The BASIS of SAP

Install SAP on Amazon Web Services #2 – the Installation

After my previous post, you either have your own Windows 64-bit AMI image, or access to the Public AMI I have created, called sap.nw70.win-64.db2. In this exercise, we will use this as the basis of a new, private, image that will:
* contain the appropriate installation data (including registery keys) for SAP NW7,
* be capable of online / offline backups, using SAP tools,
* provide a painless way of running 24×7.

Prerequisites

* EC2 and S3 Accounts with Amazon,
* access to a Solution Manager system (for the installation key),
* access to an OSS ID with download authorisation.

Architechture

Once we terminate an Amazon instance, we lose all changes to it. Saving our database and configuration changes by bundling the changed system into a new AMI will take a non trivial amount of time; Certainly enough to prevent it being run 24×7. Additionally we will lose lots of usefull ABAP and JAVA stack logs unless we bundle the running instance every time we shut it down.

Just as well there’s an alternative, called Elastic Block Storage. This allows you to create data volumes and mount them on your image. They are persistent, and more importantly, can be backed up by snapshots, from the AWS Management Console.

So that leads to an architechture (or rather, disk layout) as follows:

• Drive C: AMI instance, boot disk
• Drive D: AMI instance, ephemeral disk (data lost whenever instance shuts down)
• …
• Drive H: AMI instance, ephemeral disk (data lost whenever instance shuts down)
• Drive W: Persistent Disk, for storing disk-to disk backups DBMS and / or logs
• Drive X: Persistent Disk, for SAP and DB2 Intallation
• Drive Y: Persistent Disk, for DB2 logs
• Drive Z: Persistent Disk, for storing installation files

Creating EBS (Persistent) Volumes

To create EBS Volumes, go to the EBS Volumes section of the Amazon Management Console. The major issue with creating volumes is that you can only attach / mount an EBS volume on an instance that is running in the same Availability Zone. This does mean that all your volumes must be in the same Availability Zone, if they are to be attached to the same instance.

I’ve created four volumes, corresponding to the Drive Letteres I gave in the Architechture section above.

• Drive W: vol-a82bc7c1, for storing disk-to disk backups DBMS and / or logs
• Drive X: vol-3f658956, for SAP and DB2 Intallation
• Drive Y: vol-4451bc2d, for DB2 logs
• Drive Z: vol-fc2bcb95, for storing installation files

Note that these are empty, unformatted, unmounted, unattached volumes (at the moment…).

Attaching EBS Volumes to our Instance

To attach the volumes to an instance, we need to have an instance running. Start up an instance of your image or of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

Note that I am creating an x.large instance in the availability zone US-east-1b. I need the x.large instance to provide enough RAM and Swap Space for an IDES ECC6 system, and I’m starting it in the US-east-1b availability zone because thats where I located my volumes (no particular reason).

Once the instance is running, we can attach our volumes via the Attach Volume Button.

The result is that our volumes are now “physically” attached to our instance. Again, these are empty unformatted unmounted volumes.

Now we need to logon to this instance. If you are running an instance of sap.nw70.win-64.db2, you can logon as user sapinstall, password sap123. Use the Remote Desktop Connection, and specify the public dns name from your instance.

You assign a name to a volume when you are formatting it. You do this by running the Computer Management (if you’re running an instance of sap.nw70.win-64.db2, this should be on the Desktop of user sapinstall) and formatting and naming the volumes. Make the names distinctive, and related to their purpose, for example sw_repository.

Now use the C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Ec2ConfigSetup\Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe program and the Drive Mapping tab to control which volume gets mounted to which drive letter. This is important, because we want to make sure that our sap_install, db2_logs, and backups volumes are always mounted on the same drives. Once the current image is bundled and registered, any instance launched from the new AMI will contain the setting we have configured in Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe.

Note the relationship between the volumes and Drive letters in the image below compared to the description of each volume given in the Architecture description above.

System Specific Configuration

Change the hostname (or in Windows terms, the Computer Name) to one of your choosing (Start –> Control Panel — System –> Computer Name –> Change). Run Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe. and make sure the Set Computer Name flag and the Sysprep flag on the Syprep tab are disabled – They should already be disabled, if you are using a copy of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

Check the swap space (Start –> Control Panel — System –> Advanced –> Performance Settings — Advanced, Virtual memory). Again, this should already be correctly set if you are using a copy of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

Edit the hosts file in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to include your Computer Name as a valid host name, for internal SAP and DBMS connectivity.

Do not forget to change the password of the sapinstall user. Otherwise, anyone who reads this will know the password.

Finally, bundle the instance using the AWS Management Console and register the resulting image under your own image name. The purpose here is to save the customisation you have done if you have a problem with the SAP installation. As part of the process of bundling, the instance is shut down and restarted.

You do need to have an S3 Bucket (or directory) to store the Image in.
However, you can store multiple images in the same bucket, by varying the Amzon S3 Key Name.

For future reference, if you restart the instance yourself, using Start –> Shutdown and specifying Restart, you don’t loose any information or configuration from the C drive as you would if you terminated it from the AWS Management Console. This is because the later removes the underlying resources, while using Start –> Shutdown –> Restart doesn’t release the underlying resources.

Security and Firewalls

EC2 provides its own set of firewall rules called Security Groups. The defaults values are, essentially, just enough to get you access to the server itself.

Since SAP communicates via TCP/IP, we need to make sure that our instance(s) can be accessed via the ports used by SAP for its various services. This means we need to add the ABAP and Java ports for both our instance and the diagnostic instance.

Remember that the Windows Server underlying your new SAP system is on the Internet, and is accessible (by Design !!) from anywhere else on the internet, so only open the bare minimum of ports.

Installation

Download the appropriate files from http://service.sap.com/swdc (you’ll need an S number with download authorisation), extract / expand them and store the results on the Z drive. I stored the download files under Z:\NW70SR3 and expaneded them into their own folders on the Z drive.

Make sure you read the appropriate OSS notes. For the ECC6 IDES, the important ones are:
0799639 – General IDES related
0956921 – NW7 ECC6 SR3 IDES related
1244548 – NW7 ECC6 SR3 IDES related
and
1126127 – DB6: Deferred Table Creation and Row Compression

Otherwise, the install follows the standard process, as detailed in the appropriate installation guide (in my case, the NW7.0 SR3 ABAP+JAVA / Windows/ DB2). The two exceptions are:
* Specify that the SAP and DBMS Installations go on an EBS volume (i.e drive X)
* in my case, specify that the DB2 logs go on an EBS volume (i.e. drive Y)

The full IDES install took around 30 hours run time (think of it as $20 or so well spent) from when I started sapinst (that time did include checking and amending my previous implementation notes). The majority of the time is spent loading about 150GB data into the DB2 database. However, once sapinst had accepted the Solution Manager Key, you can disconnect RDP and leave the install running.

Saving your image

Once the installation is complete, you’ll want to back it up before you go any further. Using the SAP MMC, shut down SAP (or logon to Windows as the SAPService<sid> user and shut down SAP).

Use the AWS Management Console to bundle your running instance.

Once it is bundled, register the bundle as an instance.

You can share this with anyone with an EC2 account, by using Permissions to mark it Public, or you can share with individuals if you know their EC2 Account number. Note – Bundling a windows instance restarts the instance.

Basically, the image consists of whats on the C Drive, so backing up your EBS Volumes requires you to use the AWS Management Console to save snapshots of them. The EBS volumes are stored and charged for at the Amazon S3 rates. Just like EC2, however, you are only charged fo what you use. This means that if you define a 500GB volume, write a 1 GB file to it and create 4 snapshots of the volume, you will charged for 5GB of storage; 1GB data on the volume, plus 4 lots of 1GB of snapshot. backup.

When you’re finished with the instance, shut down SAP and don’t forget to terminate tthe instance via the AWS Management Console (otherwise you’ll be charged for it !!).

Running your SAPSystem

Start an instance of your image and attach the EBS volumes to the running instance. The work of of assigning drive letters, in the correct order, to each volume is controlled by our configuration work earlier in Attaching EBS Volumes to our Instance. One of the issues currently outstanding is that thess will actually get mounted on subsequent restarts of this instance (which we perform below).

Logon to the instance and update / verify the Swap Space sttings via Start –> Control Panel — System –> Advanced –> Performance Settings — Advanced, Virtual memory.

Regardless of the previous paragraph, restart the image using Start –> Shutdown -> Restart. With all Drives correctly assigned, and sufficient Swap Space assigned the DB2 and SAP Services for SAP MMC will start. Go into SAP MMC and start your SAP instance. Once SAP is running, you can disconnect from the instance.

Accessing your SAP System

Assuming you have opened the correct ports in the Security Group specified for this instance, you can now put the appropriate values into your SAP GUI …..

…..and access the ABAP Engine.

Again assuming you have opened the correct ports in the Security Group specified for this instance, you can go into the SMICM transaction and enable a simple service, then access it via a browser or web service.

Whats next ?

You now have a running SAP system. However

• No DBA processing, i.e. no DB13 jobs, no backing up of logfiles etc has
  been implemented, so once you’ve tested connectivity, stop the SAP and
  DBMS systems and take snapshots of your SAP & Database volume.
• The SAP*, DDIC and IDADMIN passowrds are well known (or easily determined). Change them
• No post implementation work (i.e. SGEN) has been done,

The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate how quickly you can run up a demonstration, training or testing system. Depending on how many resources you want to pay for (CPUs and memory), this can be quicker or slower.

However, it has been my experience, based on several green fields implementations, individual system implementations and upgrades, and feedback from others, that building an appropriate server – whether physical or virtual – can take up to 2 weeks. Using the approach detailed here, services such as provided by the Amazon EC2 service reduce this to the 45 minutes it takes to configure and bundle a standard public instance.

One of the obvious issues is that it is well and good using predefined data, which you can download, in zipped form, from OSS (such as the IDES data I used in this example). What about copying ‘real’ data fron an existing SAP system, especially if we’re talking TerraBytes ?

I’ll discuss this, the bandwidth of a portable hard disk and more of the Amazon Web Services features that are particularly useful for SAP in my next post.

Install SAP on Amazon Web Services #1 – The Environment

UPDATE: I have tidied this up a bit, to make some things clearer and to include the name of an AWS Public Image that can be used as the source for the subsequent step.

In this post, I describe how I setup a windows environment to install SAP ABAP and Java stacks, using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store persistent data.  I needed to:
* install and modify an appropriate Windows 2003 Server environment,
* save this environment for future use

In a subsequent post, I will describe the installation of an IDES system running NW7 and DB2.  The three major challenges were
* setting up persistent storage of the NW and DB2 installation,
* suitable for using standard SAP and AWS functionality to support sustained (i.e. 24×7) operation of the SAP system
* and allowing you to stop and start the SAP system and / or server without losss of persistent data.

The result is a fast and cheap way of running up multiple systems, with the following features:

* You are only charged running costs for those systems that are running
* Low running costs (at the time of writing, $US 50 cents an hour)
* Low storage costs ($US 15 cents / GB / month for your 50TB)
* No more waiting for hardware – you can start implementation right now
* Systems (i.e. extra application servers) can be implemented, but not running

 

What did I know I would need ?

After reading the NW 70 SR3 installation Guide for Windows / DB2, I knew the following:
* I needed a 64 bit Windows Server with authentication services,
* I needed a reasonable amount of RAM, plus a decent swap space,
* I needed JAVA 1.4.

After reading the AWS EC2 documentation, I also knew that it was not practical to keep any volatile datasets (i.e. DB2 itself, DB2 logs, SAP process logs, etc) as part of the server, and that I would need to use the Amazon EBS servcie for persistent storage.

 

Signing up for Amazon EC2 and S3

An excellent account of how to setup a Windows Server image, and the principles behind this, can be found at Dave Winer’s EC2 for Poets. It also gives a good overview of how to sign up for both EC2 and S3 and the issues around persistent data.

 

Creating the base Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Logon to the AWS Management Console and select the Amazon EC2 tab.

Select the Launch Instance button…

.. then find and select the Basic 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Authentication Services image.

 Once the server shows up as running, logon using the techniques described in Dave Winer’s EC2 for Poets.  One of the first things I did was to create a sapinstall user.  This allows me to logon (via RDP) as user sapinstall / password without having to muck around with the keypairs. 

 

Changes to standard AWS Windows 2003 64-bit Image

There were five issues that needed to be dealt with.

First I had to disable the Windows Attachment Manager (for non-windows people, this is a security setting that Windows uses to stop you writing dangerous file types to your disk) before Internet Explorer would let me save files.  See the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 883260 for a rundown on how it works.  The quickest way to disable it is to uninstall the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. To do this, click Add or remove programs in Control Panel, click Add/Remove Windows Components, and then click to clear the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration check box.

2) Both SAP and DB/2 (my target DBMS) require that the host name of the server its installed and running on remains the same.  However, the default action every time you restart an AWS image is to have the host name set to IP-xxxxxx where xxxxxx represents the internal (to Amazon) host name the server is running on.

While you can perform arcane scripting to fix the host name, Amazon provide a tool, bundled within every AWS windows instance, that will ensure the hostname remains set to what ever you set in the System –&gt; properties screen.   The tool is C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Ec2ConfigSetup\Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe

 

3) I wanted to make sure I had enough swap spacxe to run my SAP system.  The base instance we are using gives us 15GB of memory, but, especially if we want to install multiple JAVA engines, this may not be enough.  I allocated another 1500MB on each of two of the ephemeral disks.

4) My initial installation is going to be an NetWeaver 7 ECC6 system. This means we need to download and install java 1.4 from Sun’s Sekrit Squirrell place for old releases.  Don’t forget to setup the Environment variables (JAVA_HOME and PATH) correctly. 

5) The last change was to incorporate a Dynamic DNS Update tool.  This is used to pass the IP address of the server we are “running on” to a service that will then set a fixed Domain name to specify the same DNS name to users and tools whenever I ran my instance.  I use dyndns org.  You can register a limited number of domain names for free, and they provide a tool (DynDNS Updater) that allows you to register your IP address against one or more of your Domain names.

 

Save your Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Now you have an instance you can use to install and run SAP on.  However, we need to make sure that all our changes are not lost.  This utdown means you need to “bundle” your running system into a standalone Amazon Machine Image.  Go to the Amazoin EC2 tab of the Amazon Management Console, select Instances, then select the instance you want bundled.  Right click on More Actions and select Bundle Windows AMI.

This generates a popup screen.  Fill out the appropriate details and clcik bundle. The Bundle Name refers to the S3 folder that will hold the AMI.  This must already exist.  The Key Name is appended to the name of manifest.xml filre that contains the S3 layout and location of your image.

 Once you click bundle your request is confirmed.

.

You can follow the progresss of the bundling by examining the Bundle Tasks screen.  There are three steps that bundling Windows instances needs to follow- The instance must shutdown, the Amazon bundling process must occur, and the resulting data must be stored.

Once the image has been bundled and stored, you must register the bundle as an Amazon machine Image.

 

An alternative to repeating all the work shown above is to grab a copy of the Public AMI I have created, called sap.nw70.win-64.db2.  You will need to change the hostname (as descibed above), implement your own DynDNS org domain name  and bundle and register the changed image.

Either way, you now have your own mildly customised image copy of a Windows 2003 Server, running on the  Amazon Web Services cloud.  This image is ready for installation of a non-trivial SAP system, such as the NW7 ECC6 IDES system.  

In the next post, I will describe how I used the sap.nw70.win-64.db2 image to install the Windows DB2 IDES for ECC6 system.

How To Create a Customised SAP Menu

You can provide ABAP users with a modified version of the standard SAP main menu without affecting the original SAP area menu S000.

For example, say you have created a transaction code called ( z123 – My Own Report ) and you want to insert it under Administration.  The specific user will be able to access My Own Report by clicking Administration -> My Own Report.

Steps :-

• Use Transaction SE43 – Area Menu
• Click the copy button.  Copy from S000 to ZMGE
• After copying, click Change (area menu ZMGE)
• Double click on Administration and add in your transaction code in the AreaMenu.
• Remember to Activate the new menu !!!.
• Goto Transaction SU01 – Maintain users
• Type in the user name and click the Defaults button
• Type in the new area menu (ZMGE) in the Start Menu field and Save
• The user will be able to see the additional transaction on their next logon.

Reporting Tree Integration

Prior to release 4.6A, only transactions could be put in to Area Menus. From 4.6A onwards, you can also put all the types of reports which are in reporting trees, in Area Menus. The system automatically assigns a transaction code to call the report from the menu. Please note that if you have already put the report in another Area Menu, no new transaction code is generated; You must use the unique transaction code already assigned.

The old Reporting trees could only be displayed, not maintained. To modify the contents of reporting trees, you had to convert them with a migration transaction (RTTREE_MIGRATION). You could then modify the contents with the Area Menu maintenance transaction.

Advantages of the new Area Menus

The new data structure has the following advantages:

* Delinking by reference technique
You can construct a menu from submenus which are maintained separately in different systems.
* Less restrictions
The new area menus have no nesting level limit like CUA menus. The allowed length of menu texts has increased to 75 characters.

Free Articles from ERPtips (formerly SAPtips)

ERPtips (formerly known as SAPtips)is offering free access to a subset of their articles as they are published.

Sign up to their bimonthly Free ERPtips Express Newsletters and get freshly-published articles and white papers, handy tips, best practices and notifications of upcoming events delivered to your inbox, six times a year with no subscription fee.

The following articles available through 1 May;

• MM: Zero Superfluous Inventories with the Strategic Analytic Toolkit
• Financials: Collections Management FSCMCOL
• Human Resources: Understanding Retroactivity in SAP HR and Payroll
• Basis: SAP Role Creation: Guidelines for Planning and Implementation

http://www.ERPtips.com/Express.asp. A new set of four SAP articles will be posted on Tuesday, May 5th

(hat tip to @JonERP)

Copying SCM / APO Livecache data for SCM 4.0 or higher

OSS Notes: – these will require a valid OSS ID
Note 632357 – Backing up Livecache data for SCM 4.0 or higher
Note 541644 – Backing up the data from the Livecache for APO 3.X

Background:
One of the issues when copying SAP systems that have external data, whether it’s for regression testing or any other purpose, is making sure that the external data is consistent with the SAP data.

APO / SCM systems are one such example, where most data is stored in the SAP database (supported by an Oracle, DB2, SQL Server etc database), and some is stored in a Livecache database, suppoorted a MAxDB database.

The SAP Livecache technology is an enhancement of the MaxDB database system that was developed to manage complex objects (e.g. in logistical solutions such as SAP SCM/APO). In these systems, large volumes of data must be permanently available and modifiable. One of the features is that in an optimally configured SAP Livecache database instance, all data which needs to be accessible is located in the main memory.

As of SAP SCM 4.0, the /SAPAPO/OM_LC_DOWNLOAD_UPLOAD program can be used to extract all transaction data (orders and stocks) from the APO applications (SNP, DP, PP/DS, CTM, ATP, TP/VS, and so on) in the Livecache and store it in the SAP database.

This ensures, so long as no updates occur in either source database, until the database copy is complete, that the SAP and Livecache databases can be consistently copied to another system. Once the SAP database is reloaded in the target system, the /SAPAPO/OM_LC_DOWNLOAD_UPLOAD program is used to reload the Livecache data into the target Livecache database.



Process:
When you run the /SAPAPO/OM_LC_DOWNLOAD_UPLOAD program (via transaction SE38), you will see that the program is divided into four sections:
Section A: Preliminary tasks (prior to the download)
Section B: Download (storing the transaction data in the APO database)

Section C: Upload (copying the master data and transaction data from the APO database to the liveCache)
Section D: Postprocessing tasks (perform these sometime after the upload)




Each radio button takes you to the appropriate transaction to execute the required task. Perform them in order, from A.1 to B.7
Once you have reached step B7 perform your SAP database backup, and build your target system.



Once SAP is running on the target system, and before commencing the reload of the Livecache databse from the SAP database, you need to ensure that the target SAP system is pointing to the target Livecache system. Use transaction LC10 to connect the SAP and LiveCache databases correctly.

Note that there are multiple connections to modify, so make sure you do this for each connection.

Once this is completed, you can perform steps C.1 to 13



Issues:
1) You need to have release SCM / APO 4.0 or higher to use this program. If you use APO 3.X, see OSS Note 541644.
2) If you intend to upgrade (for example, SCM 4.0 to SCM 5.0) at the same time, then you must not use the /SAPAPO/OM_LC_DOWNLOAD_UPLOAD program. Instead, folow the upgrade guide and use the appropriate upgrade program.
3) If you’re using the Rapid Planning Matrix application, only the status matrix is extracted because all other data can be regenerated using requirements planning (the alternative, of saving all of the RPM data, would take much longer).

Maintaining Customisation in a Productive System

It’s a common problem, and most Functional SAP people know how to deal with it, but just in case…. My customer wanted to modify table V77RCF_USR_SGRP (User Support Group in E-Recruitment) in a production system. SAP does provide this functionality for a subset of customisation tables, but occassionally (especially in newer releases) some get left out. You may also have a custom development that requires this functionality on an extra table.

OSS Note 77430 – Customizing: Current settings
OSS Note 356483 – Customizing: Current settings in the test system

As of Release 4.6 you can maintain this setting from directly within the IMG. Position the cursor on the corresponding IMG activity and select the menu options “Edit -> Display IMG activity”. On the following screen, select the tab page “Maint.objects”. There you can see a list of the assigned Customizing objects. By double-clicking on the corresponding line, you navigate to the Customizing object and can directly set the flag ‘Current settings’ there.

As an alternative you can also call Transaction SOBJ., to directly access the Customizing object, to set the flag directly.

The SAP code behind this assumes that the Client Role ( transaction SCC4 ) of the client you are working in is set to Production. For other Non Modifiable systems (where Client Role is Test, Demo, etc), you need to deactivate the transport connection for that particular object (if possible) as well.

As of Basis Release 4.6, position the cursor on the corresponding IMG activity and choose Edit -> Display IMG activity. On the following screen, select Maint. (Before Basis Release 4.6, position the cursor on the corresponding IMG activity, and choose Goto -> Document attributes -> Display.)

On the following screen, choose Objects in the area Technical attributes. In both cases the system displays a list of the assigned Customizing objects. The types “V” (View) and “S” (Table (with text table)) stand for view maintenance transactions, while type “C” stands for a view cluster transaction.

For type “V” and “S” objects, the transport connection for the view or table can be deactivated as follows:

Call transaction SE54

Enter the Customizing object (view or table)

Select “Generated objects”

Choose “Create/change”

Select “no, or user, recording routine” in the bottom part of the
screen

Save the change

For type “C” objects, you can deactivate the transport link by turning it off for all related views or tables. Follow the steps below:

Call transaction SOBJ

elect “Display”

Select “Position”

In the field “Object”, enter the Customizing object (View cluster) and the value “C” into the type field.

Select the Customizing object and select “Piece list” in the
navigation

All views or tables contained in the view cluster are displayed.

Deactivate the transport link for these views or tables as described above.

Now the Customizing object is no longer part of the transport connection and so is excluded from the changeability check.

Note:
Perform these changes in you development / customisation system, and transport through to production.
The change is active in all clients of the system.
You can also change the Customizing object in a locked client (independent of the client role).
Once the above steps are done, it is no longer possible to manually transport entries of the view or table.

Impact of Satyam Fraud on outsourcing

Dennnis Howlett has covered the implications for PWC (the auditor) in the Satyam fraud . However, I have included his list of links if you want a quick background :

• Satyam Shares Plunge on Scandal
• Satyam chairman resigns amid accounting scandal
• Computer Head Admits to Faking Profits
• Fraud revelations hit Indian computer company
• Satyam accounting scandal could be ‘India’s Enron’
• Fraud revelations hit Indian computer giant

However, what are the implications for the Indian outsourcing industry, SAP in particular. Satyam, like all other outsourcing companies, lives and dies by the quality of its people. Right, now those people are thinking they should move on, before they’re laid off. Satyam’s customers know this and will be getting nervous. If they’re smart, and the logistics make sense, they may even be looking to hire the Satyam people direct.

From Satyam’s perspective, this makes an already difficult position almost untenable. Some people consider that Satyam is unsaleable in its current condition. If it does get sold, expect them to be snapped up at fire sale prices.

More immeadiately, what contingency plans do existing Satyam customers have in place ? Is this an opportunity, in the US and Europe at least, for more familiar names to claw back some business ? IBM, Accenture and CSC all have the cost saving benefits of a global workforce, but also have the perceived benefit of a ‘local’ name.

But what does this mean for the Indian outsourcing industry in general ? My experience is that, even before this episode, customers need far better levels of oversight over both their vendors financial robustness, and the processes governing work quality.

Questions will be asked about the ability of the ultimate provider of services to deliver according to SLAs (both financial and quality), and what is being done by the outsourcer and / or the ultimate provider to enforce financial and QA criteria, given the attention now being focused on this area.

As India’s Enron unfolds, more questions will arise.

How do you persuade the Business that an Upgrade is necessary ?

Sales are tanking, money is tight, the company is cutting costs everywhere. And you want them to fund your SAP upgrade project ? Given that only about one-third of SAP customers have upgraded to ECC/ERP 6.0, and most of these have opted to do only technical upgrades in order to save time and money, you’re not alone.

The challenge you have is that there’s no business payback for doing a technical upgrade – the only thing you end up doing is staying on support. Going to the board with this as your major justification will get your submission (and maybe you !!) thrown out.

This means you need to be creative in seeking out the payback. Not even the pure techos like to use staying on support as the main justification for an upgrade. So you need other business drivers for SAP upgrades, including the benefits of new business and technical functionality and creating a foundation for other business initiatives.

However, there are some support-driven reasons to upgrade that could pay off. One of the drivers is mitigating the risk of receiving slower maintenance responses from SAP.

Also, with a technical upgrade, you can leverage your existing existing resources to enable the upgrade, such as using the opportunity to replace hardware. For instance, switching to Windows operating system from Unix may substantially lower costs, or alternatively, changing application servers to energy (i.e. cost) saving Linux blade-type servers.

Using tools like those provided by HCL, Intellicorp or Panaya can give insight into how the current, live production system and older systems are being used. This will also identify how end users are using the system, by looking at how the standard and customized parts of the system are being used. This raises the possibility of removing some of those customized areas, and containing costs by focusing testing and support on the modules and components being used.

But the biggest driver for an upgrade is another factor (and perhaps one more reason to complete the SAP technical ERP upgrade): not having to do any more of them.

Being on the NetWeaver platform and ERP 6.0 will allow companies to adopt SAP enhancement packages . These are a mature (first released in 2006) method of applying new functionality to individula modules, and, eventually, updates to the core platform. SAP has said many times this means the end of the traditional upgrade.

jonerp.com SAP Technical and Career site

Just a quick post to highlight Jon Reed’s SAP technical and career related site

One useful page is the “hot skills” section which contains a list of hot SAP technical skills (although he does agree that “hot” is a bit of a stretch in the current economy). Jon admits to not being a huge fan of lists, but they can drive discussion. His lists (such as his SAP Technical Skills list), especially, I find to be thoughtfully selected, and his comments on why this or that item makes the list add value to that.

An earlier post of mine on certification linked to some podcasts and posts on SearchSAP.com I’ve since found out that most of this was organised and collated by Jon, as he has worked as their resident SAP career expert. Since I found this content so usefull, I’d like to point you to his own SAP training and certification podcast page. It covers (amongst other things) online training and the range of SAP training options. An example of his content, in this case on SAP certification:

One good exercise is to review current SAP jobs on sites like SearchSAP.com and see what kinds of skills are required. See how often certification is listed as required or preferred, and what other skills are needed. This will not only give you a better idea of what skills are truly hot, it will also help you to see how important certification really is (or isn’t). I think you’ll be surprised at how few SAP jobs actually require certification in order to apply.

Simple, sensible, straightforward advice, but…. its the only place I’ve seen it said.

5 SAP Strategies that architects and executives must understand

Most companies that use SAP do so because they have bought into the idea of deploying a broad, single vendor business suite. For large organizations, this is typically a multiyear, multimillion-dollar effort to transform the business. It can be a career maker or breaker, and most certainly it can make or break the company itself, but often we find the executives involved don’t pay much attention what SAP is doing after the contract is signed

One issue is that their ‘event horizon’ is just not big enough. Afterall, the blogosphere is full of article on Ruby and salesforce, and there’s new stuff to learn every day. Additionally, the SAP ecosystem is massive. For example, in 2007, Satyam alone had nearly 5,000 consultants and developers working for its SAP practice, and it had plans to grow its ERP practices by 50 percent during the next few years. At that time, the average deal size of a SAP implementation at Satyam was about $1.6 million, just on professional services.

Five SAP Strategies to Know

1. Product Release Strategy.Traditionally, SAP released products and made major changes to the underlying functionality on a (roughly) five-year schedule. So twice a decade, SAP’s customer base faced a tough decision. They could ignore the product improvements that their maintenance fees had helped to fund, or they could invest a significant amount of time and money in an upgrade project, which was usually disruptive, expensive and introduced a large amount of change for the user base. It was quite common for companies to delay or defer releases. However, the risks associated with lack of support meant that most organizations wouldn’t go longer than eight to 10 years between upgrades.” (For more on SAP’s maintenance fees, see “SAP Raises Software Maintenance Fees for New Customers” and “The Man Behind ‘Half Off’ Third-Party Software Maintenance.”)

In late 2005, SAP finally started to fix this release gap with the shipment of the Netweaver Products, including ERP 6.0. Instead of having to implement five years of enhancements and improvements in one massive project, SAP now allows you to implement a continuous innovation strategy. The major applications in SAP ERP and the SAP Business Suite are now upgraded through enhancement packages issued every six to 12 months. These enhancement packages are provided at no cost to customers on maintenance, and deployment is optional. Each enhancement package includes new and improved functionality across a variety of product and industry applications.

What this means for SAP customers is that they can upgrade their systems gradually without the kind of massively expensive and disruptive projects that have traditionally characterized SAP upgrades. For example, ERP 6.0 has shipped three enhancement packages already. SAP executives have realized that organisations with global deployments, multi-terabyte databases, and tens of thousands of users simply cannot afford to do monolithic upgrades anymore.

2. Growth Strategy.SAP has a business strategy that is fundamentally focused on organic revenue growth. As an organisation, they have always been confident about their ability to develop new products and improve existing ones. More recently, though, the company has moved to both expand its product offerings to its customers with acquisitions and mergers, as well as move into new markets with products like Duet. (See “SAP Pays Partners, Goes with Gusto for SMB Customers” for more on SAP’s SMB strategy.)

However, SAP derives most of its revenue from its installed customer base. In short, their objective is to ensure that customers never stop buying licenses, maintenance, and services. This means SAP is constantly working to upsell existing ERP customers into the full Business Suite, and it has invested heavily in products aimed at information workers who don’t necessarily use transactional applications.” (For more on software licensing, see “Software Licensing and Pricing Is Still Too Complex and Costly.”)

Therefore, customers should expect their SAP sales reps to be pitching: self-service applications, financial and business performance management, Microsoft Office integration, and much of the ‘Business Objects’ portfolio of reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.

SAP believes its customers are inclined toward a single vendor strategy, and will work hard to capitalize on this tendency.

3. Platform Strategy. The current SAP platform strategy was originated in 2003, when SAP packaged up its technology components and unveiled the earliest version of the NetWeaver product set.

The idea was that the underlying technology and architecture would be seperate from the business applications. SAP had to build the platform anyway in order to develop its service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based product line. They believed that making it publicly available would enhance SAP’s reputation as a technology leader, and it could potentially become an additional source of product revenue.

SAP has continues to refine and market the idea of a “business process platform,” which is made up of SAP’s Business Suite applications, a repository of enterprise services, and the NetWeaver technology platform. What’s important to understand is that SAP customers have to use NetWeaver because their applications won’t run without it. That means that the optional components, such as SAP’s business intelligence, portal, and integration, become an easier choice than other competing products, just because they are already available and installed, waiting to be used.

4. Industry Strategy. A major SAP attribute over the years has been offering products to key vertical industries that had unique needs in their applications. Based on a combination of internal and customer sponsored development, SAP now has more than 25 separate industry solutions across a range of industries from mining and manufacturing to higher education and financial services. These are supported by collaboration between product management teams, dedicated developers, and industry value networks (IVNs) of customers and partners that define the requirements for these extensions. This has enabled SAP to corner market share in the high-value oil and gas, chemicals, and life science industries.

More recently, SAP is useing the same “blueprint” to go after other industries, such as retail, insurance, education, banking and public sector. It’s likely that SAP will use acquisitions, investments, and partnerships to address these industry requirements (essentially, buying industry expertise).

The downside of this is that Customers in areas where SAP is very well established may find that their enhancement requests have a somewhat lower priority than industries that SAP has designated as strategic. Customers or prospects in the new areas that SAP is addressing may find SAP willing to commit resources and sponsor joint development projects in order to fill holes in industry applications. Furthermore, Companies in these industries that are willing to be referral accounts will have lots of negotiating leverage if they are willing to tolerate immature applications.

5. Product Strategy. Ten years ago, SAP was known as a one-product company, with a much less confusing naming convention for its products and releases (R/1, R/2, R/3).

Since then, SAP has accumulated dozens of products with a massivce number of options, variants and names. In some cases, this was the result of miguided marketing (SAP R/3, MySAP.com and EnjoySAP were essentially the same thing). A more dominant reason was the industry consolidation that resulted in large ERP vendors like SAP competing in many adjacent software categories, such as CRM, supply chain management, and product lifecycle management. These products are complementary products to existing ERP systems. They aren’t aimed at the CIO and IT but at the business users, in areas like performance management, regulatory compliance and analytics.

Large enterprises, especially, must take a very long view of their application strategy. One of the important issues for is knowing what happens after 2013. The SAP Business Suite maintenance windows are stable until then, apart from the regular enhancement package releases. However, they must consider the risk, how slight it is, that they may be faced with another product transition like the one from R/3 to Netweaver

The current Business Suite should remain SAP’s flagship product line well beyond the 2013 maintenance window. While the earliest forms of Netweaver were officially launched in 1999, development has recently completed on a fully SOA-based suite, and there are still a significant percentage of customers that haven’t upgraded from R/3. Launching another new product would alienate these groups, and (currently) SAP is under no pressure from its customers or its competitors to move to a new technology and it is unlikely to be in the next few years.