In his latest “SAP consulting trend trilogy” on SearchSAPs Jon Reed summarises in great fashion the current opportunities, challenges and threats of the SAP Consulting market. In his recent contribution he talks to a large extend about the North American SAP freelance market, but I guess in Europe the general tendencies are the same.

His main conclusions are very much the same as David Foote’s statements from back in February this year (link to previous post on this site): Due to the changes introduced by the Netweaver platform the traditional skill sets of both SAP developers and Basis staff is in flux. In detail, Reed and Foote are both identifying 3 main trends:

• infrastructure (or “integration and reduction” as Foote calls it)
• functional (Foote calls them “Modellers” or “Enablers”)
• business intelligence (data mgt, data warehouse, BW, BI)

Reed explains that the surge of New Dimension product installs is triggered by an increased number of installs at medium sized companies. I’d agree with Reed on this one, but would also add that another contributing factor is that only recently companies properly understood the contribution these products can make to their business and how it can provide them with competitive advantage.

This one made me smile:

Contrary to what SAP may imply — that everyone is moving to 6.0 — companies are upgrading to a range of SAP releases.

On the whole, part one, two and three of Jon Reed’s “SAP consulting trends” document make a very worthwhile read. SearchSAP tends to sometimes pack older SAP career posts into new ones and makes it look as if these were recent, but not in this case. If you’re a SAP Consultant: read it. Once you’ve finished reading it – read it again.

All I would like to see now is a more detailed analysis of the European SAP market…