Veteran SAP career expert Jon Reed has fielded quite a few questions from ABAP developers concerned about SAP’s apparent focus on Java over ABAP. Indeed, things have had a distinct Java-flavor lately, which Reed discusses in depth in his most recent guest column, What SAP says about the future of ABAP.

As a follow-up, he asked Thomas Jung, who presented “ABAP Development: Update Your Skills to SAP NetWeaver 7.0” at TechEd Las Vegas this year, to take a look at the column and add any clarifications. Here is what Jung had to say:

Jon, nice article. I did see one thing I thought was interesting. You said, ‘But there’s no question that when it comes to designing new enterprise services, Java is the language of choice in most cases.’ You might want to ask someone at SAP what nearly all of Business Suite and Business by Design Enterprise Services are written in. You will find that the answer isn’t Java. But you make an excellent point in this article: does it really matter if the Enterprise Services themselves are written in Java or ABAP? No, not as long as the results are ‘open standards based.’

Jung went on to add:

Yes, to the outside world, it really doesn’t matter if it is ABAP or Java, since either way, the services are exposed via open standards. That is true. But at the same time, it is important to note that we continue to leverage the investment SAP, its partners and its customers have already made in the business logic written in ABAP.

Our eSOA strategy doesn’t mean that you have to discard that investment. Quite the opposite. You can continue to gain benefit from that investment while also extending it to new and open opportunities.

Perhaps the most important point Jung wanted to get across to us, and to the readers of this blog, is that the question of whether Enterprise Services are written in ABAP or Java is not the most key issue. Jung wants us to remember Vishal Sikka’s message that the underlying programming language is not as crucial as understanding how SAP is “wrapping” the code and exposing applications via Enterprise SOA.

So how do we summarize the question of whether ABAP is dead? We can start by saying that you can’t answer it completely in one blog entry. We’ll return to this topic frequently as more information comes to light.

But for now, we can safely say that ABAP is not going anywhere. It’s also becoming clear that whether you’re an SAP ABAP person or an SAP Java person, if you don’t make a commitment to understanding the latest generation of modeling tools (CE, Visual Composer, Aris for NetWeaver, etc.), and how they fit into the emerging Enterprise Architecture, you’re going to be left behind.

As of this writing, the final word on “is ABAP dead?” is not “yes” or “no.” The answer is that we’re asking the wrong question.

Jon Reed & Matt Danielsson

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

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

As mentioned in yesterday’s TechEd keynote article, SAP has now announced the availability of NetWeaver 7.1. Renee Boucher Ferguson on ZDNet summarized the key improvements in her article earlier today.

“[NetWeaver 7.1] brings the discussion around the integration and development platform full circle—back to business process orchestration, where it started when NetWeaver was announced in 2003,” Ferguson said. “There are three main pieces being added to the NetWeaver stack in version 7.1: Composition Environment, Enterprise Services Repository and NetWeaver Process Integration. By incorporating the three elements into NetWeaver, SAP […] hopes to lay the foundation for business process management in the world of SOA.”

Practically all the attendees at TechEd we talked to were upbeat about the announcement.

“The improvements are tremendous,” said Oliver Kaluscha, independent SAP consultant from Frankfurt, Germany. “I mostly work with Mobile technologies, so this is absolutely helpful to my business.”

Peter Thiele, senior consultant with IDS Scheer in Philadelphia, Penn., echoed the sentiment.

“This is going to put SAP technologically on par with other EAI leaders like WebMethods, Tibco and others,” Thiele said.

What’s next for NetWeaver? Surely, the SAP folks who created NetWeaver 7.1 aren’t spending their days playing Tetris, so what are they working on now? We asked Aiaz Kazi, VP of Solution Marketing at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. what to expect from NetWeaver 7.2.

For new features, Kazi was tight-lipped. “Our internal NetWeaver road map stretches 12-18 months into future,” he said. “The public road map is typically less than a year.” Today, Web 2.0 technologies like wikis are all the rage, he said. Tomorrow is papier mache — who’s to tell what’s going to be hot?

What he could say, however, was that we can rest assured CE will drive the front end. It’s what happened with NetWeaver 7.1, and that’s what will happen in the future, he said. Furthermore, the focus will remain on maintaining and improving stability, Kazi said. He largely agrees with Ferguson’s full circle-comment, referring to the CE/ESR/PI as the “holy trinity” on which the future rests, although there’s always room for improvement.

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

SAP A1S, the new on-demand ERP solution we’ve been hearing about for quite a while now, is something of a tease when it comes to actual specifics. We know a few basic facts, like that it’ll be for the 50-500 user crowd, feature a try-before-you-buy option, and general tidbits about how industry-specific configuration will be a snap. Beyond that, there really hasn’t been much on the news front beyond some hemming and hawing about whether it’ll cannibalize the existing Business One and All-in-One markets.

Frustrating as the secrecy is (especially in combination with SAP’s continuous pre-hype), there’s little doubt in my mind that A1S will indeed make a bit of a splash when it comes out in Q1 2008… Or whenever the final launch will be. SAP is betting big bucks on this one, and most analysts agree it better be the silver bullet SAP thinks it is if the company has a chance of hitting the 100,000 customers-by-2010 mark. The move to an on-demand model may seem strange for a company like SAP, but it’s in line with the general SOA push the company has been espousing over the past few years.

That’s why this latest article from Computer Business Review Online caught my eye. Says Angela Eager in her article:

With its new release, NetSuite is moving up in the market, taking it closer to the SMB ground covered by SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, through the addition of features designed to automate complex operations and make processes simpler for growing mid-sized companies.

In a nutshell, NetSuite, which registered for an initial public offering (IPO) today, is upping the ante with easier installation, multinational sales support and new BI functionality. Now, Ellison’s baby isn’t going to drive the SAP juggernaut into retreat anytime soon, but it does make the SMB space just a little more crowded.

We’ve written about the upcoming face off with Microsoft Dynamics before, and the ongoing war with Oracle is hardly news either. But what I want to hear is your take on the midsize market by this time next year. How do you see this playing out? Will SAP crush the midmarket with technical superiority, or will Microsoft sucker-punch the German giant with its many SMB beach heads? Will Oracle’s grand plans hit the big time?

Send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com by July 10 and you’ll be entered to win an SAP book bundle:

• Succeeding with SOA, by Paul Brown
• SAP Enterprise Portal: Technology and programming, by Arnd Goebel
• Inventory optimization with SAP, by Marc Hoppe

Good luck!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Most IT workers I talk to have trouble getting up to speed with Web 2.0. Isn’t it asking for trouble to start talking about Web 3.0 in that case? Apparently, SAP doesn’t seem to think so.

ZDNet’s Dan Farber reports a “dog and pony show” surrounding the opening of SAP’s new Palo Alto lab, where SAP execs predictably talked about stuff like the importance of collaboration, the upcoming SAP A1S ERP on-demand solution, and of course, Web 3.0. From Farber’s post:

“If you look to the services that we are defining with our enterprise SOA and things a bit beyond, we know that these type of enterprise services over time, in collaboration with many customers, associations and partners, a kind of standard can bring the Internet of business services,” Kagermann said. “We don’t have the semantics today that go beyond Web 2.0 and will allow software to to speak to each other.”

There’s the keyword: Semantics. The oft-cited example of Web 3.0 is a “smart” scheduling app that handles the eternal back-and-forth between meeting participants automatically. Problem is, beyond that, Web 3.0 is rather fuzzy. How can you look at a product and say: “This here piece o’ software is Web 2.0, while that app over there is Web 3.0″? More importantly, what does this concept really mean for SAP shops, and what practical benefits vs. costs are we looking at?

While not SAP-specific, David Siegel provides a pretty good explanation on his blog. Everything in the future will be smart, he says, not just scheduling apps but mundane stuff like chasing down the best flight (enter your preferences and let the computer run the two dozen searches on Orbitz). He also uses an example of a team of construction engineers working a lighting challenge to highlight the potential collaboration benefits of Web 3.0.

The key to getting there is enabling computers to interpret “human-readable” phrases rather make a loose guess based on just keywords. For a SAP shop, this could be a boon to areas like analytics and reporting, or bringing truly personalized CRM into the world. Other areas that could use a boost of “smarts” would be logistics, SCM, or pretty much any scenario where you need to tap into multiple heterogenous solutions.

That’s the benefit portion. Cost and maintenance remains largely an unknown at this point. Of course, time will tell how far these theoretical scenarios will play out in reality, but we’re going to dive deeper into this in the weeks ahead. Stand by for a comprehensive Web 3.0 for SAP overview by Eric Samuels!

Matt Danielsson
Editor

In a guest column on SearchSAP.com today, Jon Reed discussed many skills that will be important for SAP consultants in the future. As is sometimes the case, not all of Jon’s thoughts could fit into the piece. But, he had some interesting thoughts on industry specialization, so here’s a bonus piece of advice from Jon for SAP consultants going forward:

Hopping from industry to industry will be risky business. Up until this point, consultants with solid implementation skills could jump from industry to industry in search of the best project at the best rate. However, both SAP and its customers are emphasizing the importance of consultants who know a particular industry. I had one SAP product manager tell me that consultants without an industry focus would have a hard time in tomorrow’s SAP market.

SAP ERP 2005 ships with 25 different industry solutions — industry solutions no longer have separate and sometimes confusing release schedules. Consultants who know how to apply an industry’s “best practices” are going to be in demand, which also emphasizes the importance of overall business know-how as opposed to configuration skills.

So if customers are asking for more industry experience right now, why is it a future skill? Because as much as customers want this type of industry background, the SAP consulting market is hot enough that I’m not sure SAP hiring managers will always be able to hold out for industry-focused consultants. But in the future, consultants with a consistent industry focus are going to have a big edge and it may eventually become a non-negotiable requirement.

We’ll plan on running the second installment of Reed’s piece (”The present̶ tomorrow and the final chapter (”The past̶ on Friday.

Jon Franke
News Editor

By now everyone has been affected by at least one aspect of the advanced Internet technology dubbed ‘Web 2.0‘; it’s the technology that lends a personal touch to what would otherwise be cold information.

This video may help the people out there who are not so familiar with Web 2.0 appreciate this “transition” just a little more.

Person-to-person contact, a major theme in Web 2.0 and in this video, could potentially benefit SAP enterprise software through personalization and most of all comfort. SAP has waited before picking up on these trends until now because blogs and wikis that have the Ajax style functionality have proven their worth by the test of time.

During Kagermann’s keynote he mentioned something about failures in the past in regards to their applications. He goes on to talk about how SAP is supposedly going to slowly and accurately develop material in the future so that everything produced is a success. Of course this kind of talk could be interpreted as “I’m sorry, we’ll do better next time”, but this new adoption of communication truly seems to be a step in the right direction.

In his blog, Michael Cote writes, “I’m beginning to think that ‘Web 2.0′ is set to be the ‘SOA’ for [at least] this year and [possibly for] upcoming years”. Cote also points out that SAP has waited a long time to release this technology and when they launch these applications their users will be asking about what “web 4.0″ has to offer. I agree with Cote, there are new trends that will make their presence known, but to be fair SAP is utilizing the core features of the Web 2.0 revolution that have already proven their worth.

Even though SAP’s applications that utilize these Web 2.0 functions have received mixed reviews, one thing is clear: SAP is serious about Web 2.0.

Read more about how SAP plans to utilize Web 2.0 for the SOA.

Eric Samuels
Assistant Editor

The Web 2.0 video, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us was created by Dr. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

There was a lot of buzz about the upcoming NetWeaver 7.1 at Sapphire the other week. Releasing in Q3 this year, it’s positioned as the springboard for really getting into SOA in the real world. NetWeaver 7.1 is a major milestone for SAP that packs plenty of juice, with a full Enterprise Services Repository which enables users to dig into ES composite use and creation, as well as laying the groundwork for SAP’s business process initiative.

Simply put, SAP’s Enterprise SOA bandwagon is on the move. But at the same time, SAP’s A1S on-demand ERP solution was one of the other big stories of Sapphire. Given the luke-warm reception of SAP CRM on-demand last year, it may seem a bit puzzling why SAP would double down on both sides of the fence. That’s why it was interesting to read Brad Shimmin’s take on the SOA vs. SaaS debate.

Conflict entertains, he said, but the sensible thing is to use SOA as a foundation for SaaS.

“Using an Enterprise Service Bus, SOA solutions can transform disparate data formats, mediate different protocols, and orchestrate transactions. Imagine if an enterprise that employs SOA internally were also to use a SaaS application, say Salesforce.com. That enterprise could use its ESB to connect Salesforce.com to its ERP or CRM systems. Salesforce.com, of course, has been shooting for this goal since 2005. But the real bang won’t come until SaaS customers themselves maintain a SOA infrastructure internally.”

In other words, these concepts are hardly mutually exclusive. That’s certainly food for thought in light of SAP’s stated goal of chasing both rabbits simultaneously.

Matt Danielsson
Editor