“Can we meet again next week same time? How does that suit everybody else?”

A simple question, however finding the answer is a little bit more tricky, because the meeting participants live in 5 different countries, 4 different time zones and on 2 continents. Those involved are: SAP Mentors Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, Leonardo de Araujo, Martin Gillet and myself, Michael Koch. Meeting venue is the world wide web, Skype conference calls to be precise.

So what have we been up to then?

Over the last 9 months we’ve been fighting time zones, meeting calendars and busy social diaries for one thing: SAP Certification, well, collaborating to manifest our view on it, make a critical statement and suggest what can be improved. If that’s not true passion for SAP then I don’t know what is.

We’ve created a SAP White Paper document that’s evolved over time, had several reviews and feedback (including SAP’s).

So why should you pay attention to our White Paper? Because I think it is an important stake that is being firmly placed in the ground by a group of five committed individuals. Moreover, we approach “SAP Certification Land” from different angles. There is Dennis Howlett, an experienced industry blogger and consultant on social computing projects. Jon Reed blogs, podcasts and tweets about all things SAP and is an expert on skills and market trends. Leonardo de Araujo weighs in as a SAP Logistics Functional and Technical Consultant with 12+ years experience. Martin Gillet brings the same expertise to the table for all things HCM and in addition runs HR training courses for SAP. Last but not least there is me, with deep technical and functional SAP experience across a range of modules and areas.

Our initial motives to work together as the “Certification 5″ had been slightly different. Which is no surprise, because our approach and our exposure to SAP Certification was diverse. To me, one of the main achievements from our collaboration so far is that we managed to create a document that reflects this diversity, yet still shows that we’re all aligned in the desire to make SAP Certification better. The White Paper goes into a lot of details, but we also summarised our thoughts into Problems and Recommended Action Items in Dennis’ SDN blog post.

The result can now be viewed, downloaded and commented on SDN. We’re really keen to receive input and feedback from the community on our paper. Go to SDN and let us know what you think!

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education, SAP Market

I really enjoyed presenting the findings of my online survey about “Contractors and SAP Certifications” here at SAP Inside Track London this morning. The unconference is still in full swing, but I wanted to share the presentation and survey results spreadsheet with you right now. The original slides were created with Apple’s Keynote so I hope the converted file displays ok in Powerpoint. Any problems please give me a shout.

Dennis Howlett has also recorded the presentation, so more video goodness later.

Update: Here is also a link to the zipped Keynote presentation file.

SAP Education, SAP Market, SAP Netweaver

Hacking Scala & Lift at SAP Community Day 08 (photo courtesy of Nigel James)

When Darren Hague and Nigel James spread the news that there will be another SAP Inside Track (SIT) held in London this year on April 4th, I was very quick in signing up. Especially after SAP’s announcement this week that the next wave of SAP TechEd conferences will be without Community Day, there is an even better reason to come and join SIT this year. And as Nigel put it on his blog:

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

For further details on the people involved, topics discussed and the usual logistics, go and visit the SIT Wiki page. In addition, you can also follow for updates: @SAPInsideTrack

If you have a closer look, you’ll spot a discussion about SAP Certification. I am hoping to provide some results of my ongoing online survey during this session. If you’re a SAP contractor and you haven’t taken part in the survey yet, please do so. If you know some SAP contractors, please forward the link on to them. We have a great opportunity here to provide SAP and the Community Network with some valuable data and the more people take part in this independent survey the better.

Hope to meet you there !

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education

As announced earlier today, here is the official link to the

“SAP Certifications for Contractors” survey.

Please note that (obviously!) the survey should only be taken by SAP contractors or freelancers, as this is my focus group.

The survey entails 17 questions and should not take you longer than 15 minutes max.

Please forward the link to this survey to all contractors and freelancers working in the SAP arena.

Overall goal of this is to support the aim of facilitating better implementations of SAP and increase Return On Investment (ROI). SAP is listening to the community and it’s our part to come up with ideas and constructive comments. Hopefully the survey results will contribute another piece to the “certification jigsaw” and improve the system even more.

SAP Education, SAP Market

Ever since the big response on Dennis Howlett’s “Should You Be Certified?” SDN blog post I felt that the implications of SAP’s certification push had not been identified well enough for contract and freelance consultants. The main reason for this is probably because there is not enough data to establish what this particular group thinks about the old or the new 3-tier SAP accreditation.

Why focus on SAP contractors?

It’s been my idea for a while now to do a survey purely for contractors and freelancers in the SAP arena. This group’s approach and its take on the topic is slightly different for the following reasons:

• most of the time freelancers have to pay for certification out of their own pocket
• market circumstances might dictate that certification is paramount to land your next assignment
• they might use certifications to break into new SAP areas / modules, very often without any work lined up after the exam, as clients want people with experience who can hit the ground running.

In contrast to this, SAP consultancy firms and partners tend to educate their consultants in anticipation of upcoming demand. In the current climate, they might decide to send a dozen of their staff to SAP certification exams as they expect demand for products such as Business Suite 7 to pick up within the next 12 months, for example. Moreover, these partners can also offer sandbox systems or access to early adopting clients so their newly certified consultants can learn by doing.

End users certify their staff yet again for different reasons. In my experience the leading motive in multinational corporations is usually to establish centres of excellence with certified subject matter experts.

One last thing…

One last thing that I feel is important to mention: overall goal of all this really is to support the aim of facilitating better implementations of SAP and increase ROI. My intention is not to talk SAP certifications down. Far from it.

Coming up later today

The survey will be up later today. Some people will be emailed separately with a link to the survey, but the link will obviously also be posted on here. Please forward it on to as many SAP contractors and freelancers you know. SAP is listening to the community and it’s our part to come up with ideas and constructive comments. Hopefully the survey results will contribute another piece to the “certification jigsaw” and improve the system even more.

SAP Education, SAP Market

I was completely flabbergasted when I heard the news today that I had been awarded SAP Mentorship. Let me first of all congratulate all other new SAP Mentors, namely:

• Srini Tanikella
• Leonardo de Araujo
• Vijay Vijayasankar
• Shabarish Vijayakumar
• Martin Gillet

I can’t deny that I was -and still am- surprised about the appointment, because I’ve never exactly been backward in coming forward as far as opinions on most things SAP are concerned. I’ve been working with SAP software since 1997 and since 2004 I am freelancing as SAP Development Consultant. Naturally, all changes and movements in the SAP ecosystem will affect me and my work sooner or later, so I try to keep up to speed as good as I can. More importantly: I try to feed back into the “SAP Land” to my best knowledge and ability.

One thing that I’m constantly trying to distill out of the feeds and blogs that I read or the podcasts I listen to is to emphasise the “real SAP consulting world”. By “real” I mean the world that most SAP consultants face at their clients, implementing the stuff. And that’s one reason why I am so glad to be part of SAP Mentors now, because that’s what most of the mentors do on a day-to-day basis: we’re in the trenches, using and developing SAP, experiencing the pros and cons first hand. Make no mistake, our opinions and views are not the be all and end all, but they are ONE important facet of a complex ecosystem.

Looking ahead, I hope that SAP Mentorship will enable me to contribute to an even larger audience with a stronger voice. I also hope that my contributions will help new and aspiring SAP consultants by giving them down-to-earth advice.

Thank You for appointing me !

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education

Certifications and SAP’s aim to improve quality of implementations by getting more consultants certified continue to stir a lot of conversation in the SAP Blogsphere. We have yet to see more reports and details coming out of the SAP Mentor Webinar that was held yesterday. SAP’s Mark Yolton posted a blog on SDN yesterday to which I posted a comment on. Please find my comment below :

Hello Mark,
I am a UK based freelance SAP Development Consultant with 12+ years experience. In the past I have participated in many of the SDN discussions and Twitter conversations that you have mentioned in your blog.
Let me first of all start off by emphasizing that SAP customers’ needs for better, more efficient, more reliable and faster implementations are completely understandable. Whether in the past that’s always been entirely skills related is debatable (but that’s also slightly beside the point).

With regards to your blog I was surprised to see that no feedback of today’s SAP Mentor webinar was included. This group, as Dennis Howlett recently pointed out on “Enterprise Geeks” podcast, is an important factor as far as a buy-in into new certification ideas is concerned. Almost none of the SAP Mentors are actually SAP certified, yet are able to do outstanding day-to-day work in SAP-land.

The SAP resource gaps that you have mentioned in your blog are very often filled by experienced SAP experts such as me who work on a contract basis. This is not something that will go away in the short term. My impression (based on working experience in UK and Germany) is that for experienced freelance consultants certification currently is not a guarantee to land that next contract. And I can’t see this changing in the short to medium-term. Why?

• most clients I work for want me to produce examples of real work and value
• agents and end clients are not interested if I am certified in the next hot topic, but without previous experience in it (believe me, I’ve tried it)
• certification courses and admission to TechEd (except Bangalore) are expensive for one-man-bands
• certifications are just a snap-shot. (If you’re CRM 3.0 certified, what use is this for CRM2007 implementations? re-train every 1-2 years?)

Actually, as far as my first 2 points are concerned, partners and SI’s are in a similar situation, because even if their consultants are certified in a particular new area or topic, they still need that first hands-on, exciting project to implement it. In my experience, I have seen a lot of customers who have suffered from being “bleeding edge”, being the first to use new technology in their area.

With regards to the value and depth of SAP certification in its current offering, you said: “Come join us this year in Phoenix, Vienna, Bangalore, or Shanghai … get your hands on the technology via workshops, hear from experts, and sit for the exam soon afterwards.”. If this means that a few workshops and seminars at TechEd are enough to sit (and pass) an exam that makes someone within up to 3 months a certified consultant than I feel more than confirmed in my doubts. I also feel there is a “get them while they’re hot” attitude which doesn’t help to raise the profile of certifications.

What would be a far better idea is if SAP would improve the way how consultants can acquire skills themselves (I mean beyond the current offerings), especially for those without access to partner or customer systems. Why not introduce a 1-consultant subscription scheme for BS7 or ECC6, sitting on top of the SDN subscription scheme, for example? Why? Current offerings for SDN Subscriptions or by 3rd parties such as www.sidmembers.com don’t reach far enough as these either
a) not offer the application stack or
b) can’t offer cross-client code changes.

You can only improve the quality of your work if you have access to hard- and software at any point in time, not just in a SAP training center. In my mind, this would be a much easier solution, which could potentially feed into a different kind of certification approach for the future, with help and ideas from mentors & community.

Kind regards,
Michael Koch

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education, SAP Market

image from Craig Cmehil's Rantings blog

A tweet by Capgemini’s solution architect Lee Provoost today got me thinking about the future and potential of SAP TechEd conferences:

how is SAP going to deal with the fact that lots of companies have now “no travel” policies for cost cutting?

Very aptly Lee pointed to the current economic climate which forced a lot of SAP customers to put a ban on traveling and expenses for conventions such as TechEd. This will be a problem that SAP will have to address when planning and organising the next wave of TechEd conferences taking place later this year and beyond. A while ago Chip Rodgers tweeted about the complications of figuring out the number of potential participants for TechEd given the current economic circumstances (“in this economy, how do we estimate attendance?“). TechEd attendances have been going from strength to strength in recent years, and quite rightly so. On my recent visit to TechEd Berlin in October 2008 I was very impressed with the level of organisation that goes into these events. However (and I sincerely hope otherwise)  2009 and maybe 2010 could be tough years for SAP’s main developer conference. Essentially, this got me thinking of ways out of this and thereby also making a move towards a greener way to cope with traveling as well as a smarter usage of energy.

“The biggest virtual developer convention in the world”

OK, brace yourselves! What if SAP would create an entirely Virtual SAP TechEd conference? Similar to the recent PKOM (Partner Kick-Off Meeting) and also the Business Suite 7 launch, would it not be a fantastic and mindblowing idea to entirely hold a big conference such as SAP TechEd in the virtual space? A combined use of video and microblogging could give an event such as this the feel of true collaboration. Granted, the devil is in the detail here, but there are only a few software companies on the planet that could pull this one off. In my view, SAP is one of them. The benefits and opportunities for such an idea:

• real savings for customers
• a truly green event
• bigger reach to even more developers and BPXers
• great extension to the current Virtual TechEd format
• real online collaboration
• target group for this already used to the web format

Now I can hear some people shouting “Bah Humbug” already, argueing that for example the organisational effort for an event such as this would be phenomenal. Another one: “What about face-to-face meetings, networking and collaboration ?”. Well, maybe, but would not tools such as Twitter (to some degree) prove these critics wrong? There could potentially be small compromises. For example, similar to the break up of SAPphire EMEA into smaller, more regional events, TechEd could go an analogous route by hosting one small main event with speakers/mentors and several satellite venues which would provide web video links to the main event, yet still giving participants a face-to-face option to network and collaborate locally.

Now, I can imagine that clever TechEd people such as Chip Rodgers, Amir Blich, Marylin Pratt or Craig Cmehil (Second Life?) have already been hatching a “Virtual TechEd Masterplan” such as this… or at least I hope they have.

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education SAP, SAP TechEd

This week’s top news/blog posts:

• another chapter: SAP denies liability in TomorrowNow lawsuit
• what are non-german and non-austrian SAP customers are going to do? – SAP suspends price hike – if you’re German or Austrian!
• Leo Apotheker interviewed by Charlie Rose
• the Economist with some interesting insights into Leo Apotheker’s life and SAP’s co-CEO system.
• Total Telecom: SAP ranked no 1 for strategic positioning
• Accounting scandal at outsourcer Satyam. A lot of companies using SAP system which are supported by Satyam will watch this one closely…

SAP Twitter Picks:

• @scobleizer: “(…) Enterprise 2.0 is a new range of services that build social collaboration in from the start. SAP? No. socialtext? Yes.”
• @ITSinsider: “ironically, SAP “gets” e20 better than most, as evidenced by its large communities. just hasn’t incorporated social into its sw.”
• @jonerp: “While SAP is asking for a jury trial, still expect settlement. SAP and Oracle in high stakes card game, Oracle with better hand this time.” (on Oracle-SAP lawsuit)
• @erickimberling: “Downward trends in ERP sales require software vendors to prove the measurable value of their solutions.”
• @MyCustomer: “Could SAP cause a rift in its customer base by exempting Germany and Austria from it’s pricier support programme?”
• @thomas_jung: “(…) SE16N (despite the N) was created by FI and not Basis – so not intended as a replacement for SE16″ (on a question regarding SAP’s data query transaction SE16)
• @yojibee: “(…) but not that I would want to give SAP my open source code to maintain” (with regards to Leo Apotheker’s  open source statements during the Charlie Rose interview)
• @vchalana: “heard that Satyam is one of the biggest SAP consulting shops in India. India SAP job boards are flooded with resumes of Satyam employees.”

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education, SAP Market, SAP Netweaver SAP, SAP News, This week in SAP

Due to the Christmas and new year festivities this first issue of a weekly SAP news roundup is a little bit shorter.

• SAP’s got bark: “tech companies that sell software (…)  are among the best-positioned for 2009. ” and “Software maker SAP, however, is bucking the downward trend for IT spending”
• We’re all surprised to read that SAP is not one of the top-3 tech stocks to buy in 2009. Even worse, The Motley Fool even predicts Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com to venture into SAP territory.
• According to Glassdoor.com SAP is the 8th best tech place to work for.
• interesting interview with SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner in Spiegel.de (Achtung! German).

SAP Twitter Picks:

• @rwang0: “stop spending time in your SFA tool and start selling!”
• @consultingpulse “Trust – the best run companies run SAP – the message – Do you trust their judgment?”
• @mcornell: “Google needs to push its weight vs Enterprise systems (ala SAP Netweaver) which doesn’t support IE7 on versions < 7 IE6 user !”
• @pac_mac: “SAP makes me sick” (no more maple syrup for him then )

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education, SAP Market SAP News, This week in SAP

This morning I found an email in my inbox from SAP UK Education telling me about an “extension of certification offer plus 10% discount on courses”. Obviously a decision has been made to offer the certification date range until the end of 2008 for TechEd Berlin 2008 attendees, which exactly what I proposed in my TechEd Berlin roundup from last week.

No matter what the motive for this was – I think it is great news for potential participants of certification exams in the UK.

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education Berlin, certification, SAP, TechEd

Now that I’m back home from TechEd Berlin 2008 let me try to describe the experience. Berlin itself is summarised very well in the following lines by the German Punk Band Ideal.

“Zweiter Stock, vierter Hinterhof, neben mir wohnt ein Philosoph. Fenster auf, ich hör’ Türkenmelodien, ich fühl’ mich gut, ich steh’ auf Berlin! “

“Second Floor, fourth backyard, next door lives a philosopher. Windows are open, I hear turkish melodies, I feel great, I love Berlin.

Ideal, Berlin

Community Day

In the weeks prior to the event, I found it hard figure out if the additional time spent at SDN Community day would be worthwhile spent. In the end, I decided to go for it and participate – mainly down to many recommendations from other SDNers and people I follow on Twitter. So now that the TechEd lies behind me what’s my verdict? Well, how right were they! Community day for me was a perfect opportunity to meet some of the most talented and knowledgeable SAP developers out there. I wish more developers out there in the trenches of SAP Land could see this – it would certainly blow a lot of those cobwebs away that SAP development can be shrouded in sometimes. Community Day is a meeting point for multipliers and disruptive developers – overused words, I know, but in this case certainly the right description.Whilst TechEd enables you to look beyond your own development landscape, Community Day in addition gives it a completely new dimension. I attended sessions on building RIA’s using WebDynpro ABAP, Flash Islands and Floorplan Manager (SAP’s unfortunately named Web UI configurator) held by Rich Heilman, Thomas Jung and Dan McWeeney. In the evening we had even more chances to chat, network and drink at a bash in the Berlin Radio Tower (Funkturm), an excellent venue for an event such as this – and a great way to end SDN Community Day.

Keynote

The keynote was disappointing – a speech by a leading SAP software architect (instead of co-CEO Leo Apotheker) might have fitted the bill (and expectations!) better. I was lucky enough to be offered a seat right in front row – I think there were a few gaps that needed to be filled. To my surprise there was no “Ask the Execs” session. We were given no explanation as to why none of the submitted videos were shown. To be honest I wasn’t expecting my video to be shown anyway, as it was fairly critical of TechEd admittance fees.

Hands-On Sessions

Given the sheer number of available 2 and 4 hour hands-on sessions, I think only 2 pre-bookable hands-on sessions are not enough. Enabling attendees to book 4 sessions ahead of TechEd might be better. Logistically this would obviously quite a feat for the organisers.

Certification

I’ve mentioned this already in a chat I had with Craig Cmehil: I think 4 weeks to make use of your SAP Certification discount is not enough. Why not extend this time span to say 6 months?

RIA Hacker Night

I used RIA Hacker Night to catch up with even more interesting people from SAP Dev Land (and beyond) and as lucky enough to win a Adobe Flex Pro SDK incl book.

Web Dynpro and ABAP

Anyone who still claims after this convention that ABAP is on its way out (SearchSAP, can you hear me?) has to have a serious problem. I attended 2 WDA sessions, one of them an update on the WDA dev stack and the other one about WDA and Enhancement Framework, which opened an entirely new perspective to me, because so far I never thought about changing SAP standard WDA applications (as there aren’t that many!). WDA integration into the Enhancement Framework has been executed well and will on one hand give consultants a lot of flexibility and relieve end-users from painful upgrades on the other.

RIA & RCA

A 1 hour session on RIAs (Rich Internet Apps) and RCAs (Rich Client Apps) and how they fit into SAP’s GUI strategy turned out to be a very valuable one. I’ve heard about Business Client before and it was good to hear a little bit more about it. We were assured that BC will not replace SAP GUI, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this would change over the coming years. It was also interesting to learn a little bit more about RCA and RIA dev apps from Adobe – Flex and Air. During RIA Hacker Night I even managed to win a Adobe Flex Development Pro SDK and a Flex Book ! No more excuses… SOA and

Composition Environment

During Community Day I attended Owen Pettiford’s (founding member of BPX network) interesting SOA session. He talked about the framework and approach he uses in his daily work. I like his approach to deal with small “pains” first, keeping it simple and making use of existing, perfect systems by bringing them together with SAP Composition Environment, for example. Inspired by this, I decided to learn more about CE on Community Day. I might be way off here and there is lots more to get into, but especially in the current economic climate CE might play a larger role in the short to mid term.

Atlantic

I attended a 1 hr session on Atlantic’s state of play – a joint development venture between SAP and IBM. A lot of my clients use Lotus Notes and have asked me many times about planed or existing interfaces and integration between these two worlds. The presented product hinges on Notes 8.02 as installed base and enabled SAP workflow integration into a Notes context (not vice versa). The usual holiday or Purchase Order Approval apps were demoed – no surprise there. I have to say though that the 2 presenters from SAP and IBM weren’t exactly “geling” – which may or may not say a lot about the cooperation. I can’t help but thinking that IBM needs this project more than SAP does.

TDMS (Test Data Migration Server)

As I’ve been involved in many data migration projects in the past I decided to learn more about this product (I didn’t even know it existed). TDMS provides a fairly lightweight migration server that lets you specify business objects and Z tables that you want to migrate. Several migration scenarios (timeslice or object related, for example) can also help in keeping your dev and QA enviroments in a healthier data state – always a winner in my book. According to other consultants I spoke to it seems to come with a hefty price tag (depending on your db size), but I’d hazard a guess that you could recoup your investment within 6-12 months. A very interesting session, which was slightly marred by a very arrogant presenter.

general observations

1. Mac Books, Mac Book Pros, iPhones… Thanks to Boot Camp and Parallels Apple products have certainly hit the SAP community. Three years ago in Vienna I remember being the only one with a Mac at SAP TechEd – someone actually saw me getting out my Powerbook and commented: “At least one person with a REAL computer at this convention !”.
2. describing Berlin ICC as a “starship” is well deserved and apt. I still get lost in the vaults of this monster of a building whilst trying to find my way to “Lecture Hall 1″ (or was that Room 5?). I think by the time I got to grips with the corrisors and escalators it’s Thursday evening. No, but seriously, I love the ICC and its “starship” style.
3. No sessions whatsoever on BSP, yet further updates on ITS and ITS Mobile

Conclusion

TechEd Berlin ticked almost all the boxes for me. I’ve enjoyed chatting and mixing with other peers, I liked the workshops and most info sessions.  The organisation and logistical effort (sessions, food, venue, entertainment) spent on it are amazing. TechEd is not cheap and offerings such as the pre-booking of sessions and certification discount could be improved. If I index TechEd Vienna 2005 with 100%, TechEd Berlin 2008 should receive 200%. It was simply that good.

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education ABAP, Atlantic, Berlin, RIA Hacker Night, TechEd 2008, Web Dynpro