Well, in many respects its been an interesting week for me (more about it further down), but it was also the week when SAP told the world that they would acquire Technidata. Plenty to talk about, so lets get stuck into this week’s “SAP Souffle”:

• SAP announced that they’re going to buy German Partner Technidata, a specialist in Product Safety, Health and Environment Solutions. I guess Greenmonk can really claim they were on the money when back in March 2008 it reckoned that ”SAP should really buy Technidata so that it can move forward more quickly in this space” (nb carbon accounting solutions). James Governor also saw something like this coming in 2007.
• Vijay Vijayasankar once again was on fire this week when he posted his great blog on “South beach diet didn’t work for me and neither did Agile development” (so much for a modest title). Great post with some great comments. I tend to agree with Vijay to some degree. To me, Agile is a little bit of “old wine in new bottles”, but old wines can taste good, too.
• I liked Thomas Wailgum’s “why is the CFO still boss of IT?” – this still is far too common and his statistics prove it.
• as mentioned above, this week 5 SAP Mentors (Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, Leonardo de Araujo, Martin Gilett and myself) published a White Paper on SDN with regards to the current state of SAP Certification (“The Certification 5 Report“). The response couldn’t have been more resounding. Read Dennis SDN post here, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan comments in his blog, Pixelbase had a (pimping) write-up, Michael Douane had a pop (“SAP Certification Ruckus”) – and let not forget the 33 comments (so far) on SDN!
• Jon Reed’s podcast with Eric Brown on ByDesign is a good one. Make sure it’s coming to an iPod near you soon!
• good old SAPMeSideways is back with the “same old, same old“
• great interview on German TV with SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp (link here – but make sure you skip to chapter 2. Chapter 1 is with D. Hasselhoff!)

take it away, Twitter!

• se38: @jspath55 Never run a changing system
• esjewett: SAP removed the WebDynPro runtime from Visual Composer in Ehp2? Didn’t know that was coming
• sapteched: @MGILLET Thanks for the breaking news on SAP #certificationfrom Cert5 @dahowlett @jonerp @pixelbase@Leonardo_Araujo
• jonerp: @twailgum yeah it’s rough when you do a particularly witty Tweet and it doesn’t make the cut with @pixelbase! >> please scroll down to find my price list

This week in SAP

“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

It’s been the week when the Icelandic Ash tried to muddy my view of SAP Land. However I have been victorious! And to keep it topical: What’s this week’s fall-out?

• The Var Guy evaluates SAP’s EcoHub in a short blog post, naming it (just like SAP) an application store. Apparently the ill-named EcoHub offers over 500 different solutions. I wonder if people who get so excited about it have ever dived any deeper into any of those 500 offerings? You would expect you get some nitty gritty apps to install (it is called an “app store” after all!), but most of the time when you click on the “Demo” button, you’re presented with a contact form. If you’re interested in any pricing details you’re referred to your “local SAP representative”. So in what way is EcoHub different from any fluffy showcase event? If you call something an “App Store” then put some “butter to the fish” (that’s a german saying).
• SAP announced Dr Angelika Dammann as new Executive Board Member
• excellent SDN blog post by SAP’s Thomas Weiss on “What’s new in ABAP Nw 7.0 Ehp 2“
• Eric Kimberling weights in with a good SAP vs Oracle article. I wish he would spill more beans, but I guess he doesn’t want to give away the crown jewels.
• former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker joins US software firm GT Nexus
• CIO with some interesting insights into SAP Enhancement Packs & upgrades. It gets a bit general towards the end though. Jon Reed weighs in with some good points
• Despite “restructuring”: SAP promises “5000 Developer jobs are safe” (translated via WiWo & Google Translate)
• Silicon.de interviews Vishal Sikka. Here is the english Google Translate version

and here’s a pick from Twitter

koehntopp: I love the smell of Walldorf in the morning

vlvl: RT @Capgemini_SAP: The SAP Community Network saved me 7 hours of work today. Simply brilliant experience

koehntopp: @vlvl the question is: what did they bill the customer? #scn (nb. in response to @vlvl’s retweet!)

dahowlett: RT @vendorprisey: good. SAP appoints an HR professional to the board. < and an outsider so no taint

dbmoore: RT @SAPinsider: Did you know that 77% of SAP’s customers are #SMEs? <<Depends on your definition of small and medium …

MarkYolton: RT @thevarguy: The VAR Guy: EcoHub: SAP’s App Store Attracts Partners <hot

tbroek: Just got an email from #sapphire now that my agile SAP session didn’t get selected “It is unable to use”. Agile still not that important?

This week in SAP

Okay folks the easter bunny managed to prevent me from posting last week’s news, so this week you get a whole-lotta-SAP-Land-goodness more:

• he does it again: SAP’s Craig Cmehil once again puts himself under the strain of a 24h Friday Morning Report Marathon. This year -like last- he managed to raise $$$$ for Doctors Without Borders. He’s got an amazing line-up of people on his show this time!
• Dennis Howlett has done it again: with his “six questions for SAP Management” he puts forward some incovenient points to the boys at the helm.
• Jon Reed and the Enterprise Geeks do it again: “Finding geeks and keeping them happy” gives you a little insight into the world of a programmer, geek, nerd <insert any other explentives here>.
• Andy Klee says what’s wrong with SAP-related LinkedIn Groups and suggests how to use them properly
• fellow Mentor Vijay Vijaysankar with a daring blog on “Women Geeks and their Troubles“. Someone’s not too afraid to pick up a very hot potato…
• there’s also been some inspired and passionate debating going on my recent blog entitled “SAP from the Apple tree“. OK, it’s a shameless plug, but I don’t care.

and what did I spot in Twitterland?

• SAPPHIRENOW:  Bill in Orlando, Jim in Frankfurt.
• vlvl: Realizing that Santana will play in SAPPHIRE Orlando and Duran Duran in SAPPHIRE Frankfurt, I’m rethinking going to Orlando. #80srule
• jonerp: RT @pixelbase @jonerp @vlvl let’s hope that Snabe and McDermott are not the “Union of the snake” >>> classic SAP Tweet of the week (in reply to @vlvl)
• jspath55: RT @ccmehil About 2 hrs until go live with the 24 Hour Marathon! [more like 2 seconds to go now!]

This week in SAP

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