here’s my weekly rundown of all that’s been happening in SAP Land over the last 7 days

• Alvaro Tejada (aka Blag) announces SAP Inside Track Lima, Peru. For known geographical reasons I won’t be able to make it, Blag.
• a good install guide for ABAP & Java stacks on Amazon Web Sevices (part 1).
• Oracle buys IP assets of SAP-funded Conformia: “SAP funds them, Oracle picks up the assets on the cheap. Nice system.”
• “So we will get it right, and we will take our time. Yeah, it took a little bit longer than we thought, but we can afford to.” – SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka talking to CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum on Timeless Software, Saas, The Cloud and BusinessByDesign. I do miss a little bit of bite in the questions, but Vishal seems an eloquent talker. I think though it is a little rich to say that SAP’s been in the cloud for 15 years though.
• SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett with another worthwhile contribution on ZDNet: What really happened with SAP Business bydesign? – ZDNet Blogs

here’s my Twitterverse take… some funny ones on the eternal Walldorf <-> Heidelberg debate (where shall you stay when visiting the SAP mothership?)

• @yojibee: @vlvl I usually prefer Heidelberg too, but think I might stay in WDF this time – just for the fun of it
• @vlvl: @yojibee it is rare to find “Fun” and “Walldorf” in the same sentence

Well in SAP News terms last week certainly was “John Wookey Week”. A lot of SAP relevant content came out of the SIIA On-Demand Europe conference:

• “It’s a problem that only we at SAP can solve”. Interesting FT piece on John Wookey, SAP EVP, and SAP’s future in the on-demand space.
• ZDnet followed the FT piece up with some solid analysis from Phil Wainewright and SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett.
• Here is also an interesting interview from Dennis Howlett talking to John Wookey on the fringes of said SIIA conference in Amsterdam.
• SAP Mentor Jon Reed with a good piece on the PAC website about SAP and its Social Media strategy.

And this week’s Twitter-Picks:

• @jonerp: Short but interesting: “Merril cuts SAP from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’, sees no IT spending recovery in 2009.”

• @rmtiwari @mrinal: just when on-demand should be their *present* they think SAP’s *future* is on-demand

This week obviously saw the start and end of Sapphire 2009 in Orlando, which is reflected in this week’s news items.

• news just out before the start of Sapphire 2009: SAP aquires Clear Standards
• Sapphire 2009: Dennis Howlett with an apt first-day-keynotes-summary – this also includes the “Sapphire 2009 press conference that never was”.
• CIO.com ‘s Sapphire 2009 round up
• Vinnie Mirchandani with some interesting insights from Sapphire here, on sustainability here and here.
• “Even SAP can be cool”. CNN.com with a report on Leo Apotheker who is soon taking over the reigns at SAP.

I’ve decided to include this week’s Tweet picks courtesy of Thomas Wailgum (CIO.com), who’s posted some great Tweet pickings from Sapphire 2009, Orlando.

Whoops! What happened over the last few weeks? Because of a recent change in direction for me my “This week in SAP” column suffered a little bit. More to be announced soon!

So let’s get this SAP News Show back on track…

• Forbes’ Dan Woods sees SAP taking revenge as Oracle customers will face an implementation headache further down the line. Nothing really new in this article (the integration headache argument is already 4-5 years old). Woods added some Business Suite 7 sprinkles worthwhile a read though.
• SAP aquires High Deal, a private France telecom spin-off which especialises in real-time billing.
• “There’s not going to be a lot to report.”, that’s what SAP’s Bill McDermott said when asked about the status of Business By Design (BBD) prior to its annual Sapphire conference. My guess is that SAP is keeping cards close to its chest whilst fumbling their way into a SaaS world.
• SAP Business Suite 7 has now come out of ramp-up is available to customers worldwide. I’d like to know what all the companies mentioned use BS7 for and for which processes. Heavyweights such as Colgate Palmolive surely have not implemented BS7 across their enterprise. And: are they’re still using it now? Hopefully Sapphire will tell us more.
• and finally an interesting CNBC interview with SAP’s Bill McDermott once again. As a journalist, how badly prepared can you be? They have a big gun in front of their cameras and then mess it up like this. Funy to watch though. (via Vinnie Mirchandani and Jon Reed)

TwitterSAPLand:

• @erwintenhumberg : “BTW, we’re now at 68 non-SAP registrations for the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf. Pretty cool I think!”