On the Future of SAP NetWeaver: Podcast Transcription
Jon Reed with Ori Inbar, Senior Vice President of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver
Hosted by Eric Samuels of SearchSAP.com
Podcast Interview Date: September 7, 2007
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Jon Reed: Welcome to this podcast interview with our special guest, Ori Inbar, Senior Vice President of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. We're going to talk with Ori today about NetWeaver job roles of the future and how we're going to get there. This podcast is hosted by SearchSAP and was made possible by a joint collaboration between SearchSAP, my site, JonERP.com, and B2 B Workforce, an SAP Premiere Partner.

Ori, before we get into your current role with SAP, can you tell our listeners how you got your start in SAP? Was it a case of being in the right place at the right time, or were you savvy enough to see how big SAP was eventually going to become?

Reed: And tell us about your current role with SAP.

Inbar: A year after I joined, I was asked to lead the marketing team for the new concept platform idea that we now all know as NetWeaver. So, practically in the last five years I was leading the solution marketing effort for NetWeaver, starting from the definition, the market strategy, and all the way to making it a one-billion-dollar business as it is today.

Reed: Ori, our goal for this podcast is to have you give us your take on some of the NetWeaver jobs of the future that SAP has envisioned. But more importantly, what we want to do is help get a better idea of how SAP customers and consultants can better anticipate these skills trends.

Before we go further, one thing I want to do is clarify the use of terminology we're going to use today. And maybe you can set us straight on the proper use of some of these terms we throw about kind of loosely sometimes to impress our colleagues. In a sense, the focus of this podcast is on Enterprise SOA; but Enterprise SOA is deeply connected to NetWeaver because having a NetWeaver platform in place is necessary to leverage SAP's eSOA functionality. Does that description make sense to you, or would you put it a little bit differently?

Inbar: It's right. In fact, Enterprise SOA is linked to everything that SAP does today, as it's the foundation of the architecture and the technology that we do. And also, when we look at it from the customers' perspective, they cannot have the same siloed view of the past, where you have your SAP application here in the corner. Now everything has to relate to each other, work together, so that you can really integrate your business processes across different systems, regardless of the boundaries. And that makes Enterprise SOA the foundation for practically everything you do in your IT landscape.

Reed: Makes sense. Well, I think we've got the terminology down. Looking back at SAPPHIRE 2007, CEO Henning Kagermann and other top line SAP executives talked about the pending ESOA's skills shortage. What are these new skills they're talking about that are needed on project sites that we're maybe a little bit short on now?

Inbar: First, yes, we're definitely seeing significant shortage. There's a lot of movement in terms of technology and product out there, and, more importantly, a lot of movement in terms of the methodology and philosophy on how you want to organize your IT, and that is basically having high demand on highly skilled people. You know, it's not just someone that you can shop off the street with a certain certification. This is something that you basically know by name: "That guy that knows how to do this specific thing."

So there's definitely a shortage, and some people estimate it to be around 20 thousand resources that will be missing in the next few years. And that includes partners, consultants, and customers' own IT organizations. The key roles that we're seeing move forward could be described in four categories.

I would say that first you have the traditional, if you will, technology professionals: people who do administration and security and running portals and data management, and so on. Demand for these guys will continue to be strong, as it was in the past.

Then we're getting into some of the newer categories. One is the enterprise architect. This is really a major role, responsible for this whole transition of IT landscapes and organizations from where they were before, to where they're going to be in the future. Leveraging an SOA architecture, leveraging the new ideas of a business process platform, and so on. That guy is really responsible for the big picture - connecting the business requirements with the technology and working with all different departments, different teams across the company, or sometimes across a business network, beyond the company, to establish these new approaches. That's a very, very key role.

Another key role is the emerging business process expert. We recently launched a community around that audience; you're looking at the people that are responsible for managing, changing, and evolving specific business processes. Again  it's emerging from some existing roles, such as business analyst and application consultants and people coming from the business perspective, and responsible for certain business processes. That's really the third role.

The fourth role that I would describe is more on the developer side. Obviously,   there is still going to be a strong demand for developers. Now, the specific skill that is needed is around development of enterprise services, which is still development. So you would use your language of choice - Java or ABAP or a combination, or maybe even some dot net coding - but you need to have in mind a different perspective on what you're developing, because this is something that will have to be reused across multiple needs, across multiple departments. The state of mind and  the tools that you're going to be using are very different than what you have in the past.

Reed: That makes a lot of sense, and I can start to see some connections between those roles and today's project roles. One thing that I really picked up on at SAPPHIRE that I wanted to ask you about was that it seems like the transition to the business process platform that SAP is envisioning now also really impacts these new roles.

What I was hearing again and again is that a lot of your classic functional experts in SAP may be a little more used to looking at things in more of a functional silo type of approach in that a business process-driven platform is going to look at things in a much more integrated way across functional areas. Also, just the business process platform implies that business is really driving IT, rather than the other way around.

So IT folks are needing to think about things in terms of a bigger business picture for what they're trying to do.  Would you agree that those trends are impacting the skills roles that we're looking at here?