This Week in SAP

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Brazil, Argentina, England – World Cup favourites come and go, but This Week in SAP can’t be knocked out that easily. This little project of mine is a labour of love and therefore might experience the odd blip in broadcast. Blame my clients who keep me busy.

Anyway, what have we got?

And here comes the Twitterverse:

  • jonerp: There is such a thing as overthinking SAP career options. Hot skills chase – avoid. Passionate pursuit of excellence – that’s more like it
  • vendorprisey: RT @hrportal: SAP Records Management is now called “SAP NetWeaver Folders Management”: . >more renaming games???????
  • openczun Hint : just because SAP says some functionality is supported, doesn’t mean it works.
  • schucci @enterprisegeeks did anyone notice that “innojagd” is really an anagram for “ninja god”…must be Craig’s nickname.
  • qmacro Overheard: “I can’t code anymore. I’m going to have to do Architecture” (!)

This Week in SAP

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OK, there’s been a little gap in weekly updates. I knew that the title “This Week in SAP” would come to haunt me one of those weeks. I blame the World Cup and Konrad Zuse’s birthday. But now, after some dire performances from Germany and England, I’m desperately looking for some distraction in the vaults of the SAP world… let’s see.

selections from Twitter, not necessarily from the last 7 days.

  • PuruGovind: I have shifted most of my SAP-context tweeting to SAP talk, our inhouse microblogging tool.
  • dahowlett: Resetting my #sdn password for the 3rd time in as many days…..grrr…..

This Week in SAP

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Decompressed and recovered after SAPPHIRE the Blogsphere and Twitterverse was back on track… I thought… but it was rather quiet.

Tweet, tweet, tweet….

This Week in SAP

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Welcome back! It’s been a Sapphire-tastic week both in Frankfurt and Orlando, so most pickings of mine are still influenced by that. I’m glad I went over to Frankfurt to witness all the action. Co-Mentor Nigel James summarised it best by saying “SAPPHIRE WOW”.

  • numerous Sapphire wraps have been posted (including mine here, here and here). Those most noteworthy in my mind are the ones from (a very complimentary) Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett (note: also check Vinnie and Dennis’ latest after thoughts, now the “drugs have worn off”! follow their links), CIO.com and also the summaries on Craig Cmehil’s FMR for day1, day2 and day 3.
  • more thoughts by Dennis Howlett on SAP’s SME SaaS offering Business By Design and its pricing. Dennis also mentions the SDK for BBD which is supposed to hit the community later in 2010. Generally there seems to be concerns around entry level for partners, infrastructure (what if SAP decides to outsource the hosting?) and pricing. Personally I would like to see a clearer strategy announcement from SAP around partnerships – hopefully this will be in place by the time the SDK is released.
  • two excellent Enterprise Geeks podcasts around Agile and (of course) the Certification 5 and their efforts to move the needle on SAP Certification. Unfortunately I missed out with all the fun as 4/5 of the group gathered in Orlando.
  • I can probably get away with mentioning Dennis Howlett a third time by pointing to his excellent blog on the Certification 5 experience with Bill McDermott. Goosebumps guaranteed!


and finally from the Twitterverse…

  • DearingGroup: the # of times we’ve seen Sustainability in tweets from SapphireNow almost equals the amount of consultants it used to take to implement SAP
  • bitterer: Bill McDermott looks, speaks, and acts like the other Bill. Clinton, that is. #sapphirenow
  • rhirsch: RT @bitterer: Real real-time from SAP. Unreal. #sapphirenow >> now that is reality
  • vendorprisey: just googling Virgin’s IT set up. Lots of Oracle, some SAP, some netsuite. #sapphirenow
  • SAPProJournal: Must say this is the first time at an SAP conference that colonizing another planet had come up in the discussion. #SAPPHIRENOW
  • njames: Ash #ash go away Go away and stay away I don’t care why I don’t care how I want to get to @sapphirenow
  • dahowlett: All the smart people are in the lobby bar #sapohirenow (nb. couldn’t resist, Dennis! 🙂

day 3 at SAPPHIRE

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The third and last day of Sapphire Now in Frankfurt started for me with a round table with SAP CTO, Vishal Sikka, during which he emphasised several times that Netweaver was still SAP’s supported platform and that it’s staying. It was good to have this confirmation, as Jim Hagemann Snabe’s keynote on Tuesday didn’t mention the work “Netweaver” once. Moreover, Snabe talked about a “future stack” and SAP having talks with “software vendors about it”, which initially brought a little confusion to the community.

Then there were of course the much anticipated keynotes from Sikka and Hasso Plattner. A lot of what Vishal was talking about had already been touched upon at the round table earlier in the day.

On In-Memory, I think the community was suprised and even delighted to hear that support for the product goes all the way back to SAP 4.6c. Vishal also talked about “Project Gateway”, which seems to be a key to SAP’s On-Demand ambitions for the “normal” ERP world. The next weeks and months will hopefully provide further clarification on Gateway. Sikka also mentined an internal SAP challenge back in March 2010 to produce 500 mobile apps. Up to Sapphire, more than 600 have now been developed (not all of these published though). It would have been nice to see and hear more about this, but I’m expecting more on this soon.

Plattner’s keynote was more of a dive into In-Memory Database, rounded off with a demo of In-Memory Analytics within a little real world scenario. Plattner delivered it in his usual off-the-cuff style which can be very entertaining. It certainly demonstrated the power this sort of technology has, especially its non-disruptive nature.

Biggest take away for me on day 3 was Business By Design (BBD) though. At a round table with SAP Go-To Market SVP Markus Schwarz and Eric Luengen we were given a demo of BBD version 2.5, the latest version of the on-demand SME solution. It was the first time I had seen BBD in the flesh and I have to admit that I liked UI look and feel (I know that the UI is not everyone’s cup of tea).

Customers should basically be able to re-configure simple things in their system themselves, whilst more complex changes or additions/extensions would be developed by an SDK to be released later this year. The SDK will be based (as mentioned before by Anne Petteroe) on the Microsft Visual Studio and C#. Dennis Howlett mentions some concerns around the possibility of SAP outsourcing the BBD infrastructure to third parties. Once SAP’s BBD team has found a good way how enhancements and plugins developed with this SDK can be marketed, there could be a big potential for a new or enlarged partner ecosystem. Let’s also hope SAP’s marketing efforts are strong enough to get all of this off the ground, as Dennis points out (he knows more about SME SaaS than me).

On the whole, it was a good and down-to-earth SAPPHIRE for me. I was expecting more fluffy, hot air type of stuff, but actually walked away with more hands-on info than I thought. This is also down to the great work of Mark Finnern, Craig Cmehil, Oliver Kohl and also the SAP Global Communications team. Altogether they provided very informative 3 days for me in Frankfurt. Thank You to you all!

day 2 at SAPPHIRE

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Day 2 at Sapphire was very much a continuation on SAP’s message regarding innovation and rejuvenation. Apart form the keynotes by the co-CEOs, SAP Mentors and Bloggers had the opportunity to participate in a round table with Jonathan Becher, Executive Vice President of Global Field Marketing. Jonathan explained more about SAP’s aim to use Sapphire to demonstrate to customers the change that is happening within SAP. One major attempt in this area is the re-branding of Sapphire into “SAPPHIRE NOW”. My take on the conference so far is that SAP has managed to show itself in a much more grounded and listening kind of way. A refreshing change from a rather chilled atmosphere not too long ago, triggered by topics such as support costs, for example.

For most of the audience the two keynotes by co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe were the first time they had seen or heard what these two business leaders had to say. Where Bill McDermott showed vision and direction, Snabe filled the strategy and product gap. With Vishal Sikka there is now talk about a “virtual 3rd CEO”, responsible for the technical and architectural part. Judging by the Twtterstream during the keynotes and conversations after the speeches, my impression was that SAP has bounced back and has so far executed well.

However the software giant has quite a task on its hands as far as change internally is concerned. New paradigms such as the hybrid model for On Demand and talks about the “future stack” (for applications) have already caused quite a lot of discussions amongst employees, partners and consultants. Now everyone is looking towards this afternoon’s keynote by Vishal Sikka and the enigmatic Hasso Plattner for some clarity. To be continued.