Archive for the ‘Career’ Category:

SAP career paths for BASIS or Netweaver Technical consultants ?

February 6th, 2010 View Comments Posted in BASIS, Career, Management

Now, I may be biased, but I had to start off with this quote from Jon Reed

Before I get to the videos, I want to say that Basis is one of the most neglected areas in terms of SAP career content. Even on SDN, there are way more conversations and forums on development than Basis. This is too bad, as the Basis/NetWeaver Admin role is a vital one to most projects.

No one else is managing your career or your future. If you want more control and choice over where you work and what you do, I recommend you read Jon Reed’s latest career advice and career trends. Jon is an SAP Mentor and his name is probably familiar to you already through his SCN blogs and ASUG and Sapphire presentations. He’s got about 15 years experience in analyzing the SAP career market, and he has worked in SAP recruitment. This all adds up to someone who knows what the SAP job market is looking for, and what makes some candidates more marketable than others.

The white papers Jon created are

You can also access the white paper on Jon Reed’s website.

However, one thing you will notice is that these particular whitepapers emphasise the functional and developer career paths; there is not much reference to the BASIS or Netweaver Technical Consultant career path. Jon identified this himself in another post, this time on his web site, What is the SAP Career Path for Basis Administrators – NetWeaver Engineers?. He has taken a presentation on the career path for Basis-NetWeaver prosby SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis of Australia Post (based in part on Jon’s earlier work referred to above) and taped four commentary tracks through Tony’s Prezi slides.

…. just resting on our laurels isn’t going to cut it in this economy – “stronger measures” are required. Part four gave me a chance to share my views on the content as a whole, and why it’s so important to find an SAP career path that combines skills marketability with a passionate, or even soulful, angle.

I used to say I was in BASIS (which is why this blog was called basissap.com). However, many people seem to see this as being restricted to R3 ABAP Administration, with perhaps some particular combination of OS and DBMS skills. Nowadays, regardless of the platform your SAP system(s) run on, BASIS Administrators / Netweaver Engineers need knowledge of their site’s OS / DBMS combination, good windows server administration skills (for managing your TREX, and possibly EP, systems), maxdb knowledge (for your SRM system), etc etc.

With all these skill requirement, possibly including other duties as well (depending on the size of your environment), how do you avoid being jack of all trades and master of none ?

For your own sake, you pick two (maybe three) Core Skills in BASIS or Netweaver and become the local guru in those. This provides security of employment; in other words, you know enough about the SAP core to be valuable to both your current employer, and future employers.

Pick another couple of areas that interest you, but aren’t crucial to your organisation (at least, not yet). Jon refers to these as Edge Skills. They should be skills that are on the horizon, either within the SAP ecosystem, or your organisation. These are the skills that will make you employable in the future.

But what about all the other areas ? In one of my previous incarnations, I was an MVS Systems Programmer. The most important thing I learnt was how to use the manuals (they weren’t online when I started). A key part of this was my own notes – Knowing where to find the official answer or process isn’t always enough, you need to get it working, and sometimes you only perform the process once every couple of years or so, and it is difficult to remember exactly how it works from time to time.

Keeping records of what works and what doesn’t work, especially in relation to your own environment, gives you an edge on those who don’t, and of course, it is nice to know what the real process is (as opposed to what the books say !!).

A word of advice here; do not horde your documentation or knowledge –

  • its hard to get moved to the exciting new project if you’re irreplaceable, and
  • after all, you’re getting paid to support and help.

It also identifies you as someone who will help, who will answer questions about (or can find out) what really works.

Another way of finding out stuff is experimenting with your own system; an SAP preview system, or one of the New Community Developer Systems. These systems, well removed from the semi production status of the ‘real’ Development and Testing systems, provide scope for you to experiment and develop ideas into implementable services. This identifies you as someone who can bring real value to the SAP Environment, the IT organisation, and your employer in general.

Businesses are not run by IT departments....


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

January 8th, 2009 View Comments Posted in BASIS, Career, Upgrade

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.


5 SAP Strategies that architects and executives must understand

December 28th, 2008 View Comments Posted in Career

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.


Web 2.0 Reality Check, against SAP Portals

October 23rd, 2008 View Comments Posted in Career, Portal

Dennis Howlett has stirred up a hornets nest recently by pointing out that the Web 2.0 Emperor has no clothes, especially when it comes to the enterprise.

Enterprise has had enough of incremental step change where the ROI is questionable at best. The trending down of technology prices goes some way to redressing that imbalance but arguing that technology is cheap ergo high ROI is facile. As I have repeatedly said on this and other blogs, there are genuine barriers to adoption that make even free look expensive. My Irregular colleague Susan Scrupski thinks that’s a griping argument. Sure. But it is recurrent and current with few easy answers in sight. I suspect a part of the problem is because those most active in pushing these solutions have little idea about organizational dynamics or what makes people tick. I don’t say that lightly. Check out Oliver Marks blog and his experiences at large organizations.

Why does this matter in the SAP world ?

For a realistic comparison, my last SAP implementation (not upgrade) had a gloabl reach, required 5 nines reliability (scheduled application downtime is 6 hours every 3 months), and a Disater Recovery metric of 30 minutes RTO (with an RPO of 10 minutes) after a data centre disaster, for multiple mult-terrabyte databases. The customer’s management team was experienced, knew the implicit difficulties in this, and knew it would cost money. However, they were able to justify the spend, based on their business requirements.

Compare this SLA against the Google Apps Mail outages in March 2008, the Google App Engine failure (June 2008) and another Google Apps outage in October 2008.

You don’t have control over the cloud, which means you don’t have control over your data, whether you’re talking about the physical security, or secured access once the data is available.

On the other hand, with tools like ESME, the wikis and rooms available on SAP Portals, and sensible well designed Web Dynpros, under pinned by the new Java Engine architechture, you have the technology to provide your users and customers with Web 2.0 like systems, in a secure, scalable, stable environment.


Getting an SAP job

August 12th, 2008 View Comments Posted in Career

The most popular SAP-related question I see is some variant on “How do I get into SAP?” The promise of a rich career with the world’s largest enterprise applications company attracts a lot of interest from university graduates, IT professionals seeking to switch fields and consultants eager for recurring engagements.

Rather than offering specific advice, because evryone’s position is different, I’d suggest that you educate yourself about the various business and technical contexts in which SAP operates. The more you learn, the more you’ll learn which part of SAP appeals to you, or even whether SAP is right for you in the first place. It’s an investment that may get you into the SAP door, and it will keep paying off, as you will get into the habit of staying up to date with SAP developments.

An excellent resource to help you build your SAP intelligence is SearchSAP, who have an excellent catalog of podcasts containing valuable advice and direction for SAP job seekers. If you don’t have the time to listen to them immediately, download them and listen to them on a commute to work or on a plane. Some notable recent podcasts for SAP job seekers:

  • SAP and SOA: Want to know how SOA is changing the SAP careers field? Listen to SAP expert Rabi Jay explain how SOA is changing SAP’s product set and rewarding particular skills over others.
  • The SAP skills shortage: What it means for you. The good news for SAP job seekers is that SAP demand is higher than qualified supply. Some areas of SAP are more open than others. In this podcast, David Foote explains which SAP areas are paying the most and which areas are not as hot.
  • SAP explains its certification program: SAP offers three levels of certification. Learn what the levels are, why SAP thinks certification is important for hiring managers and why getting certified by SAP partners instead of by SAP may be pointless.
  • How can ABAP developers survive in a NetWeaver era?: ABAP is SAP’s proprietary development language, but recent moves towards SOA (particularly in NetWeaver) have offset the once-unchallengeable status of ABAP. Developers should listen to this podcast to learn how to polish their skills for the SAP jobs of tomorrow.

Another extremely good resource is the SAP Developer Network. This is designed for practicing SAPers, so the Getting Started link is about getting started in the Software Devloper Network, but some usefull posts include:

  • Trial Versions of SAP Software: How to obtain and install the free trial versions of SAP software. The best news is that these will run in Virtual machines, so you can install several different versions (Linux, Windows, DB2, maxdb) and experiement.
  • SDN Subscriptions. SDN subscriptions offer on-line convenience, lower-cost, term-based access to the educational content, SAP software and the related services, designed for peopel and organisations who know they need SAP knowledge, but don’t have access to (or can’t afford) full time class room training and consulting.

SAP Certification Changes and SAP Careers

July 17th, 2008 View Comments Posted in Career

On a recent SearchSAP podcast, SAP explains the new certification options that are available. There’s also some detail coming to light on the SAP Certification site.

The original level of SAP certification is now called the “Associate” level, aimed at inexperenced practitioners. SAP is also rolling out the “Professional” level certification for people with more extensive project experience with system integration, and applying the “Associate” skills against the Customer requirements. This is a more rigorous certification program, where project experience will be mandataory, so may carry more weight with Customers and therefore employers. Most of these certifications are available now.

There is also a third level of certification on the way also, called the “Master” level, designed for the Project or Team Leader with 10 years or more experience. These should be available from the 4th quarter 2008 onwards. Some other key points to takeaway:

  • if you’re going to invest in certification, invest in SAP’s own three-tiered certification offering, which is the only official, SAP-recognized certification offering in the marketplace. Lots of third parties currently offer SAP ‘certification,’ but SAP is going to be more aggressive about regulating these kinds of claims.
  • Certification is most important at the early stages of an SAP career, but fades in importance later on. It is in response to this that SAP offers a ‘master’ tier of certification to recognize and reward senior-level consultants and their experience.
  • SAP’s certification seeks to encourage and enable lifelong learning. It is part of the process of becoming a better SAP consultant. Thus, certification is not an end but a means.
  • There are plans to enable a social network, providing personalised training paths and discounts based on your existing and planned certifications.

Some sample questions are already available on the levels, certification focus areas, and exam preparation.pages, including

Depending on where you are located, and at what stage you are at in your career, you may be wondering if SAP Certification is worth spending time and money on anyway. In the BASIS field particularly, the arguments revolve around SAP specific skills versus real life experience, especially nowadays where there is so much more to maintaiing SAP systems than just the SAP systems themselves. The article does have a useful comment from John Reed, the SearchSap Careers Expert. I’ve pulled some extracts from John’s comment:

Back in the 1990s, it was possible to land an SAP job with “certification only” because there weren’t enough experienced consultants, and “Big Six firms” on large project sites were able to field teams with plenty of junior-level consultants who did not have any hands-on SAP experience other than their classroom certifications.

And there are fewer “big bang” type implementations where companies just open the floodgates and hire hundreds of consultants regardless of experience level. As a result, even though the SAP consulting market is very healthy, the power of SAP certification to land that all-important first project has diminished over the years, and I don’t expect that power to return.

Sometimes I have found that SAP hypes its own certification, but often, I find that it’s the job seekers themselves who latch onto certification and hype it for themselves.
…..many aspiring SAP professionals view certification as the easy (if expensive) way to open a door into the SAP field that is not always easy to open.

how many SAP jobs require certification? The answer is: only a small percentage. Project references are so much more important,

I think knowing how to make your current skills appealing to SAP customers and their IT departments may be more important. One good exercise is to review current SAP jobs on sites like SearchSAP.com and see what kinds of skills are required.

The key to breaking into SAP remains hard work, good overall technical and business skills, and savvy self-marketing.

Some of his comments resonate with me and my career. I had general Mainframe Systems Programming (DOS and MVS, CICS and a mixture of Databases) experience, but also Windows PC programming experience, when I applied for a job at an SAP R/2 site that was looking for a Capacity Planner. I was able to leverage my mainframe skills (JCL, CICS, Assembler, and DB2) into a Job with the R/2 BASIS group. A couple of years later, I applied for a job with an outsourcing company with a strong SAP Practice, on the condition that I was to be transitioned into R/3 BASIS. This was back when the 3.x releases of SAP were being implemented.