“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

This post is predominantly for those people in the SAP development community who lament the news that Apple has decided that with iPhone OS 4 any 3rd party dev environments are kicked off the popular mobile platform.

If you’re an accomplished iPhone developer who largely focussed on Adobe’s Flash-To-iPhone compiler or tools such as MonoTouch (both of which I do not know or have used, by the way), then I can actually understand your anger.

However, if you are a developer who lives and breathes the SAP ecosystem -and ABAP in particular- then this whole epipsode must sound to you like a sequel of “Back to the Future”. Apple’s move aims to create a development platform which is dominated by the one and only language Apple (who actually developed the platform’s hardware)  sees fit – Objective-C. Parallels to SAP’s own proprietary language ABAP are not out of place here.

I’ve recently dabbled a little with iPhone SDK and even though ABAP and Objective-C are not very similar languages by and stretch of the imagination, what they do have in common is that their respective “inventors” push these languages for reasons of stability (a strength of both SAP’s ABAP stack as well as the iPhone OS), reliability and performance.

For years now, SAP’s ecosystem has been mainly hailed for its rigid design under the bonnet, the bulletproof-ness, the stability. At the end of the day, vast numbers of global businesses rely on SAP’s technology day in day out. ABAP, love it or loathe it, plays a central part in that. (It also plays a central part in which future path for SAP to turn towards and innovate the core, but that’s another topic).

Maybe it’s because I’ve been using stable Macs for 15+ years now and been part of SAP’s ecosystem for many moons, but why is it so hard to understand that Apple is trying to provide a stable and reliable platform for iPhone, running on hardware Apple has developed itself? I’d wager that the same people who now complain about the locked-down dev platform would also be the first who would complain about crashing iPhone apps had the device not been so tighly regulated.

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere

Drawing by an 11 year old son of a norwegian SAP employee

Experts, Analysts and ERP pundits are still recovering from the top-level management changes that SAP announced over the course of the last 10 days. Triggered by this, there has been noticeable noise around the notion of SAP as an acquisition target. No one seems to remember that SAP once was in a similar situation.

During the Dotcom boom SAP was relegated to the bottom of analysts’ short lists. Walldorf didn’t have an answer for the pundits back then either. For the latter, ERP was very yesteryear and regarded as obsolete. They claimed it was stuck in the “old age” of doing business, all bricks & mortar, not enough “New Economy”. Even the belated introduction of the Internet Transaction Server (ITS) left the IT journaille unmoved. “Too little, too late”, they moaned.

However economic history taught the dotcom whippersnappers a lesson and the german software concern had the last laugh – and the bigger financial breath. Hasso et al rubbed it in: It was at Sapphire 2001 in Lisbon where SAP played a keynote video in which a father and his son walked through an IT museum of the future. Stopping in front of a massive pile of old PCs, monitors and keyboards the father explained (in a very tongue-in-cheek way) that this is what was left of the dotcom bubble – and that only the stronger players survived. Hasso and his team were thoroughly enjoying this moment, giving a 90 minute keynote during which he slated those who doubted the power behind SAP. The boys were back in town.

Right now, there is a similar atmosphere of underestimation. Back then, Hasso kept the software giant on a steady course. There is no reason why he shouldn’t do that again.

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver

Let me start off with a little made-up story :

Imagine for a moment you are a car mechanic. You know your stuff and so do your colleagues at the garage where you work. Said garage specializes in selling, repairing, checking and tuning cars manufactured by company XXL. All the staff at the garage love XXL cars and you all strive to pass that passion on to your customers.

Now XXL is very keen to keep all garage mechanics up to speed with their latest cars, products and developments. It therefore holds a big training session every year for them. Part of this training session is an open competition in which teams can show how far they can take XXL’s cars in terms of design, performance and appeal.

You and your colleagues really want to show what you’re made of and together you submit what you think is a great idea for the competition. However it doesn’t convince the preliminary jury and a few weeks after submission you’re being told that you have not been picked for the final at XXL’s next annual training session.

“Never mind.”, everyone at the garage says. Everyone suspects the other entries to be strong with brilliant ideas from other teams. After all, XXL products are great and spur the imagination! So why shouldn’t other teams come up with even better entries for the competition?

Shortly before the annual training session XXL announces the teams that have been picked for the competition final. It turns out that the majority of finalists actually consist of XXL staff !

You and your colleagues are a little disgruntled about this as XXL staff has not only much better access to original XXL spare parts, but can also speak exclusively to XXL’s engineers and therefore can quickly tap into a resource pool that is at the core of each of XXL’s products! Completely unmatched to what you and your colleagues have at your disposal.

Packed Demo Jam crowd at SAP TechEd '07 Las Vegas

In case you’ve seen the line-up of the next SAP TechEd 2009 Demo Jam competition the above may sound familiar to you. In Phoenix this year, SAP’s Demo Jam hosts 4 out of 7 entries from SAP themselves !

Furthermore your trained eye might also have observed that another Demo Jam entry is from Sybase, presenting an entry called “Mobilizing SAP CRM and Workflow on iPhone”, which sounds very much like what said company advertises under the name “iAnywhere”. Whilst this surely is a great product: sales pitches are not allowed during Demo Jam and therefore this is an obvious violation against Demo Jam rules.

Hang on! Now, isn’t Demo Jam not just a little bit of beer-inspired Tuesday night clapping fun? Does this all REALLY matter? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Unfortunately not! Demo Jam can mean big business to some. A past winner even mentioned a pickup in business of 500% after Demo Jam victory.

There have always been home-grown SAP contributions to Demo Jam in the past, but this year’s SAP landslide is a bit much. There should be no deterrent for SAP’s own staff to take center stage, but 4 out of 7 entries appears too much to me.

Doesn’t Demo Jam not just become yet another “pat on the shoulder” exercise if there’s more or less only SAP or partners presenting their own products? And above this, wouldn’t it be much cooler for SAP to see how their customers and partners want to take the products further or use them?

Maybe the latter would even reveal where SAP’s products should really go.

SAP Blogosphere, SAP TechEd Demo Jam, TechEd 2009

Let me give you an update on my journey onto pastures greener that are the SAP Netweaver Composition Environment (CE). If you’ve missed the first part of this series, go, go, go and catch up now!

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”, Darth Vader (Star Wars)

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time in SAP’s own Enterprise Services Workplace on SDN, which is a pretty good resource to look through SAP’s latest enterprise service offerings. It’s actually more than that: it’s THE place where you can find up-to-date info on documentation for services which you deem appropriate for consumption or exposure in your own landscapes. On their SDN website, the ESW is described as follows: “The ES Workplace is the central place to view consolidated information about all available Enterprise Services delivered by SAP.”. Fair dos.

You can install an ES Repository yourself, but chances are you’re not always on the latest release, so checking the ESW is always a good way to see what’s around the corner.

Now you would think that the ESW gives you an easy overview of the services on offer, describing to you exactly what each service does (especially when you compare them to each other). You would probably also think that the ESW gives you a nifty little search engine which enables you to sieve through the 2000+ services and get what you want quickly.

Well, things have definitely improved and especially the testing part of the service (against SAP’s own Discovery System, ie an ECC app stack) is much better now. However much is still left to be desired as far as documentation, search facilities and test harness is concerned. Oh, and while I’m at it: don’t even think about opening up the ESW in browsers such as Firefox, Safari or Opera.

It simply looks to me as if these services have been arranged in such a way so they fit well together with SAP’s module documentation and education plans. This doesn’t always sit in line how other consultants look for services.

In contrast, here is the way how I approach a service from a developer’s perspective: I know I want to create a sales order in a backend system. From my old BAPI days I remember that I need a few parameters to feed the service in order to get order processing going without those elusive error messages. You can find the “Sales Orders Create” service easily enough, but of course that’s only part of what’s needed. If you’re looking around for services to find sales organisations, sales groups, divisions et cetera, you’ll be surprised how difficult it can be to get the information out of the backend that you’re looking for. Bottom line for me is: finding the services you require and testing them is still far from easy.

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny”, Yoda (Star Wars)

Now as a developer there is an underlying danger in all this. Let me tell you what this is: The more time you spend looking for those services and collecting your data, the more you’re inclined to log into the backend using SAP GUI, enter the letters “S-E-8-0″ into the top left of the screen and create a little remote-enabled function module, expose it as a web service (using a wizard) and get those pesky sales order related details out of the ERP system. Even worse, you’re even contemplating copying a SAP standard function module to extend it so it does what you want it to do. Do not give in to the powers of the dark side….

Now can I just say one thing here: I bet there are other ways to retrieve data out of the backend system. Whilst I love to hear about them, all I want to illustrate here is that I’m currently on a long journey during which I will learn how to find the services I require quicker and get the backend to do what I want it to do. The benefits will be that the customer I work for have systems that need less support and testing after an upgrade, because services to external systems are provided via standard services which are constantly updated and maintained by SAP.

However a little help from SAP by making the ESW easier to use wouldn’t go amiss!

TO BE CONTINUED!

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver ABAP, CE, SOA

SAP Mentor Yoda

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”, Yoda (Star Wars)

Heeding Yoda’s advice, I’m currently in the process of unlearning some (but by far not all!) of the skills I’ve acquired over the years as SAP Development Consultant. During the past 11+ years, I’ve developed a lot of my applications within the ABAP stack, mostly for use within SAP GUI, sometimes within a browser.

Now, to some of you this might sound a bit pretentious, but I wanted to do something new and different! SAP ERP products are great but not perfect. I spent over a decade performing ABAP and config work in order to mold SAP ERP systems into a shape so they do exactly what a business wants. Make no mistake, these years were very valuable for me and my backend expertise is going to come in very handy in my new job. But I wanted to get out and explore, see what’s beyond and discover pastures new.

Over the years I’ve brought a lot of help and value to businesses with my ABAPs and web apps, but it always entailed changes or enhancements within the ERP core system. Sometimes these changes were not easy to make, as end users wanted to keep their system as free of customisation as possible, fearing problems and endless regression tests further down the line.

Moreover, before ABAP OO came along, reusability of development components (DCs) was merely restricted to INCLUDEs and Function Modules. Thankfully this has all changed now. But let’s face it: adoption of ABAP OO based development principles is still not a reality in every SAP development team. Things have definitely improved, but it’s far from being fully adopted.

Enter Composition Environment, Netweaver Developer Studio, Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer, Guided Procedures, Enterprise Services Builder and all these other tools & repositories of a new service-oriented world that is Enterprise SOA. My new world. “The other side of the pond”, as I call it.


“Rest, Neo. The answers are coming.”, Morpheus (The Matrix)

However all these new tools can be quite daunting for a SAP Development Consultant who in the past usually spent most of his time using one single development workbench: SE80. In addition to new tooling and code syntax (Java), a CE development consultant also needs to understand the landscape far better than an ABAPer. It comes with the territory: if you want to build apps that link systems and leverage services then you surely have to know your backend from your Java stack from your Dev Studio. Simple as that.

If you’re an experienced ABAPer then you must expect to be out of your comfort zone (aka ABAP Development Workbench) once in a while. Books, TechEd videos, Tutorials, SAP help and helpful colleagues are hopefully at the ready to make the transition easier for you. Benefits you can reap from the learning process are more DC reusability, agile and flexible development, modern development tools and many, many more  (at least that’s what I hope for!). Imagine to cut down development time and deliver solutions to end users at a much faster pace than what you’re used to in SAP Land. Isn’t that worth the effort?

At this point I would also like to divert your attention to my CompriseIT colleague Tom Scaysbrook’s blog “Journey into SAP”, another great read in the CE arena and beyond.


So what are my observations so far?

• I think that my background in SAP’s web app offerings and ALE/IDOC are a distinct advantage when it comes to understanding services, protocols, MVC paradigm, Object Orientation and parts of the new tooling. So if that’s your background, great.
• Here’s the frustrating bit: most CE tutorials on SDN are out of date. Details in the tooling have changed in CE, disadvantage being that screenshots and descriptions have you got your head scratching more than once. It sometimes happens to me that I spend more time looking for a button or a tab than I actually need to complete the tutorial. CE consultant Thorsten Franz has also emphasized this on SDN some time back in 2008 in more detail.
• diggin deeper: I was curious and had a look at the ABAP coding behind a web service for “sales order management” and was surprised. I guess my expectation was to see a lot of wrapped BAPI calls, but instead I found a lot of usage of the MV45A screen modules (even FCODEs). Very interesting to see how it was done though. Learning how to use BAdIs to enance web services is high on my agenda.
• another perspective: another thing that I find fascinating is the Composite Application Framework. It is integrated into the NW Developer Studio and enables you to write your own CAF services but also define your own structures and data tables. Storage of data (or “persistence” as it is called) is all dealt with by the framework (which is nice!). The topic of “data storage in backend or CAF – pros and cons” will surely tempt me to a blog post in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED !

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver ABAP, CE, SOA

Just to let everyone know that Craig Cmehil’s “24h Friday Morning Report Marathon” is due to start in less that one hour. Craig is raising money for Doctor’s Without Borders, “Doctors Without Borders is at work right now saving the lives of women, men and children in more than 60 countries where people would otherwise not have access to medical care.”.

Please tune in, participate in this event and most importantly: DONATE. Craig will surely do a fantastic job and I’d like to wish him all the best for this tour de force.

Link to the event program is here.

SAP Blogosphere Craig Cmehil

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

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

Interesting SAP related news links from the last 7 days:

• SAP’s worker’s council wants job guarantee (Achtung, German! – english translation here, albeit Leo Apotheker translated as “pharmacist”). via, @rwang0. Isn’t the worker’s council trying to square the circle here?
• “Never.” SAP US boss Bill McDermott interview predicts a SaaS disillusionment. A fairly misjudged and badly interpreted interview, or, as @jonerp put it: “SaaS true believers portraying SAP as legacydinosaur“.
• SAP and SaaS: SeekingAlpha’s Jeffrey Kaplan sees SAP in denial. I thought this article lacks real insight into what products such as BBD deliver. Also, what’s wrong with being cautious about ERP in the cloud? For instance, the idea of SAP SaaS snap-on’s to work toegther with SAP ERP is a good one, as it could ease customers into SaaS.
• this week also saw the go-live of the Enterprise Geeks website with interesting contributions from Craig Cmehil, Dan McWeeney, Ed Hermann, Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung. I’ve certainly subscribed to their feed.
• This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as SAP customers had to continue facing the music: a survey by Panaya Inc showed that 75% of all SAP upgrade projects are still going ahead as planned, some with lower budgets. Main driver appears to be support cost avoidance.
• SAP confirms it has won UN implementation project. Might just be a drop in the ocean financially, but bums on seats is always good PR.

This week’s Twitter Picks:

• @jonerp: As of January 1, 2009, Business Objects is no longer “Business Objects, an SAP Company.” It is now: “SAP Business Objects.” Noted.
• @dahowlett: “When SAP asked me how I felt about eSOA last year, I retorted something along the lines that I’d rather have an anal probe by Rosa Klebb“
• RajeevTrikha: “India’s outsourcing revenue is $50B and Satyam’s take was $2B. But definitely the impact on India’s reputation seems to be bigger than 4%.”
• @rooreynolds: “Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you’d like to know better”

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