Who’s majoring in SAP this semester?

My car and I moved at a slow crawl along the Massachusetts Turnpike on my commute home the other day, much of the road clogged by students heading through Newton, Mass. back to the many Boston colleges.

Between marveling at how much a college kid can fit into a Civic and punching the radio station buttons in an effort to keep my mind off the gridlock, I thought about, of all things, the SAP skills shortage.

The shortage made its way back into the news this week with a new AMR Research report .The report raised the idea that the shortage could present a competitive edge for Oracle and Microsoft. Small and mid-market AMR Research clients have been rating “availability of resources,” higher and higher on their ERP selection criteria, and, because SAP skills are in short supply, SAP’s losing out, the author reasons.

One of SAP’s plans to solve this shortage is its University Alliances program. SAP is training college professors so that they can teach computer science, engineering and business students to use, run and develop SAP software.

I wondered if any of these University Alliances programs were in place here - in college-rich Massachusetts, home to prestigious MIT, and a $1 billion project of Gov. Deval Patrick’s aimed at making Massachusetts the country’s leading biotechnology state. There are currently 573 open SAP jobs here, at least according to Monster.com.

Turns out, there’s three SAP partnerships at three good schools here -Suffolk University in Boston, Western New England College in Springfield and Bentley College in Waltham.

To be honest, I’d hoped for more. But three isn’t a bad start out of the 900 SAP has worldwide. SAP plans to increase this count by 200 over the next few years, and I for one hope that it chooses to form more partnerships here in the Bay State, and in other states like Michigan and Illinois, where the shortage is so severe.

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor