Having been in SAP for some years I get asked this question how to get into SAP as a career. I was writing this to a close friend of mine and thought of putting it on the blog. This advice is a rather first step to decide which stream to join in SAP -

1. Technology Consulting – understanding the architecture of various SAP solutions and advising the IT department of clients on what is best for them and then helping them implement it. Your end customers in this case is always IT department people. This is purely technical job Folks who work in this area are called technology consultants. On the first day of project you can recognize these guys as someone who is wearing a suit but is uncomfortable in it.
2. Business consulting – understanding the capabilities of SAP’s solutions and implementing them for the client’s business. For example let us say you manufacture bulbs – you have plants where you make them, you have suppliers who supply you materials, you have distributors who distribute your products and finally you have customers. Also don’t forget the employees. So you implement SAP solutions which take care of all these folks and the processes they are involved in. People who work in these areas are called functional consultants and they love to wear suits
3. Solution Delivery – both of the above activities could involve multi-month engagement with the end clients with a team of functional as well as technology consultants. This engagement would be called a project. There are folks whose main job is to deliver the on time within budget and scope delivery of these projects. These are your project managers. Usually PMs evolve organically from the above two roles. But you might see folks coming out of B-Schools directly jumping as PMs. This guy is a leader and can be seen very nervous during the first few days of the project

Once you have decided one of the three above you can focus on a particular SAP product. I wrote this with SAP in mind but I think this would be true for any enterprise software product.

Last night I landed back in San Jose on US Airways 162 which should have been dubbed rather TechED flight. I am sure more than 50% folks were returning from Mandalay Bay. It was easily the biggest TechED so far with 6000 folks from all over the US, quite a few from outside US too. Attending the sessions you like and managing the schedule can be a lot of work – see right.

eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things

ADoW – ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.

“New” Identity Management – is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 

Virtualization – is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux

SDN Clubhouse – Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil, Mario Herger, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give , check your basis skills in the back etc.

Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together

Enterprise software has been of great interest to me since the college days. Sadgopan who heads eBusiness and Consulting for Satyam has written an excellent article on evolution of enterprise software and the direction it is going to take in future. He is musing

With globalization and a flat world increasingly beginning to force enterprises to become more competitive the business climate began to slowly change – the new rule of the game demanded agility as the key driver for success in general – the game changed and began to favor the fast moving against the slower one and big size did not necessarily confer advantages on business entities by default.

Do read it over here at sandhill.com. He concludes that the enterprise software is moving towards composite applications made from mash-up of existing apps. My own take on the software evolution can be summarized in very few words –

First there were custom apps,
Then came COTS^[1]
Now is the age of the composite applications

What is more motivating in the story is validation of SAP’s Netweaver Intiative. Being a Netweaver professional it makes me smile. Quoting Sadgopan

SAP is said to be devoting as much as a third of its overall R&D efforts towards building composites & its roadmap promises to provide its customers with the ability to create new business processes on the fly & avoid any rebuilds

[1] Commercial Off The Shelf

Read over at Silicon Beat about the new Big Picture feature of New.com. It tells you about the related stories, companies and concepts related to the present story. Immediately went and checked this story. See what the big picture is.

Isn’t it interesting how SAP has Micorsoft, Oracle in its vicinity.

A nice hotel is a must for any business traveller. A good night at a decent hotel can do good for the business. As a SAP professional constantly on the road, I can associate with this. Just read over at Rajesh Jain’s Emergic about the new hotels from Tata group called indiOne. Rajesh has good things to say about this hotel. From the looks they look pretty decent. Have a dekho yourself

Nice fact about the hotel is that first the price of the rooms was fixed and then the infrastructure was built backwards from there or as Rajesh puts it “bottom-up innovation”. For 1000 bucks a night this is great deal.

Considering SAP India is in the walking distance from there I might just land up there some day. If you are going to SAP TechEd ’05 Bangalore, this might be the place to spend your nights.

In the rosy days of late nineties there were three pure portal play companies. Plumtree, Epicentric and Toptier. Then sometime in late 2000 SAP decided to complement there technology platform with a portal offering. They acquired Toptier for whopping $400 millions and married it with their existing portal product called workplace. This was a great buy for SAP as the acquired product has now morphed in the very mature people layer of SAP’s Netweaver platform.

Then somewhere in 2002 came Epicentric’s turn and it got acquired by Vignette for $32 millions. Vignette complemented their content development platform with the content delivery platform via Epicentric.

Today I read the news of Plumtree’s acquisition by BEA via Phil Wainewright’s excellent Loosely Coupled blog. It is sad in the sense that there is no major Pure Play Portal vendor left in the field But does that mean being pure portal vendor is not viable in today’s economic scenarios. You got to be an applications vendor and club portal as delivery platform. SAP has a whole slew of applications to be delivered via portal i.e. CRM, BW, HCM, SCM, and SRM etc. Vignette has while not a business application vendor has the content management system up its sleeve.

This gives rise to the question what application does BEA has? But again BEA has been a pure technology platform vendor. What perplexed me as rightly pointed by Phil in LCBlog was the decision to keep BEA’s existing portal separate from Plumtree stack.

“We now have leadership in both transactional and collaboration portals” Chuang said.

Both Chuang and Carges stressed that BEA will maintain separate portal offerings. “We will have two separate portal product lines for as long as we can see,” Carges said.

Keeping both the products separate would mean more pain for the customers in maintaining and operating two separate stacks. It would be interesting to see how long both of the stacks remain separate from each and how they evolve.

Last a disclaimer I have been a SAP Portals consultant for the last four years and naturally I have a strond bias towards SAP Portal which I consider the best positioned platform sitting at the top in SAP’s Netweaver Platform’s People layer. Also it would have been more interesting if Oracle had bought Plumtree

I was smitten by Linux very early in my tech life. I still remember how long it took to configure X Windows on a CEL machine in the summer of 95. SAP also has a special initiative for linux It pleased me to read about German Railways migration to linux over here. What got me more interested was this snippet

The company has already shifted its vital train timetabling system from HP Non-Stop to Linux. Next, it will move various SAP systems, including sales support, from Unix to Linux. And by the end of the year, all remaining critical systems such as databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers and network infrastructure will be running on Linux, the company said.

Definitely some thing to watch for. Someday I want to do a detailed ROI analysis of SAP on Linux.

If something makes a news on Slashdot it has to belong to the kingdom of day-to-day geeks. Typically SAP professionals start getting the news about cool technologies brewing inside the tech giant thru various niche magazines and lately SDN. I was excited to read Dagfinn Parnas‘s article SAP Virtual Machine Container (as seen on TechEd). But this article on slashdot just makes my day…

Writing an article about “A Java Server That Never Goes Down” is pure hubris, but a German developer who says he’s been “eating, sleeping, and drinking Java” for 8 years doesn’t seem to care and his article brings to light the aspects of VM we rarely think of as he introduces “user isolation” and tells about some interesting work SAP in Germany is doing in that area, merging the Java and the ABAP worlds.”

I got a nice Diwali greeting from someone at SAP. I love it.

I too have been sending HTML greetings over the years. What I liked about this one was the right header, content and footer.

Pankaj

Got the book in the mail today courtesy Jeff Nolan of SAP Ventures. Some one, I think Vivekanand, said once to the effect that if you need advice on something, see what the great men of the world did in the same situation. It would be intersting to read how Hasso made a company with “128 quarters of financial results and only 1 of them in the red“. Thanks again to Jeff for the book giveaway.