Business Objects works… right? That seems to be the general consensus from its customers. Frank Dravis, back in 2005, wrote about categorizing data quality problems. In this blog he referenced what Professor Richard Wang, TDQM Co-Chair at MIT, calls the 15 dimensions of data quality problems (listed below).

Recently, DMreview.com reported that Business Objects sent “an apology to customers for issues related to poor service including delayed deliveries of the company’s technology.” When the technologies aren’t even available to its customers then these data quality dimensions are taken out of the equation… or maybe it adds one, “availability”; to be fair this is a problem and the business intelligence business is a business and customers are expected to receive what is promised to them.

After reading around a bit, it seems as though people thought the Business Object’s apology to its customers was a bit odd and unexpected but if we simplify the core of what is going on here, using a common metaphor as an example, it becomes clearer. Lets pretend you are a movie buff living in New York City. You have chosen the largest media provider available in Times Square as the place you always reserve your movies before they are released, specifically because they guarantee that you will get a copy. What happens when you show up to purchase that movie and the store doesn’t have it? You have an internal debate on whether or not to reserve movies from that particular store again while the manager gives you a formal apology.

In the end, unless I missed something, this boils down to a matter of credibility. Did this skew your view of Business Objects? Maybe. Maybe not. What I’m interested in now is figuring out how Business Objects ranks on the 15 dimensions of data quality. How would you rank Business Objects on the 15 points above?

Eric Samuels
Assistant Editor

This is the second SAPPHIRE in which SAP and ASUG will present together. For attendees, this means a wealth of sessions, networking opportunities, and demos in the same location, but at the possible cost of creating some scheduling complexities. How do you decide which of the hundreds of sessions to attend?

I asked that question to Cyndi Leamon, chief learning officer with ASUG, this morning, and she reminded attendees to make use of the automated scheduling features on the SAPPHIRE and ASUG registration sites. This feature allows you to pull up sessions based on your corporate role, the functionality or topics in which you are interested, or the community of which you’re a part. I also asked Cyndi to give our readers a heads-up on key ASUG sessions at SAPPHIRE and got the following tips:

1. There will be two pre-conference sessions devoted to Business Objects, the business intelligence vendor acquired by SAP. Attendees will have a chance to learn about the Business Objects roadmap, understand its role in enterprise performance management, and access working Business Objects software in dedicated kiosks.

2. There are also two pre-conference sessions on the subject of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA), which few people know anything about but which is transforming the architecture and infrastructure of enterprise applications. One session will be a basic information session (completing the in-conference SOA 101 session) and the other will be a boot camp for architects to understand SOA integration, value tips, and best practices.

3 . Check out Session 5604 to learn about the value proposition for upgrading to SAP. This is always a red-hot topic, and anyone even remotely interested in an upgrade should be at this session.

See you all at SAPPHIRE next week!

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP will delay general availability of its Business ByDesign Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, according to German news source Handelsblatt. Given that SAP wanted Business ByDesign to bring in $1 billion a year by 2010, the delay represents a significant setback in SAP’s attempt to win a chunk of the lucrative SaaS market.

ByDesign is already out on a trial basis, but it hasn’t picked up as much traction as expected. At Cebit, SAP revealed that ByDesign had 150 customers. By contrast, SaaS market leader Salesforce.com claims 41,000 customers.

An SAP developer speaking to Handelsblatt claimed (in German) that ByDesign was suffering from performance issues and bugs that would delay general availability until perhaps the end of 2009. That gives Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and other SaaS vendors another eighteen months to keep dominating a market that none of the majors (including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft) have been able to crack.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

With SAPPHIRE ten days away, this is a good time to list the top ten sessions–not by any objective quality, but by how I see them based on what’s hot

1 . Today’s Business Process Expert–What You Need to Know. This daylong event aggregates a whole posse of consultants, executives, and SAP users who will address what I consider the most overlooked topic in enterprise applications today: business process management (BPM). BPM is increasingly becoming a native part of SAP applications, so this could be a glimpse into the future of modeling, workflow, re-engineering, and continuous change, SAP style.

2. Workflow and BPM Open Forum. This session offers a drill-down into what some people consider the core of BPM. Thus, it complements session #1 above.

3. BMW MC: The Roadmap to a Successful ERP Upgrade. ERP upgrades are almost as difficult as ERP implementations. This session offers a firsthand look at an upgrade that went well, suggesting best practices to other enterprises thinking about upgrading.

4. Strategy and Challenges for Global Rollout of SAP Software. This is a bread-and-butter sessions for SAP prospects.

5. SAP and Business Objects: Understanding the New BI Platform in Detail. Business Intelligence isn’t an easy sell these days, but there’s a lot of value in BI if you get it right. This session will provide visibility into the Business Objects platform in a way that might convince potential BI adopters to get aboard.

6. Strategic IT: Getting the Most Value from Your IT Investment. Enterprises spend hundreds of millions of dollars on IT. This session brings together some heavy hitters from Pepsi, the U.S. Postal Services, and Harvard Business School to help enterprises get the most bang for their IT bucks.

7. RFID and Serialization Strategy and Road Map. If physical goods move through your supply chain, RFID should interest you. If you have SAP anywhere in your stack (not just as SCM), you’ll want to know how SAP plans to handle RFID, since RFID data can touch many SAP applications.

8. Leveraging SAP ERP to Drive Success for Midsize Manufacturers. There are hundreds of thousands of midsize global manufacturers who are behind their North American peers in terms of IT adoption. It’ll be interesting to learn SAP’s value proposition for this segment in more detail, because it might somehow inform SAP’s Asia-facing strategy in the years to come.

9. SAP for Utilities at CenterPoint Energy, Inc. Smart Grid is going to turn the utilities industry upside-down. Imagine being able to monitor your meter the same way you monitor your Vonage phone, and you get an idea of what’s waiting. We recently talked to Bob Frazier of CenterPoint recently, and he’s got a great story to tell about what’s going on in this space.

10. Security Open Forum: Security is at the top of CIO agendas year after year, and this session taps Halliburton, Coca-Cola, and The Home Depot to share risk management ideas and strategies with the community.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP’s Business Objects unit suffered a black eye recently. DMReview.com was forwarded a copy of an email from Business Objects to some of its customers that read, in part:

“As we look back the past several weeks, it is painfully obvious that our internal system issues have brought challenges and unwanted distractions to your ongoing operation of Business Objects software solutions…many customers have not been able to receive our technologies in a timely manner. You have our most sincere apology…”

The email was signed by Pascal Clement, SAP/Business Objects’ VP of Enterprise Information Management. After the email came out, Business Objects went into damage control mode with DMReview by issuing a statement to the effect that only a few (they didn’t say how many) Business Objects customers had been impacted. There was also no clarification on what had caused the service delivery problems.

Combined with the fact that “the Business Objects sales organization may have missed its Q1 targets by a wide margin in North America,” according to analyst Patrick Walravens of JMP Securities, the service failures are bad news for both SAP and Business Objects–especially when you consider how well Business Objects’ old rival, Cognos, seems to be doing at IBM after Big Blue snapped it up earlier this year. IBM’s software revenue is up $4.8 billion, or 14 percent, year-over-year, and IBM executives named Cognos as a big part of that success.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP has taken a couple of hits from financial analysts recently. J.P. Morgan’s Manoj Singla downgraded SAP from Overweight to Neutral, and Patrick Walravens of JMP Securities issued a research note in which he claims that “the Business Objects sales organization may have missed its Q1 targets by a wide margin in North America.” Given that most companies still don’t use Business Intelligence (the functionality that Business Objects supplies) properly, if at all, that would hardly be a surprise. BI has been slow to get going, and difficult for executives to utilize properly.

Meanwhile, Singla is more bothered by what he called “increasing macro-economic concerns” and “signs of a slowdown in technology spending.” In the past, even in tech’s dog years of 2000-2004, macro-economic trouble and IT spending slowdowns did not impact large enterprise applications providers, so it remains questionable whether the factors identified by Singla will bleed over into SAP’s business. A much more immediate concern is TomorrowNow, which continues to torment SAP by means of the lawsuit that Oracle has filed against it. Oracle plans to go after senior SAP executives as part of this lawsuit, which looks like dragging out for quite a while. Then there’s the $100 million lawsuit Waste Management has filed against SAP.

Combine all of that with hard competition from Oracle, macroeconomic trouble, and a very strong Euro, and it adds up to a tougher time than SAP has experience for some years.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

In an age of smart devices, energy consists of dull infrastructure: age-old meters, for one. As it turns out, the utilities industry wants to change all of that. The new industry vision, Smart Grid, will replace the old infrastructure with meters and communications devices that can broadcast outages, give residential users a daily, Web-based readout of their energy usage day by day, and radically simplify the way in which utility companies provision service.

SAP is part of the transformation. As enterprise applications provider of choice to many of the major utilities vendors, SAP is helping them change the infrastructure needed to deal with all the new data (for example, meters broadcasting usage statistics every fifteen minutes). As utilities reconfigure their systems and business processes, the participation of SAP and other vendors, including systems integrators and niche players in utilities data management, provides an example of how only vendors of a certain size can keep up with a big industry’s changes.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

There’s a new development afoot in the SAP-Oracle dustup over TomorrowNow–the filing of a joint Case Management Conference (CMC) Statement that stakes out SAP and Oracle’s positions in advance of the Case Management Conference that will take place on April 24, 2008, with Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton presiding.

The CMC Statement is notable for setting out Oracle’s case against Tomorrow now in a fair amount of detail. Here are excerpts from the most damning accusations:

“Defendants [SAP] have a dedicated bank of 20 “download servers” to accomplish the unauthorized taking and infringing conduct…”

“Defendants compiled a master download library of Oracle-based Software and Support Materials that exceeds five terabytes in size – so large that Defendants could not produce it for over six months…”

“Defendants have approximately 3,000 copies of Oracle software applications on their systems, each one of which may additionally have included within it illegally downloaded Software and Support Materials…”

“Virtually every one of the almost 200 TN employees had some involvement in TN’s illegal activity. Documents produced by Defendants suggest that SAP AG and SAP America employees and managers had involvement in or knowledge of TN’s infringing conduct.”

SAP won’t admit that any overt illegality took place, preferring to put the emphasis on what it considers Oracle’s misguided use of the legal process: “Oracle insists on overly broad, unnecessary discovery into what TN accessed as part of providing third party support; it should be compelled to explain how TN’s support of its former customers harmed Oracle, and to permit immediate discovery into that elusive claim.”

Whatever the case, the TomorrowNow acquisition continues to be a headache for SAP, which is unable to find a buyer for the company and has spent a lot of money on the Oracle lawsuit.

For more context, check out today’s SearchSAP story on the CMC.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

NetSuite, the on-demand applications provider, has released OneWorld, which pulls together ERP, CRM, e-commerce, and business intelligence into a hosted format. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson took some shots at SAP during the product’s launch, telling the U.K.’s IT Week that OneWorld is “far more robust a system than you get when you pay $100m.”

As it turns out, though, there’s some tension between this statement and what NetSuite says in its 10-K: “Until NetSuite, we believe there was no provider of an on-demand, integrated suite of business management applications that addresses [sic] the needs of SMBs in the comprehensive manner that Oracle and SAP address the similar needs of large enterprises.”

So, in its 10-K, NetSuite admits that SAP and Oracle do indeed address enterprise needs in a “comprehensive manner,” an admission that is directly contradicted by the Nelson quote. After all, if SAP and Oracle are indeed comprehensive business applications suites, how can NetSuite be “far more robust” than them? Logically, it doesn’t make sense.

Hyperbole is common in the B2B software market, but it seems excessive when a company’s own 10-K contradicts the CEO.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

163,000 applications for U.S. H-1b visas were filed this year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Most of these applicants will be disappointed, as the regular H-1b cap is 65,000. Those whose H-1b applications are approved can expect to begin hearing from from USCIS in June.

For the SAP market in particular, the high number of H-1b applicants suggests that the pool of consultants, developers, and other members of the SAP ecosystem is growing outside the U.S., and badly wants entry into this market. While the U.S. economy suffers from the mortgage fallout, high energy prices, and eroding consumer confidence, the rise in H-1b applications indicate that foreigners continue to prize economic opportunity in this country. Last year, by contrast, there were only 133,000 H-1b applications.

A serious question that has to be asked about the 30,000 new applicants is–where did they come from in only a year? H-1b holders typically apply to technical jobs that can require at least 5 to 7 years of operational experience. It’s a long curve. Thus, in a single year, one wouldn’t expect this many qualified new workers to have come online. A possible answer is that certification mills in India, and even less scrupulous companies who help their clients manufacture false experience in technologies such as SAP, have turned out tens of thousands of new H-1b aspirants who lack substantive experience or competence.

What’s the hard evidence for this possibility? Admittedly, it’s anecdotal. If you subscribe to any of the large SAP email groups, you’ll notice the high volume of messages from people whose ability in SAP (or Oracle, or PeopleSoft, for that matter) is quite limited, and who are actively looking for ways to fudge their credentials and experience. Some of these people have no idea of what to expect in actual SAP interviews, and ask more experienced workers on the message boards to help them bluff their way through.

Based on our talk with SAP Labs India, it seems likely that the most talented and experienced IT workers in India have already been snapped up by multinationals based in India, or absorbed into the U.S. and/or Europe during the IT workforce crisis that began before Y2K and ended a few years later. Therefore, the people who are not working in the field now — i.e., the H-1b applicants — are likely to be new graduates, employed in fields tangential to enterprise applications, or, frankly, less skilled than their employed counterparts. This population is a far cry from the highly skilled tech workforce that Bill Gates says is supposed to rescue America’s position in the global economy. It’s more likely to be represented by the person who wrote to an SAP email group this morning that he would like to “brush up” on SAP FI…despite being a Flash designer with no experience in either accounting or SAP.

SAP customers should find this kind of situation frightening, just as patients who learn that their prospective doctors are house painters who “brushed up” on surgery last week would be frightened. Unfortunately, in the wild world of tech, there is no strict system of governance to ensure that people have the skills they say they have. In an ideal world, the 163,000 2008 H-1b applicants would all conform to a minimum standard and truly add value to the global economy, but one wonders how many of them are in fact viable workers.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor