America’s SAP User Group, ASUG, has announced its new president: Steven Strout, former CIO of Morris Communications. In addition to president, Strout will also take on the title of CEO to become the first full-time employee of the organization.

Rod Masney, who used to run the ASUG ship, worked with SearchSAP.com on numerous occasions, leaving a rich legacy behind. He will stay on the ASUG board and continue his efforts in keeping SAP and ASUG close.

We had the good fortune of sitting down with Strout at Sapphire 2007, and we’re looking forward to continuing our ASUG relationship in years ahead. Tune in later this week for news editor Jon Franke’s interview with Strout on what’s next for him, ASUG and SAP.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Truth is, we don’t know all that much about A1S yet. But that will all change on Sept. 19, when SAP has a big A1S bash planned. Another event approaching fast is the much-ballyhooed IPO of NetSuite, Oracle chief Larry Ellison’s baby. Some may debate the wisdom of an IPO in this market, but NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson isn’t one of them; he’s in a quiet period and can’t comment about it all. He can, however, take jabs at SAP A1S. Here’s what he had to say during a recent interview with Mary Hayes Weier:

SAP is saying A1S […] will be less customizable than SAP’s traditional software. That strategy amazes me. Midsize businesses need customization, just as every other company needs customization. Vendors like SAP will say SaaS is less customizable, but that’s just not true from a technology standpoint.

Interestingly, Nelson doesn’t see much competition with Oracle itself, adding that the Redwood City giant is busy “hammering SAP in the enterprise market.”

I’ll leave that without comment, but Nelson’s words on SAP’s lack of customization do raise some concerns. Indeed, as others have noted, SAP is a bit late to the party, and it better have some substantial bells and whistles to jazz things up. Stay tuned as news editor Jon Franke treks to New York City for the Sept. 19 event.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Research firm Datamonitor’s recent report on the CRM market pegs Oracle as number one, followed by SAP. Microsoft? Not so much. From Stuart Lauchlan’s analysis:

Datamonitor concludes that Oracle is a clear market leader with an impressively versatile and highly competitive CRM portfolio while SAP is also recommended as an automatic shortlist choice due to the excellence of its CRM modules and dominant impact on the market […] There are possible alternatives in the form of Chordiant, Infor and Salesforce.com, but these have to remain competitive if they are to continue to be considered as market leadership challengers. Other possible contenders include Consona, Microsoft and RightNow Technologies if they enhance their profile among end-users or deliver on the considerable promise of their forthcoming releases.

It is true that Oracle has made substantial acquisitions over the past couple years. Indeed, the time for decrying the Siebel- and PeopleSoft-mess as more bluster than actual business benefits has come and gone. But does that translate to automatic CRM dominance, especially in light of SAP’s admittedly excellent offerings? What about the pesky little deal that SAP is actually leading in market share? We asked Lauren Hoyt, site editor of our sister site SearchCRM.com, for her take on the issue:

It’s hard to deny that Oracle has a clear lead in CRM deployments, thanks in large part to their acquisition of Siebel Systems. Siebel has 4.6 million users, and Oracle and Siebel combined can claim 5.6 million. Meanwhile, SAP leads in market share. Still, don’t count out Salesforce.com or Microsoft. Analysts predict significant spending on CRM in the next few years, which should be telling from a market share perspective. My sense is that the vendors that can do a few things — design a friendly user interface (UI), help customers design a real strategy for managing customer relationships, capitalize on the now ever-prevalent on-demand market and finally, blend its product with social media opportunities — will be the winner in the long run.

Will that winner be Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or any of the other CRM players? Submit your comments for a chance to win a free copy of “mySAP CRM Interaction Center” by Thorsten Wewers & Tim Bolte, courtesy of SAP Press.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

SAP has officially opened registration for TechEd ‘07, inviting SAP professionals to attend one of their four locations through fall. Las Vegas is first (10/1-5), followed by Munich (10/17-19), Shanghai (11/6-7) and Bangalore (11/28-30).

These events tend to be more technical in nature than Sapphire, offering some 1,000+ hours of SAP education for beginners and experts alike. As usual, ASUG, SDN, BPX and other SAP groups will take an active role with sessions and forums to round out the regular SAP fare.

The stated theme of this year’s event is “Enterprise SOA: Put the Power to Work,” focusing on the practical benefits that can be gained from jumping on the Enterprise SOA bandwagon. This is probably a wise move. Many SAP users I’ve spoken to complain that SAP’s push to get users to upgrade has been more stick than carrot; highlighting the positives may help sinking millions into upgrades seem less of a burden and more like a wise investment. If SAP can convince Joe Customer, that is.

One way to make the case for upgrading are the new Enterprise SOA Showcase Contests, where regular SAP shops can provide SOA success stories for a chance to win cash prizes. The contest opened just last week and remains open to submissions until 9/19, after which there’s a public voting opportunity to establish a list of finalists. The grand prize winner, who takes home $10,000 cash, gets crowned at TechEd in Las Vegas.

Chalk that up as wise move number two on SAP’s part. Call me cynical, but after seven years on the SAP beat I’ve learned this: One page of customer case study is worth infinitely more than ten pages of marketing speak. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume I’m not the only one who’s a lot more interested to hear a customer talk about how things worked out in real life than read about world-class solutions set to revolutionize the core value chain through innovation leadership. (Ok, in fairness, this applies to ALL enterprise tech press releases, but you know what I mean̷

Anyway, we were there in 2006, and we’ll be there again this year. Stay tuned as we approach this exciting event!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

You’ve probably seen the new guest expert feature called On The Spot we launched last week. First out was SAP jobs expert Jon Reed with his words of wisdom on topics like the next big thing in ABAP careers, how to become a techno-functional consultant, and how a U.S. developer can ask for a raise without getting the pink slip.

We’re now taking questions for next month’s installment, this time featuring BI/BW expert Gary Nolan. Gary just released his latest SAP Press book: Efficient SAP NetWeaver BI Implementation & Project Management, and he is a frequent conference speaker with many years practical experience. Read his bio, then submit your toughest SAP BI/BW questions.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

With product code names, companies tend to lean more towards whimsical and creative. Take Microsoft. The company has used locations, like “Whistler” for Windows XP (Microsoft held design retreats in Whistler, British Columbia) or “Longhorn” for Vista (the Longhorn is apparently a bar in Whistler).

And then there’s SAP, which for its brand new, on-demand, game changing midmarket offering, went with… A1S.

In an interview with SearchSAP.com about the new All-in-One improvements, Tom Kindermans, senior vice president for SAP’s SMB in EMEA, speculated that the A1S code name might be behind some of the confusion surrounding SAP’s midmarket offerings. And it makes sense. Says Kindermans:

Some of the confusion comes from the codename we are using — A1S — for the new suite we announced. This created some confusion because some people believe A1S will be the successor of All-in-One, which is not the case. The real commercial name will be announced in September. And we have a very clear positioning for each of the three [midmarket products].

SAP doesn’t think the error is fatal, though, it will just require that much more investment in marketing to differentiate the products. Still, we might expect a more innovative nickname for SAP’s next new product. Perhaps “Sylt” after the German resort town famous for its clothing-optional beaches?

Kindermans went on to echo what other SAP executives have said: That even with the release of A1S and resulting confusion, he doesn’t expect All-in-One’s growth to slow at all, because the products address different markets.

It’s out of the question that A1S can replace All-in-One for several reasons. One of the reasons is that we’re addressing another type of customer, what we call an unserved market. It’s a hosted solution which we don’t have in the portfolio for the moment. So we are absolutely convinced that the business A1S will generate will not cannibalize All-in-One business.

SAP will, obviously, be relying on the midmarket, and its 3 products, to generate significant customer growth on its way to the company’s goal of 100,000 customers by 2010. So, while some analysts and industry watchers have questioned whether that goal is realistic, Kindermans thinks it is within reach, with the SMB products being relied on heavily.

[The 100,000 customer goal] is definitely within reach. We haven’t changed our goals and there is no reason to change the goal. Our Business One product will contribute heavily to the 100,000 customers. But not only Business One, A1S will contribute. All-in-One has over 10,000 customers but we continue to invest in the product as before and we believe we will have the same growth in the next few years… so this 100,000 customers is within reach and we are very firm to confirm this number.

Jon Franke
News Editor

SAP PLM (product lifecycle management) is growing, and that means it’s time for SAP professionals to pay attention. Here’s what veteran SAP jobs expert Jon Reed had to say about the career opportunities a PLM surge may bring to your industry:

SearchSAP.com’s recent piece on the growth of the PLM market bodes well for SAP consultants for a couple of reasons: First, because PLM is becoming more central to corporate business processes, and second, because more and more companies are choosing the add-on extensions from their ERP provider instead of opting for best-of-breed solutions. This should be the case for PLM buying decisions also. We can also be confident that SAP puts a lot of stock in its own PLM product - PLM is a highlighted part of SAP’s Business Suite offering.

So that’s the good news. The more sobering aspect is that we have heard a buzz about PLM consulting from the year 2000 onward, and we have yet to see a big uptick in demand for PLM consultants. It’s important to realize that until the demand for a particular product becomes widespread, the consulting market will be limited to SAP’s own service line, its Tier One partners like IBM and Accenture and a handful of elite independent experts. A few boutique specialization firms round out that picture. Up until recently, that’s been the case for PLM, but we’re starting to see more widespread adoption of SAP PLM. I think we’ll see an even bigger surge in the demand for PLM skills a couple of years from now. At that point, more companies will have their core SAP upgrades behind them and will be looking to build on those long days of project work with strategic product line extensions.

That’s why I personally think the SAP PLM market will probably see its greatest activity in the 2-5 year window ahead of us. But it never hurts to add some PLM skills to your toolkit. The next question is: How would you go about that? Like most areas of SAP, there are numerous entry points into PLM consulting from both the functional and technical side. But let’s focus on the functional PLM opportunities. I see a couple of classic PLM profiles that work out well for functional consulting. One is that of the PLM industry expert who is new to SAP but has deep PLM and engineering experience outside of SAP.

These folks can be a real asset, especially as full-time employees who are pulled onto an internal project team. From the SAP side, the most common entry point I have seen into PLM is from that of the logistics-oriented module set including SD, MM and PP. We are also seeing some PLM project activity in the process industries and the Environmental Health and Safety area, so there are some entry points into PLM from those with industry expertise and SAP vertical experience in one of those two areas.

Finally, SAP is starting to gain some traction with its ECM (Engineering Change Management) product, so we are starting to see more PLM-ECM jobs. SAP skills associated with such roles include project/portfolio management, project collaboration (cProjects), design collaboration (cFolders), as well as CAD/CAM and DMS platform integration. We’re also seeing some PLM-related activity connected to the PPMDC Business Package, an up-and-coming “xApp” from SAP. That’s a lot of alphabet soup there, but if those acronyms are familiar to you, that’s a good sign that PLM consulting might be right up your alley.

Adding any of the above tools to your SAP skills would begin to position you for PLM consulting, and as the demand for SAP PLM skills picks up, you could be in a great position.

Jon Reed is the President of JonERP.com, an interactive web site which features Jon’s SAP Career Blog and his podcasts for SAP professionals. Jon has been publishing SAP career and market analysis for more than a decade, and he serves as the career expert for SearchSAP.com’s “Ask the Expert” panel.

SAP PLM (product lifecycle management) is emerging as a growth area in the enterprise in general. This is hardly a surprise, seeing how innovation is becoming the key competitive factor in the global marketplace. That means ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle, IFS and others have to stay on the ball to retain and up-sell existing customers.

Today, SAP upped the ante with a slew of PLM enhancements. We can expect new portfolio planning processes and portfolio management capabilities by the end of this year, followed by an extensive interface overhaul of the SAP PLM interface in 2008. This move will cut down on manual tasks and training time. 2009 and 2010 will see even further integration support, along with tidbits like new product information management capabilities and enhanced RFID/barcode functionality.

This is part of SAP’s plan to outmaneuver arch-rival Oracle, which in turn made headlines with its $495 million Agile acquisition earlier this year. But is SAP equipped to pull this off? Blogger Chris Kelley is skeptical. PLM is ‘messy’ by nature; it has to be flexible, juggle multiple input sources and so on in real time, he said. The strength of ERP titans like SAP has always been that rock-solid structure that prevents messiness.

“PLM is just too different from what they are good at,” Kelley said. “It’s too ‘miscellaneous’. Its too dynamic. Its too creative.”

Roy Wildeman, senior analyst for Forrester, doesn’t agree.

“Manufacturers that are also SAP ERP customers will want to investigate SAP’s PLM offering,” Wildeman said. “[Look closely at] the potential integration benefits from interdependent process areas like project and portfolio management, direct material sourcing, and configuration management.”

Stay tuned as we follow up with SAP career expert Jon Reed’s take on what this PLM growth trend brings in terms of new job opportunities tomorrow.

Matt Danielsson
Editor