There has been something of a slow burn recently on a couple good blogs about SAP SRM 6.0. The word around is that the product, also referred to as SRM 2007, won’t be released beyond those customers currently in the ramp-up phase. Obviously, this isn’t great news for SAP, but how bad is it?

To clear some things up, we talked to Andrew Bartels, an SRM (supplier relationship management) analyst with Forrester Research.

SAP says between 10 and 50 companies are in the ramp-up phase for SAP SRM 6.0 (Bartels puts that number closer to 10 or 20). Bartels said these companies will be able to continue implementing the product, but SAP will not be taking any new customers. Rather, the idea is that SAP will focus on getting SRM, SCM (supply chain management) and all its “alphabet soup” products on SOA (service-oriented architecture) by the fourth quarter of 2008.

So, is this a disaster for SAP? Not according to Bartels.

On the plus side, the SRM 2007 product itself doesn’t have a lot of new features and functionality, according to Bartels. Rather, most of the improvements were in usability, and SAP may have some service packs in the offing to help in that area.

SAP will also continue developing the areas that have needed the most attention — spend analysis, CLM (contract lifecycle management) and e-sourcing — all of which will be available for sale separately.

However, with the next SRM product now likely debuting in the fourth quarter of 2008, that puts a large two and a half year gap between major SAP SRM releases. Also, some customers were counting on the usability improvements and will be disappointed. But we shouldn’t expect a mass customer exodus for SAP, Bartels said.

The bottom line?

“This is not good for SAP,” Bartels said. “But it is not, by any means, too bad for them — they still have competitive products out there.”

Jon Franke
News Editor

Oracle’s recent hostile takeover bid for enterprise infrastructure software company BEA triggered speculation that SAP and other big players may enter the fray and engage in a Retek-style bidding war. Well, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The clock ran out on Oracle’s offer and nobody else has stepped up to the plate.

In fact, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann went on the record to restate that SAP has little interest in BEA just earlier today. What now? Since BEA insists it is worth at least $21 per share (compared to the $17 offered by Oracle), it better show some seriously improved numbers in the next few quarters. It’s a risky gambit, and the market response has been rather brutal. It seems neither technical analysts nor Wall Street are taking a kind view to BEA’s bold stance.

Carl Icahn, who owns some 13% of BEA, is already suing the board for not taking Oracle up on the offer. SOA blogger Miko Matsumura predicts BEA will also face a new “wait and see” attitude in its potential customers, making it even harder to salvage the sinking ship. Investment researcher Georges Yared went so far as to call BEA “…an arrogant company led by an arrogant management team.”

Ouch. The consensus seems to be that Oracle is BEA’s only hope, where Oracle is in a position to patiently wait for BEA to come crawling back on its knees… Or, if BEA is stubborn, the company can slowly crumble away into oblivion. Either way, SAP obviously intends to steer clear of whatever ripples may be caused by the BEA drama. In this situation, that’s probably a wise move.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

In this two-part guest column, veteran SAP expert Jon Reed sounds off on the recently announced Business Objects acquisition.

Coming back from TechEd Las Vegas, we were all taken by surprise when the big TechEd announcements were trumped by the news of SAP’s Business Objects (BO) acquisition. This purchase was a major development for many reasons, not the least of which was because it marked a significant shift in SAP’s “build, don’t buy” development strategy. The biggest question off the bat was a simple one: Is this a good or bad move for SAP?

Matt Danielsson’s Editorial Blog ran a series of entries which provided a very useful assessment of the pros and cons of the BO acquisition. Featured among the entries was Naeem Hashmi of Information Frameworks, who provided a well-balanced look at the impact of the BO purchase.

After Matt posted his initial features, a follow-up question appeared: How will the BO acquisition affect SAP: How will the BO acquisition affect SAP consulting in the BI/BW area? To get a handle on this issue, I asked Naeem Hashmi to share his thoughts on the impact of BO on the careers of SAP professionals. I then placed his comments in an overall context of how I look at the issue myself. Here is what I had to say:

Almost as soon as SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (BO) was announced, the emails started pouring in. All kinds of SAP consultants, including those who were seriously involved in BW/BI or those who were looking to get involved, were concerned: How would this acquisition affect their career path? To be honest, I never truly understood these concerns.

Let me clarify: I do grasp that the BO acquisition poses some potentially dramatic changes in the SAP BI consulting space. Certainly the “skills profile” of the BI consultant of the future will change as a result of SAP’s BO purchase. But I saw the BO acquisition, which was a major departure from SAP’s “build our own code base” strategy, as a signal of the strategic importance of BI to the product line. And that can only be good news to the SAP BI consultant in the long term.

This certainly jibes with the sense I got from TechEd 2007. On the lookout for hot skills, what I saw was that the “eSOA skill set” would eventually be very much in demand, but right now, BW/BI skills were considered the most sought after of any skill, certainly any technical skill.

So it’s hard for me to see a serious problem for BI folks here – if anything, the BO purchase indicates the huge value SAP sees in BI going forward. And that means that SAP’s own customers are committed to implementing this technology. SAP would not have gone after BO if they had any doubt about that.

In order to get a better handle on how BO will truly impact SAP BI consultants on the skills level, I asked Naeem Hashmi, Chief Research Officer of Information Frameworks, if he would like to share his take on how the BO purchase will impact SAP professionals.

Read his thoughts on the matter in part two of this column.

In the first part of this column, guest expert Jon Reed expressed confidence in the future job prospects of SAP BI professionals. But what does our other expert voice on the Business Object acquisition think? Jon Reed sat down with Information Frameworks Chief Research Officer Naeem Hashmi for a job growth reality check.

“From an SAP BI professional growth perspective, SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (BO) brings a great opportunity,” Hashmi said. “Business Objects offers a superior and flexible presentation environment. However, whether the back end ends up being BO, SAP BI 7, Oracle, MS SQL, DB2, etc., you still need data warehousing skills to construct a data access environment regardless if you use the SAP BI or BO front end. For that reason, if I am an SAP BI consultant, I do not worry about the BO acquisition by SAP. If I was only a BO consultant, I would be concerned, however.

I see greater hardship for BO consultants learning and becoming fluent in SAP BI. Under NetWeaver, BI training and skills are very important. SAP BI consultants will find it much easier to learn BO and become fluent in BO technology quickly.

Note that the heart of BI usage is not really the technology, but the business side of “business intelligence” and here is where I see the BO acquisition will bring a wide array of good knowledge about building user-friendly business intelligence solutions into SAP (and to SAP BI consultants).

I do not see much of an impact of BO on SAP BI consultants. SAP BI is going to grow. Perhaps there will be a robust RFC (or other high performance data exchange method) to build BO universes automatically, and synchronize them easily from a backend SAP BI broadcaster or other method.

This way, enterprise BI users would still enjoy access to clean SAP and non-SAP data and have the ability to analyze data through a powerful BO user front-end using local universes. At this point, the SAP-BO integration plans are still on the drawing boards, so we’ll have to see how the future BO roadmap will evolve towards disappearing within the SAP Solutions. But at this point, the outlook for SAP BI consultants looks promising.

So what can an SAP BW or BI consultant do to prepare for the SAP BI profession for the future?

1) Take some BO training for your short-term competitive edge. Learn the business intelligence language of non-SAP business users. SAP BI consultants need to become “enterprise bi-linguals.” Learn the BO Data Integrator (which is the Acta ETL tool), which could eventually become the SAP ETL tool for non-SAP data sources without coding ABAP.

2) Get some training in Enterprise Architecture (EA). This will help you understand the actual business processes that span across SAP and non-SAP solutions, how people use information and when/how/why they make decisions that pertain to the BI side. You will be a better BI consultant with some EA understanding, and this will enable you to diversify your profession as well.

3) I would also suggest BO consultants start learning SAP BI and get used to the SAP BI lingo. The BO universes will disappear from the SAP universe sooner than you may have imagined. Prepare yourself with SAP BI.”

I think Naeem has summarized this situation well, both in terms of the big picture of SAP BI and the next steps SAP consultants can take. In addition, he’s shared some useful pointers for BO experts in the midst of this big corporate changeover.

However, there is one other aspect to consider, which Naeem brought up in his original SearchSAP commentary on BO:

“The bad news is, we’re now seeing a momentary confusion among SAP BI customers and consulting partners. We have many different products with different infrastructures, usage and life cycle management environments. Just a few month back SAP acquired OutlookSoft, a corporate performance suite, and before that we saw the Virsa acquisition.”

This is an important point. Naeem is correct that the BO acquisition has definitely created some short-term customer confusion, for understandable reasons. It’s possible we could see the immediate demand for SAP BW/BI expertise go down as SAP customers put the breaks on certain BI initiatives until they determine the best way forward, what their BO options are, and how the two frameworks will be integrated.

However, there are so many ongoing BW and BI projects, covering so many different kinds of initiatives, that I don’t expect a big adverse impact on BI consulting demand. For consultants trying to break into SAP BI, this may create yet another avenue, by mastering the tools on the BO side and approaching SAP from that direction.

The confusion we see in the shorter term about BI should be cleared up for the longer term. I expect in the end, we’ll see even more demand for BI consultants as a result of this acquisition. It’s never ’smooth sailing’ with SAP for any consultant, and the BO acquisition could create some choppy waves for some, and make it a little harder for junior-level BI folks to push ahead. But I see some promising shorelines ahead for the BI consultants who realize that this development is, more than anything, a recognition of the strategic value of their work.

As SAP shifts from a transactional system to a business process platform that leverages transactional data, BI is in a crucial product position. That strikes me as very good news for the BW/BI consultant.

Bottom line: SAP BI professionals have little reason to worry, but Business Objects experts would be wise to start cracking the SAP books sooner rather than later. Do you agree? Are there factors in play Reed and Hashmi are missing? We want to hear from you — please send your comments to mdanielsson@techtarget.com, where one random submitter will receive a free copy of “SAP System Landscape Optimization” courtesy of SAP Press.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

If you’re following the developments in the SMB (small and midsize business) space, you’ve probably heard about the latest Microsoft move. MS Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution is a new, fully Office-integrated suite aimed at the really small fry. Sage and Intuit are the primary targets for this particular release, and so far the release is limited to the Netherlands, but it’s another little step towards the SAP vs. Microsoft showdown we’ve talked about in the past.

SAP is betting the hard on the SMB market, but Microsoft certainly isn’t about to stand down. Indeed, Microsoft Business Solutions head Kirill Tatarinov recently told Reuters that he’s eager to meet SAP’s new Business ByDesign in the field.

“There are many organizations that may not use Dynamics just yet, but many are already using the infrastructure that Dynamics is built on,” Tatarinov said.

What makes this battle for the SMB space so interesting is the different strengths of the key players. Microsoft has a strong channel and beach heads everywhere, while SAP is (generally) technically solid. Oracle’s fierceness in and of itself goes a long way, and the smaller niche players have the advantage of specialization in their respective fields — which, in combination with their inherent nimbleness, may help keep the big bullies from stealing their lunch money. Here’s to an interesting 2008!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Now you can learn more about SOA from a big-picture perspective, in SOA Talk, the new blog at our sister site SearchSOA.com. While not SAP-specific, it will provide plenty of general SOA strategy, governance, infrastructure and data architecture information. Check it out today!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

The recent news of Oracle’s bid to acquire troubled enterprise infrastructure software company BEA took an interesting turn today. Despite Oracle offering $17 per share, some 25% over market price before the deal was announced, BEA has now responded to the Redwood Shores giant saying that’s nowhere near fair valuation. From BEA’s official response:

“…It is apparent to our Board […] that BEA is worth substantially more to Oracle, to others and, importantly, to our shareholders than the price indicated in your letter […] We believe that the absence of current financial information in the public markets limits investor visibility into our performance. We expect that this will be corrected in the near future.”

Furthermore, BEA is not about to get lured into any kind of shenanigans that might endanger its competitiveness.

“…As we have made clear to you in previous discussions, we are very sensitive to the fact that Oracle is a direct competitor of BEA. Therefore, the Board cannot consider any process which is long in duration, open-ended in nature, or would divulge competitively sensitive information which could materially harm our business and our shareholders’ interests.”

An interesting turn of events, indeed. It seems the BEA folks are quite confident, and the market is responding; as of this writing, BEA’s stock price is approaching $19 a share, a neat one-day bump of about 40%. Still, Goldman Sachs analysts Sarah Friar and Derek Bingham believe Oracle will be game for a price tag of $20 or more per share.

It’s an all-cash deal, so the question is: Will Oracle dig that deep into the coffers just to get BEA in the bag? And if they do, how will this impact SAP and other competitors? Better yet, will SAP, IBM, HP and other key players engage in a bidding war now that there’s blood in the water? Stay tuned as news editor Jon Franke digs deeper into this over the weekend for an in-depth analysis early next week.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

The SAP acquisition of Business Objects (BO) brings a mix bag of good and bad news to both SAP and non-SAP customers, according to Naeem Hashmi, Chief Research Officer at Information Frameworks. First the good news:

The BO acquisition brings a large BI market share to SAP.

Most importantly, BO will bring a good team of experienced BI professionals who are fluent in the business intelligence language spoken by small and midsize enterprises (SME) where SAP is heavily targeting its solutions.

BO will be highly valuable for enabling SAP customers in such SME segments to enjoy a powerful BI environment that users are already familiar with. BO will be very instrumental in meeting BI needs for SAP Business ByDesign initiative without much worrying about NetWeaver BI infrastructure support.

BO will bring a good proven reporting tool, Crystal Reports, back in SAP BI which used to be shipped with SAP BI in its earlier versions.

BO will also bring the ETL missing link. Behind all flashy user facing tools in BO, the most important component of any BI suite is the ETL engine. The Acta ETL engine, which Business Objects acquired a few years back, will be an excellent ETL engine to pull data from the core SAP Enterprise into customer data marts (BO universes, databases or even in core BW.)

Granted, Acta is a lightweight, but it’s a very sophisticated ETL engine originally designed for SAP R/3 while other ETL tools vendors were not. The Acta engine will also fill the ETL gap for non-SAP data sources under NetWeaver BI infrastructure as well.

That sounds pretty reassuring. So what’s the downside? Read the bad thing about SAP buying Business Objects for Naeem’s observations on the dark side of this landmark deal.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

In the first part of this guest column, veteran SAP expert Naeem Hashmi talked about the good things about SAP buying Business Objects. Unfortunately, there are some thorns to be found amidst the roses too, Hashmi said — and that applies to SAP users and non-users alike.

The bad news is, we’re now seeing a momentary confusion among SAP BI customers and consulting partners. We have many different products with different infrastructures, usage and life cycle management environments. Just a few month back SAP acquired OutlookSoft, a corporate performance suite, and before that we saw the Virsa acquisition

Full integration of Virsa and OutlookSoft within the NetWeaver platform is still years away. And now you need to think about bringing legacy Business Object universes in under the NetWeaver umbrella. Either that, or users have to continue using BO as a non-SAP BI front-end. That results in an explosion of data marts.

When talking with SAP customers at the TechEd last week, the common question on many attendee’s minds were that today SAP offers too many BI development frameworks, not only the composition environment but also the user-facing environments. With a streaming acquisition of BI products, each with its own composition and user-facing environment, it will be quite hard to create consistency in user-experience when dealing with so many competing BI user interfaces.

Consistency and reusability is at the heart of SOA: back-end services are used to share consistent content to develop consistent user experiences through consistent user-facing styles. With diverse front-ends, this dream of NetWeaver-powered custom services reusability will be hard to achieve.

On the ETL end, about 6 moths back SAP signed an OEM relationship with Informatica for its NetWeaver BI solution. While the Informatica OEM relationship is not fully materialized, now the Acta engine is popping up in the SAP world shadowing the Informatica footprint. Will SAP still continue Informatica OEM relationship?

Another piece of bad news for BO “by association” alone: From experience in advising executives for BI solutions, any time when I dealt with a client who has no SAP footprint in their IT landscape, the word ‘SAP’ alone is the end of discussion. So when BO is tagged as SAP BO, it will be a big booboo, end of discussion. It will be interesting to see how BO as a standalone SAP legal entity can remain hidden under the huge SAP umbrella. Truth is, once you’re in, you just can’t hide. Virsa is an example of this.

Ouch. Clearly, the Business Objects deal is a mixed bag. But in the end, how will it really impact regular SAP shops? Is the net sum a positive or a negative for real-life companies dabbling in BI? Read Hashmi’s concluding remarks for his final verdict on the acquisition.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

In the first two parts of his guest column, veteran SAP guru Naeem Hashmi discussed the good aspects and the bad aspects about SAP’s recently announced acquisition of Business Objects. So how does all this wash for real-life users? Should your regular, midsize SAP shop be giddy, concerned or indifferent? Here’s Hashmi’s concluding remarks:

In my opinion, the BO acquisition is good news for SAP customers. This is especially true for the small and midsize segment, which SAP needs to penetrate hard. I also see this move being helpful for some large enterprises as well , as it has potential to complement their BI needs.

As you read the previous parts, you will note that most of the bad news are related to short term issues. The main sticking points were positioning and integration. SAP need to simply bring in BO as part of one single BI umbrella – as SAP BI. Not product -specific BI solutions such as NetWeaver BI or SAP BW or OutlookSoft or Business Objects… Just SAP BI. And as products come and go, you don’t end up changing BI solutions and thus distracting or confusing customers.

A few people I spoke to at TechEd also raised concern that the SAP NetWeaver BI solution is in effect dead now… But remember, the BO-based BI solution still needs data from the SAP Enterprise back-end. You can’t draw fancy charts/graphs without real data.

As most of you probably know, about 60% of BI time is spent for data acquisition alone. SAP has done an excellent job in providing data acquisition schemes for its customers within its BI solution. Also note that the SAP BI solution is engineered to provide intelligence (analytics) within the process scope and not from outside-in, which traditional BI solutions do.

The problem with the current SAP BI solution is that initially, SAP consultants spoke of BI in terms of ‘transactional’ language instead of ‘business intelligence’ language that customers were familiar with. It was a great technical model, but its value was ‘lost in translation‘ to the BI users. Now the cross-pollination of BO and SAP will be great news for SAP customers and the BO presence will actually enhance present-day SAP BI — not end it.

Bottom line: Odds are it’ll be a bumpy ride in the short term, but for the long haul, this is good news. Do you agree with Hashmi’s assessment? Will SAP pull off the BO acquisition and use it to finally crack the small and midsize BI challenge, or is the risk of derailing the assimilation process too great?

Email us with your take on the matter for a chance to win one of three copies of SAP System Landscape Optimization, courtesy of SAP Press.

Matt Danielsson
Editor