Leo Apotheker (source SAP)

Typical! After last a slow news week it’s all happening within 48 hrs. I thought I provide a little summary of the best SAP, Hasso and #leogone related posts of the last 2 days.

• Dennis Howlett only minutes after the news broke that Leo Apotheker and SAP have parted ways.
• Thomas Otter weighs in with about “Hasso and SAP”. I guess the core of this piece is “SAP’s challenges are bigger than simply replacing the CEO. It needs to recover its geist.“
• CIO’s Thomas Wailgum predicts a competition between Snabe and McDermott in his “So long, Leo. We hardly knew ye.“
• Dennis Howlett with a good summary post the press conference during which Plattner was announced as back at the helm.
• Vinnie Mirchandani with an interesting contribution, linking into arguments with Apotheker last year. He’s defiant that ERP needs its soul back. A commenter quite rightly points out whether it ever had a soul, but I can see where Mirchandani is coming from. There needs to be more Wow! for Innovation (not just slideware).
• Computerworld with a good round-up of the events up to Tuesday
• Hasso means business with regards to gaining trust of customers back. Sapphire 2010 to be held in Europe and US in parallel, using real-time connected sessions.
• InformationWeek’s Bob Evans probably strikes the hardest with this lengthy analysis of the change at the SAP helm. Poignant phrase referring to Plattner’s suggestions how to bring back trust: “look at where customers rank in the great chain of being constructed by Plattner: dead last. Almost an afterthought.“

Achtung, Twitterverse, Baby!

• nenshad: #SAP‘s Apotheker built one of the most formidable enterprise software sales machines and delivered YEARS of record growth
• yojibee: @nenshad @rwang0 Great sales guy, less great CEO – as simple as that (IMO of course) #SAP
• dahowlett: RT @jhurwitz: Oracle buys another company: AmberPoint- SOA management < blimey !!!!
• monkchips: so Hasso runs SAP. tell us something we didn’t know. #leogone
• dahowlett: At last: “WE made a mistake” – re: maintenance
• rwang0: RT @kitson: #Plattner: “the average age of the typical #SAP installation is quite substantial.” #erp #crm #sap
• paulhamerman #SAP Hasso sets a tone for accountability, admits mistakes.This transparency will be important in helping SAP regain trust
• twailgum: #leogone I said it last night, and I’ll say it again: “SAP, Who Are You?” Hasso offered direction this a.m. We’ll see where this all goes.
• @InFullBloomUS: “It’s time #SAP announced a next gen product strategy that twill take their R/3:#ERP6 customers to the future.
• @sapnews: SAP to Hold SAPPHIRE® 2010 Customer Conferences in Europe and U.S.:

This week has been a bit slow, so only a few headlines I could make out through my “SAP-shaped specs” (try to say that fast three times in a row!).

• Thomas Wailgum on what SAP and TV Series “Lost” have in common. I’m not into Lost, but there are apparently some spoilers in there.
• Tim Negris of TheVirtualCircle.com on swiss army knifes and why Ellison wanted Sun.
• Jon Reed with some highly praised SAP Career Outlook 2010 contributions here and here.
• and lastly a bit of an “evergreen” pick. Evergreen because it’s been around a while now and most of the readers of TWIS know about it already. “SAP Me Sideways” is an anonymous blog by an end-user SAP Consultant who updates his site with some interesting anecdotes and insights into what life is like in the trenches of  a SAP implementation. If you’re expecting any white papers and marketing slideware here, move on! 

over to you, Twittersphere:

• @kalsing: Sun CEO @openjonathan Tweets His Resignation, Haiku Style
• @yojibee: Awesome! The new @sapmentors page is up  (thanks to @aslann )
• pixelbase: looking through a WDA component and discovered rude names for outbound plugs 🙂 (okay, my own tweet, but I liked it!)

Once again, I’ve been scraping that SAP News barrel for your and my reading pleasure. Enjoy..

• Marketwatch reports 12% profit fall for SAP
• Jon Reed, Andy Klee on SAP Market Trends, Training and Certification
• SAP releases a revamped Enterprise Services Workplace, including some Web 2.0 features. I’ve had a short play with it this week and found the menus, search function and new layout much improved. But let’s face it, it could only get better. 🙂
• SAP’s Richard Probst on the first few months of the “Best Built Apps” project. I had the pleasure to meet Richard in Phoenix at TechEd this year. The BBA project is an amazing leap forward in terms of clarity and confidence-building for customers.
• Computerworld reports on “Deutsche Bank picks SAP as new core banking system” – after Postbank Germany developed the standard branch solution with SAP for this, Deutsche is now going for it. They’re holding 25% plus one share of Postbank, so they know what they’re letting themselves into. This could easily be the biggest SAP SOA project of the next 4 years.
• SAP named one of the top most sustainable large corporations in the world – credit where credit is due
• John Schwarz can’t see why Oracle bought Sun in this interview with Barron’s Eric Savitz. He also wants to achieve 1bn SAP worldwide users in 4-5 years (including mobile devices & smart meters!), from 100m today. Ambitious!

Tweet, tweeter, the tweetest…

ttrapp: Deutsche Bank AG goes SAP for Banking Solutions for their core systems & has SOA ambitions: http://tinyurl.com/y8jcm4v (in german)

vendorprisey: Epstein has a good point. Oracle has acquisition integration competence.I personally think it is an undervalued strength @mfauscette #oracle

cote: “It’s great that Hasso and his five guys got it. It’s whacko!” –Larry Ellison at #oraclesun on in-memory databases.

jamesfarrar: SAP CEO on climate change: ‘time for stakeholder value not shareholder value’

Welcome back! Here are my picks out of this week’s fistful of SAP stories & tweetings.

• EU Commission gives green light to Oracle for Sun aquisition. ITPro also covered the story before the announcement and mentioned the more than 30,000 users who signed a petition to “Help MySQL” (and Java?)
• SAP posts preliminary results for 2009
• New Community Developer Licence is available – no more expiry dates, hurrah!
• it’s all happening Down Under: SAP Inside Track Australia 2010
• have Oracle and SAP become “too big for their own good?” asks CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum. I’m not entirely sure of the relevance here, as you could say this about any big conglomerate or concern. Also: what would be the alternatives and repercussions if they indeed have become too big?
• I found this one a little gem amongst the flood of SDN blogs: SAP’s Gerald Kleser “A Timeless Software Problem”. An excerpt: “Try to find research work that tries to empirically find relationships between project success (…) on the one side and technologies or standards (…) on the other… You won’t find much! The lack of hard facts leaves the job of advocating for particular technologies to the marketing departments of software tool vendors.”

Twittersphere

sapnews: “SAP Combines CeBIT 2010 With SAP® World Tour Customer Conference:

yojibee: @se38 LOL now you got me thinking. No Mentor shirts this year, but Mentor skirts 😉

TonkaPome: @yojibee @pixelbase maybe we should all chip in, buy SAAB, then install SAP. After all, all best run businesses use SAP

timoelliott: The second SAP c-level exec on Twitter? Oliver Bussmann, SAP CIO, @sapcio — welcome!