upgrade.

Podcast: Run SAP and Solution Manager. Implementing or upgrading SAP is only half the battle. In order to keep your business running, and to optimize your SAP ROI, you have to learn how to run your SAP solutions in the most efficient possible. Fortunately, SAP can help you do this with the Run SAP methodology and the Solution Manager tool.

If you have follow-up questions generated by this content, don’t hesitate to leave your comments below.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

How will SAP’s BO acquisition impact SAP BI consulting?

In this two-part guest column, veteran SAP expert Jon Reed sounds off on the recently announced Business Objects acquisition.

Coming back from TechEd Las Vegas, we were all taken by surprise when the big TechEd announcements were trumped by the news of SAP’s Business Objects (BO) acquisition. This purchase was a major development for many reasons, not the least of which was because it marked a significant shift in SAP’s “build, don’t buy” development strategy. The biggest question off the bat was a simple one: Is this a good or bad move for SAP?

Matt Danielsson’s Editorial Blog ran a series of entries which provided a very useful assessment of the pros and cons of the BO acquisition. Featured among the entries was Naeem Hashmi of Information Frameworks, who provided a well-balanced look at the impact of the BO purchase.

After Matt posted his initial features, a follow-up question appeared: How will the BO acquisition affect SAP: How will the BO acquisition affect SAP consulting in the BI/BW area? To get a handle on this issue, I asked Naeem Hashmi to share his thoughts on the impact of BO on the careers of SAP professionals. I then placed his comments in an overall context of how I look at the issue myself. Here is what I had to say:

Almost as soon as SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (BO) was announced, the emails started pouring in. All kinds of SAP consultants, including those who were seriously involved in BW/BI or those who were looking to get involved, were concerned: How would this acquisition affect their career path? To be honest, I never truly understood these concerns.

Let me clarify: I do grasp that the BO acquisition poses some potentially dramatic changes in the SAP BI consulting space. Certainly the “skills profile” of the BI consultant of the future will change as a result of SAP’s BO purchase. But I saw the BO acquisition, which was a major departure from SAP’s “build our own code base” strategy, as a signal of the strategic importance of BI to the product line. And that can only be good news to the SAP BI consultant in the long term.

This certainly jibes with the sense I got from TechEd 2007. On the lookout for hot skills, what I saw was that the “eSOA skill set” would eventually be very much in demand, but right now, BW/BI skills were considered the most sought after of any skill, certainly any technical skill.

So it’s hard for me to see a serious problem for BI folks here – if anything, the BO purchase indicates the huge value SAP sees in BI going forward. And that means that SAP’s own customers are committed to implementing this technology. SAP would not have gone after BO if they had any doubt about that.

In order to get a better handle on how BO will truly impact SAP BI consultants on the skills level, I asked Naeem Hashmi, Chief Research Officer of Information Frameworks, if he would like to share his take on how the BO purchase will impact SAP professionals.

Read his thoughts on the matter in part two of this column.

SAP’s BO acquisition impact on SAP BI consulting, part two

In the first part of this column, guest expert Jon Reed expressed confidence in the future job prospects of SAP BI professionals. But what does our other expert voice on the Business Object acquisition think? Jon Reed sat down with Information Frameworks Chief Research Officer Naeem Hashmi for a job growth reality check.

“From an SAP BI professional growth perspective, SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (BO) brings a great opportunity,” Hashmi said. “Business Objects offers a superior and flexible presentation environment. However, whether the back end ends up being BO, SAP BI 7, Oracle, MS SQL, DB2, etc., you still need data warehousing skills to construct a data access environment regardless if you use the SAP BI or BO front end. For that reason, if I am an SAP BI consultant, I do not worry about the BO acquisition by SAP. If I was only a BO consultant, I would be concerned, however.

I see greater hardship for BO consultants learning and becoming fluent in SAP BI. Under NetWeaver, BI training and skills are very important. SAP BI consultants will find it much easier to learn BO and become fluent in BO technology quickly.

Note that the heart of BI usage is not really the technology, but the business side of “business intelligence” and here is where I see the BO acquisition will bring a wide array of good knowledge about building user-friendly business intelligence solutions into SAP (and to SAP BI consultants).

I do not see much of an impact of BO on SAP BI consultants. SAP BI is going to grow. Perhaps there will be a robust RFC (or other high performance data exchange method) to build BO universes automatically, and synchronize them easily from a backend SAP BI broadcaster or other method.

This way, enterprise BI users would still enjoy access to clean SAP and non-SAP data and have the ability to analyze data through a powerful BO user front-end using local universes. At this point, the SAP-BO integration plans are still on the drawing boards, so we’ll have to see how the future BO roadmap will evolve towards disappearing within the SAP Solutions. But at this point, the outlook for SAP BI consultants looks promising.

So what can an SAP BW or BI consultant do to prepare for the SAP BI profession for the future?

1) Take some BO training for your short-term competitive edge. Learn the business intelligence language of non-SAP business users. SAP BI consultants need to become “enterprise bi-linguals.” Learn the BO Data Integrator (which is the Acta ETL tool), which could eventually become the SAP ETL tool for non-SAP data sources without coding ABAP.

2) Get some training in Enterprise Architecture (EA). This will help you understand the actual business processes that span across SAP and non-SAP solutions, how people use information and when/how/why they make decisions that pertain to the BI side. You will be a better BI consultant with some EA understanding, and this will enable you to diversify your profession as well.

3) I would also suggest BO consultants start learning SAP BI and get used to the SAP BI lingo. The BO universes will disappear from the SAP universe sooner than you may have imagined. Prepare yourself with SAP BI.”

I think Naeem has summarized this situation well, both in terms of the big picture of SAP BI and the next steps SAP consultants can take. In addition, he’s shared some useful pointers for BO experts in the midst of this big corporate changeover.

However, there is one other aspect to consider, which Naeem brought up in his original SearchSAP commentary on BO:

“The bad news is, we’re now seeing a momentary confusion among SAP BI customers and consulting partners. We have many different products with different infrastructures, usage and life cycle management environments. Just a few month back SAP acquired OutlookSoft, a corporate performance suite, and before that we saw the Virsa acquisition.”

This is an important point. Naeem is correct that the BO acquisition has definitely created some short-term customer confusion, for understandable reasons. It’s possible we could see the immediate demand for SAP BW/BI expertise go down as SAP customers put the breaks on certain BI initiatives until they determine the best way forward, what their BO options are, and how the two frameworks will be integrated.

However, there are so many ongoing BW and BI projects, covering so many different kinds of initiatives, that I don’t expect a big adverse impact on BI consulting demand. For consultants trying to break into SAP BI, this may create yet another avenue, by mastering the tools on the BO side and approaching SAP from that direction.

The confusion we see in the shorter term about BI should be cleared up for the longer term. I expect in the end, we’ll see even more demand for BI consultants as a result of this acquisition. It’s never ’smooth sailing’ with SAP for any consultant, and the BO acquisition could create some choppy waves for some, and make it a little harder for junior-level BI folks to push ahead. But I see some promising shorelines ahead for the BI consultants who realize that this development is, more than anything, a recognition of the strategic value of their work.

As SAP shifts from a transactional system to a business process platform that leverages transactional data, BI is in a crucial product position. That strikes me as very good news for the BW/BI consultant.

Bottom line: SAP BI professionals have little reason to worry, but Business Objects experts would be wise to start cracking the SAP books sooner rather than later. Do you agree? Are there factors in play Reed and Hashmi are missing? We want to hear from you — please send your comments to mdanielsson@techtarget.com, where one random submitter will receive a free copy of “SAP System Landscape Optimization” courtesy of SAP Press.

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

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

New SAP certification options

The value of formal certification differ quite a bit depending on your situation. A formal certificate may be the golden ticket to getting a foot in the door for a junior position. However, “Practical experience is King” is the mantra most of our experts rely on.

“If you can show two or more years of good results, whether you have certification or not is completely irrelevant,” said Matthew Billingham in his guest column The Keys to ABAP success last month.

This potential for diminished value of certification is obviously a problem for SAP, but it seems SAP recognized it. Announced at TechEd, there are now three levels of certification for SAP professionals:

• SAP Certified Associate is the basic stamp of approval for budding SAP professionals, suitable for recent college grads and those who recently moved to the SAP world.
• SAP Certified Professional goes one step further, requiring proven experience and good understanding of SAP basics. This step is suitable for those with at least two years practical, hands-on experience.
• SAP Certified Master is the trial-by-fire achievement that is likely to involve practical testing as well as interviews and written tests. I say “likely” because this flavor of certification is still under development and won’t be available until 2008.

On that note, there are still branches of the Professional level that are under development too, although I’m told this will be resolved shortly. Another quirk worth mentioning: For Associate and Professional levels, you choose a technical or functional angle for the topic you seek certification in; for Master level, you have to know both sides of the fence, said Michael Smith, eLearning Manager at SAP America in Atlanta, Georgia.

“One notable difference with the new certifications is the type of questions,” Smith said. “Instead of multiple choice questions from the study material, you get more open questions like ‘If you’re faced with problem X, how do you solve it?’”

That’s probably a good thing, seeing how there have been grumbles about SAP certification holders with subpar practical know-how — which typically doesn’t become evident until the project goes awry, be it a consultant or salaried employee.

“As a rule, SAP professionals tend to overestimate the power of certification,” said SAP career expert Jon Reed. “My experience is that most hiring managers are far more impressed by strong project track record than they are with a piece of paper.”

Reed will take an in-depth look at SAP’s new certification program in the weeks ahead, providing practical advice for new and current SAP professionals on what options are best suited to their current skills and interests.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

A peek into the future

One interesting part of SAP CTO Vishal Sikka’s keynote presentation was his “peek into the future” almost tacked on to the end of his part. While light on technical details, the next step in SAP development is model deployment straight into SAP code.

This evolutionary leap is Eclipse-based, which is an important statement about SAP’s confidence in Eclipse in and by itself, but what makes this interesting is that it enables a business process expert with minimal ABAP knowledge to draw a model like he or she would do on a whiteboard — and SAP simply fills in the code on the back-end as needed.

In the demo, it only took minutes to drag and drop the desired process components into place, map it to relevant data, and set up the needed connections to the supplier so that orders, order confirmations and other vital communication can flow freely between the systems.

“I’m amazed at the fundamental change of this compared to what we are using now,” said Clint Friesen, ABAP developer at Antioch Company in Sinclair, Minnesota. “We’re on R/3 4.7 Enterprise right now, and thanks to this I definitely see a lot of benefits for our team in the future.”

Blogger Jeff Nolan shares the sunny sentiment in his blog.

“The visual modeling tool that is part of CE reflects a long held view that Vishal has that abstractions of processes as services does not require the developer to tradeoff functionality or SOA governance,” Nolan said. “The promise of SOA is that by weakening the rigid coupling of the components, customers will benefit from cheaper and faster delivery of services to users, services that better match to their requirements.”

Matt Danielsson
Editor

SOA showcase contest winners announced

As you may recall, SAP recently decided to run a case study contest where SAP shops shared SOA success stories for a chance to win cash prizes. The contest only ran for six weeks, but yielded some 33,000 votes until voting closed on September 19.

Today, Zia Yusuf kicked off his keynote speech by announcing the grand winner: Sharp Electronics, with aid by Intelligroup. It was a big project involving eSOA, NetWeaver, Portal and other technologies, but the effort paid off. Order costs are down and sales are up, making this a worthy winner, Yusuf said. The runner-ups were Molson, Andarko, SEAL consulting and Microsoft. Stay tuned as we attempt to get an interview with Sharp to discuss the specifics of how they did it.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

TechEd 2007 community day highlights

You may remember SDN day at last year’s TechEd event, where the SAP Developer Network pulled together some helpful resources to bring SDN members and others up to speed on the technical side of SAP. This year’s pre-event day was renamed to simply “community day”, which turned out to be a pretty good way to sum it up.

For a modest fee, SAP professionals got an opportunity to meet peers and discuss a slew of pressing issues through birds-of-a-feather sessions, roundtable discussions, networking activities and more. One notable was the Meet the Execs session with Zia Yusuf, Peter Graf and other SAP profiles, now posted on SDN by Craig Cmehil.

There are two categories of SAP users who benefit from this kind of days, said Jon Reed, veteran member of the SearchSAP.com expert panel and founder of JonERP.com. The first category are those who know fairly little about SAP’s new SOA deal. The second category are those that are not experts, but know enough to ask the right questions when given the opportunity. Events like the community day are especially good for moving people from the first category to the second. Tomorrow, they’ll know enough to ask ‘how does Solution Manager integrate into the eSOA framework?’ rather than dash between sessions hoping for the best, Reed said.

As for topics, the SAP ecosystem was a central piece of discussion. Indeed, as research firm IDC has declared SAP’s ecosystem an economy of its own, SAP was quite clear about its importance: It’s the secret sauce that will enable SAP to pull off the big transition currently underfoot as SAP shops across the world readies to embrace the blessings of SOA. Time will tell how this plays out in reality, but Reed pointed out SOA has one inherent advantage no matter what.

“In the past, you had this bunch of guys holed up in Walldorf for 12 months,” Reed said. “Then they’d pop up and say, ‘Hey, look what we have! Do you like it?’. Then they’d take the feedback and disappear for another 12 months, and so on. Now, SOA enables every imaginable mashup, connecting SAP professionals from all walks across the globe. This dynamic is bound to speed things up incredibly, as well as make sure customers needs are indeed being met.”

Another thing that kept popping up was TOGAF, The Open Group Architectural Framework. As the name implies, TOGAF works to help architects make sense of today’s rapidly changing enterprise architectures. While SAP itself hasn’t said much, they do have a formal session at TechEd and judging by the interest it’s definitely something to keep an eye on, Reed said.

Check out the SearchSAP.com event page for breaking news stories, press releases and podcasts, updated continuously as events unfold all week!

Matt Danielsson
Editor