BI just one of many challenges for SAP
news analysis SAP's acquisition of Business Objects looks unlikely to cause the company's existing customers to rush out and add business intelligence applications.
SAP announced earlier this week that it was acquiring business intelligence (BI) vendor Business Objects in a friendly 4.8 billion euro takeover.
There was no hint of the transaction at last week's SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas, where 6,000 SAP users -- representing a substantial proportion of SAP's 42,000 customer base -- gathered to discuss the nuts and bolts of working with the vendor's enterprise software.
If their experiences are any guide, while companies are open to the notion of expanding the range of applications managed within the SAP environment -- a major theme of the conference keynotes, even without the added ingredient of Business Objects -- simply keeping the existing implementations ticking over is enough to occupy many IT departments.
SAP's current pitch is now focused around service-orientated architecture. Having promoted SOA since 2003 via its NetWeaver platform, it is now time to begin taking advantage of SOA's flexibility to adopt new applications, SAP board member Peter Zencke argued in his keynote speech. "We've found a language which is close to IT but which is understandable for business," he said.
SAP has begun offering a developer subscription to the entire NetWeaver stack, expanding the potential range of companies who can develop SOA-friendly applications. "Enterprise SOA is about the innovation we are bringing on top of the stable core," said chief technology officer Vishal Sikka.
Staff and shifting
Finding staff who can handle these environments is also an ongoing challenge for the IT department.
"The demand for enterprise SOA-related skills is expanding dramatically," said SAP executive vice president Zia Yusuf. "Our service partners are spending a lot of money and time to train up their consultants to build up those capabilities. The SAP ecosystem is doing the best it can."
At Tyco Electronics, consolidating multiple instances of SAP has proved to be a major undertaking, especially because the systems already in place were so unique.
"We have done a lot of customisation to suit the various business needs in the SAP system," said Muthu Sabarethinam, who manages the SAP program at Tyco.
Merging finance and logistics systems, which together comprised 6.8 terabytes of data, took the better part of eight months, with almost half that time spent on detailed data analysis in the two systems. Even with careful planning, four days of downtime was required to merge the systems.
"You will need more people than you think and you will spend more time synchronising configuration than you think," Sabarethinam said.
Transition takes time
In any event, getting businesses to shift is a slow process. SAP claims that, as of June, 3,400 companies have moved to version 6 of its ERP platform, while just over 18,000 are using NetWeaver as a standalone platform. That still leaves a large pool of customers to be convinced.
Even when new technology projects emerge, that doesn't automatically mean SAP's background technology platform gets adopted.
"Our experience to date is that most of this work is being done in R/3 and not in NetWeaver," said Bruce Johnson, VP for SAP mobility services at integrator Morse.
Despite SAP's enthusiasm for SOA, the technology remains in its infancy, according to some. In his opening keynote, technology writer Tim O'Reilly noted that the transition into service-oriented applications was still in its very early days.
"If this was the PC, we're maybe coming out the Lotus 1-2-3 era, we're maybe coming out of Windows 3.1. We're certainly not as far as Windows 95."
Angus Kidman visited Las Vegas as a guest of SAP.