This Week In SAP (#8)

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Michael Koch

traveling the mountains and valleys of SAP land, here are this week’s results:

This week’s big news was SAP’s acquisition of cloud computing start-up Coghead. Dennis summed it up best, in my opinion.
Now the other big news this week was Anne Kathrine Petteroe’s group opposing the new Terms Of Service (TOS) that the social media site Facebook tried to introduce. Within a couple of days her Facebook group grew to a staggering 100,000+ members, which got a mention in the NYT (in addition to numerous TV interviews!). Anne is now officially the first SAP Mentor to appear on TV and in the future we all have to click our heels whenever we meet her. 😉
IBM’s Vijay Vijayasankar didn’t quite make the cut for the news last week, so I include this interesting SDN blog in this week’s roundup. I like real-world blogs such as this, as these contributions try to dig deeper than the marketing material fluff we are usually given. Vijay puts his fingers in the wounds. For example, who will be the first to implement this (skills?) and whether a graphical tool is really needed.
Marco ten Vaanholt with an interesting view on Twitter and why it is not valuable for BPXers (and others) – Marco is making some interesting observations, but claiming that some Twitter users are suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder is going a bit far. In the comments Natascha and Oliver sum up nicely my views in terms of value that Twitter can give to all users (SDN, BPX et al)
Natural employee fluctuation is not enough: SAP will also need voluntary redundancies (FT Germany: Achtung, German! – translation is here)
SAP has now introduced a book for children of its employees explaining “mummy and daddy’s workplace” a little better. I hope this book will be made available to non-SAPers soon, as I sometimes struggle to explain SAP to grown-ups.

This Week in SAP (#7)

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Michael Koch

After weeks full of SAP quarterly results announcements and the BS7 launch the last seven days were slow. So here are my SAP-related highlights of last week:

Jon Reed’s latest contribution on services and skills required for SAP Business Suite 7.
Michael Krigsman blogs on ZDNet about last weeks SAP event in NY, during which a blogger interview with Roche CIO Jennifer Allerton was held. A key point for me is Allerton’s view on system integrators and their (according to her) need to reinvent themselves. “The old Accenture model, where you trained [inexperienced] consultants for many months on your dollar, just doesn’t work anymore. The hardest thing is to get the consultants out at the end of the project, because they try and hang around as much as possible. We do use external consultants very successfully, because you can’t have all the skills in-house.“
Eric Imberling of Panorama Consulting Group with a brief and insightful report on how ERP and CRM deployments can help organisations to weather the economic storm.

This week’s SAP Top picks from the Titterverse:

@jamesfarar: “Just done w Lunch gig w Prince Charles at Clarence House. He says: ‘SAP? What is that? I can’t keep up with the acronyms’. Hmmmm”
@leeprovoost: @chiprodgers how is SAP going to deal with the fact that lots of companies have now “no travel” policies for cost cutting?

This Week in SAP (#6)

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Michael Koch

What was hot this week in the SAP arena?

on Thursday and Friday I found some more details on Business Suite 7 launch by Jon Reed and Ray Wang. Although I have to damit that I have not digested all of them. Jon Reed’s upcoming post on what impact BS7 will have on skills is going to be an interesting one.
during Thursday posts emerged on Twitter that SAP has started to enforce new clauses whereby customers may not be allowed to strike third-party maintenance deals. Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett stepped in quickly with further (possible) explanations and analysis for this. This could be SAP’s reaction to the fact that the time for “mega software-deals” is over and even more focus needs to be given to service revenue streams.
Wednesday morning SAP launched Business Suite 7 in New York. Despite expectations that BS7 would be more SaaS and cloud focused, SAP seemed to get fairly cautious on it, stating that research is still done in this area. SAP intends BS7 to be more about shorter implementation cycles and thus higher ROI. Or quoting Apotheker: “innovation without scary upgrades and sleepless nights. We’re done with that,” – quite a statement ! (also follow ZDNET’s Larry Dignan here). Frank Scavo’s summary is also a worthwhile read. On the whole BS7 debate, I particularly liked Dennis Howlett’s (as always) real-world contribution. There is no running away from the nitty-gritty of system implementation and testing – at least not in the short to medium term – no matter how sophisticated your methods are. Even if SAP can really deliver value with BS7, by the time we have got the facts and ROI results the downturn might already be well over.

Uwe Fetzer releases a WDA Twitter client on SDN. Excellent stuff.

my Twitter picks:

@rwang0: “Hearing from SAP customers that there are new clauses that will force customers to commit to no Third Party Maintenance.“
@boris: “Twitter is like a sauna: we are all in the same space, we show everything, but are not really looking at each other.”
@dan_mcweeney: “Enterprise software robustness cannot be compared to these toys you play with.” Leo, referencing iPhones and Clouds.”
@dan_mcweeney: “Had banks had IS systems like these SAP customers, we might not be where we are today.” > Leo (Apotheker) during opening remark of BS7 launch in New York
@dahowlett: “65% of all chocolate produced in the world use SAP tech” .. gimme a Cadbury’s bar – quick!!”

This Week In SAP (#5)

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Michael Koch

All the best and interesting from the last 7 days on planet SAP:

Good Joshua Greenbaum piece on Kagermann’s curtain as co-CEO and SAP’s staff cutbacks. In terms of the way how it was handled, you would almost think SAP came out of the Q4 results fairly well (open letter to employees and Kagermann not passing the poisoned chalice to Apotheker), but…
…then the “Das Kapital” column of FTD.de comes along with a more sober and balanced view (Achtung, German! English translation here) on what they call a PR “signal for the moneymarkets”.
This week we were all waiting for SAP’s Q4 results: find some news picks here, here and here. Altogether nothing unexpected. SAP announced the job cuts that had been predicted, albeit not revealing which areas of the business will be affected, but likely most of it could be fluctuations (over what time?).
post SAP results thoughts: Dennis Howlett draws an interesting comparison between the car industry and a (possibly) saturated top-end ERP market.
Jon Reed with a good, digestible summary of SAP’s PKOM (Partner Kick-Off Meeting) event last week. Also touches on the certification debate and the upcoming Business Suite 7.0.
EbF conects iPhone with Lotus Notes and SAP solutions with their Ebf.connector. Looks like an additional proprietary middleware server is required through which the iPhone pulls the data. Download available from iTunes App Store in about 2 weeks.

This week’s Twitter Picks:

@SAPMentors Blogged about SAP Mentor Highlights 2008 http://is.gd/hMSD
@jonerp: “Chase skills over $, challenge over comfort zone, and you’ll have adventures in excellence.”
@fkoehn: “a fool with a tool is still a fool”
@monkchips: the activity, or lack of it, on SAP ecohub (nothing to do with sustainability) is disappointing. @dahowlett will surely “eviscerate” it

This week in SAP (#4)

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Michael Koch

What happened in SAP-Land during the last 7 days ?

SAP has cancelled this year’s SAPPHIRE EMEA event but instead enlarges its World Tour event, claiming it is responding to customer requests. The US part of SAPPHIRE will still go ahead though.
Even if there is nothing else you’ll do on February 12th 2009, make Craig Cmehil’s 24h Friday Morning Report Marathon the only thing. During this event he aims to raise money for Doctors Without Borders.
Dennis Howlett posted a very interesting SDN blog on the need for certification as a way to improve the quality of SAP implementations. As mentioned in my comment, I agree with his aim in principle, but disagree on the comparison between accountancy and IT certifications. Update: A LOT more comments have been added to this fountain of criticism, ideas and suggestions with regards to certifications. Well worth a read!
Henning Kagermann to step down as SAP CEO on Jan 28th, earlier as expected. (Achtung, German! no translation yet).
SAP & IBM’s joint project codename “Alloy” (previously named “Atlantic”), ships in March 2009. The Yahoo Finance bulletin didn’t pick up on the rename. Here is the official info on the IBM site.
SAP helps German Federal Department of Emplyment to get future-ready. More good SAP news just in time for the analyst meeting on Jan 28th. Unfortunately no mention of the size of the order or the price tag. Interestingly, the “Implementation of the software began in early October 2008. “. Before the tendering process had ended? Maybe for a protoype ?
SAP’s stock performs better, trading volumes were up and early analyst invites sent out seems to indicate no profit warning will be issued during their meeting on Jan 28th. (thanks @choirshark and @jonerp)
SAP pays Sun to keep old older versions of Java up-to-date. I find it slightly misleading to call it “Netweaver Middleware”, but there you go. The long-term future of the Java part of Netweaver remains interesting.
Blag’s (aka Alvaro Tejada) excellent “tale of an SAP addict…”. Wonderful stuff.

This week’s Twitter Picks:

@vendorprisey: “(programming) languages are like characters in soap operas. You think they were killed in a car crash but then it was all just a dream.”
@jonerp: “One major point of SAP PKOM keynotes that struck me: not a time to “weather the storm,” but to innovate. In my words: innovate to survive.“
@leeprovoost: “Is IBM-SAP’s Alloy what Microsoft-SAP’s Duet should have been?”
@oliver: “SAP ERP and Lotus Notes – two of the most beautiful UIs finally join forces to show the world how it’s done.”
@yojibee: “The SDN search sometimes drives me nuts” (commenting on search facility on SAP Developer Network site).
@ccmehil: “only sometimes – so it is improving – thanks for the feedback 😉” (Craig’s reply to the SDN search tool tweet).

experiences with SDN Netweaver Subscriptions

Posted on November 19, 2008 by Michael Koch

SDN Subscriptions have been at the centre of my attention for a while now (click here for previous posts). Monday’s news about price cuts for SAP’s Netweaver Subscription package reminded me of a little interview I’ve been meaning to do for ages with Stefan Ressing, a SAP Netweaver Solution Architect. Stefan is an old friend and former colleague of mine and I knew that Stefan had recently extended his subscription, so I wanted to know what his experiences so far have been.