But after hitting the floor for four days and pounding SAP representatives with questions, the picture did become clearer. I was able to identify some themes that went against the grain of my own expectations. Some of what I learned actually contradicted advice I have been giving SAP professionals for years, so the changes are worth noting.

After I return from a big SAP conference like this one, I issue a series of articles and podcasts on the JonERP.com web site, as well as some content on SearchSAP.com. This article is the first in the series, and I envision it as a raw reaction to the trends I identified. This is a lengthy piece, but each section has its own heading, so scroll through it to find the items you are interested in.

Much of this is my own opinion, formed by reading between the lines of the interviews I conducted, so I’ll leave it to readers to judge the accuracy of what I spell out here. I will be writing a more polished series of articles for this site as well as SearchSAP.com, so watch this web site for more on that.

Note that in addition to these upcoming articles on TechEd, I will be issuing a series of podcasts featuring my spontaneous, from-the-exhibition-floor responses to Tech Ed 2007. I did this for SAPPHIRE 2007 also, and while those podcast recordings were definitely raw, they have proven popular, so I will do that again this time around. They will be issued as soon as they are consolidated into daily podcast summaries.

I will divide this first article into sections. Each section will touch on a major theme of the conference. Some of these are topics that SAP considers important, and some are points that I think are crucial. In each section, I will also try to note how these themes could affect the supply and demand of SAP consultants, and how they might impact the overall career strategies of SAP professionals.


I. News roundup - the only real news highlight was the release of Business by Design (BBD), though there were some smaller announcements of interest to consultants. To the chagrin of reporters, SAP’s Business Objects acquisition, announced the week after TechEd, trumped all the TechEd stories they had just written.

For some reason, SAP chose to play up the release of BBD at TechEd, even though the bulk of attendees at TechEd are SAP customers already running in-house SAP solutions. BBD, for those who don’t know yet, is now the formal market name of what was being called A1S. BBD is SAP’s new "Software As A Service" (SaaS) product for the lower mid-market. The jury is still out on the overall success of SaaS as a whole, but I believe that in time, hosted software solutions will play a significant role in the enterprise software market, particularly in the small side of the mid-market, and perhaps in smaller business settings eventually.

Though the success of any "SaaS" product is not a given, SAP is making a smart move by releasing a BBD product – as long as it doesn’t detract resources from other key initiatives. The question was really one of timing - BBD would have made a better SAPPHIRE news headline - but timing product releases is no easy feat. I do think BBD will be successful in the lower mid-market. The only real question is whether it will get market traction and how many competitors it will encounter, but I expect BBD to be a factor. Just how successful it will be remains to be seen.

However, this doesn’t mean a lot for the average SAP consultant or project manager. In general, hosted solutions are not going to offer the same kind of consulting opportunities as on-site products, nor is the lower mid-market a lucrative consulting space. I didn’t talk to any SAP customers at TechEd who were concerned about BBD, and that’s not surprising. The SAP project managers at TechEd had other things to worry about besides a product that a company of their size would probably never consider, given that they were already running an SAP system. I would guess that these folks were more concerned with issues like exception handling, employee retention, and the prospect of extended maintenance fees if they linger on 4.6 for too long.

As for the other "news" announcements, most of them pertained to SAP’s continued emphasis on the "eSOA will change everything!" theme - more on that shortly. One smaller news item that consultants may find interesting is the introduction of a new three-tiered certification program. Matt Danielsson wrote about this in his SearchSAP.com editorial blog, so check that out for more info, but the most interesting certification, the master level certification, will not be rolled out until 2008. Called the "Certified Master," this level is interesting because it will involve some kind of hands-on skills verification - not an easy thing to design. If properly implemented, it could change how SAP certification is perceived in the market at large.

One more piece of news is that the SAP Business Suite is now service-enabled. Those who followed the SAPPHIRE announcements noted that SAP committed to service-enabling the Business Suite (SRM, SCM, PLM, and CRM) by the end of the year. That has now been accomplished. There is also a piece of news in terms of the release of NetWeaver 7.1, which contains the much-hyped Enterprise Services Repository, but I can’t count this as a news story because there is too much confusion over when 7.1 will be available and what exactly it will contain. I’ll get to that in more detail shortly.

The final funny thing about the TechEd news stories is that immediately following TechEd, the news hit the financial markets that SAP is acquiring Business Objects (see SearchSAP.com's auto-updated Business Objects acquisition news archive for more on this). Since this acquisition marks an about-face in SAP’s "build our own code" strategy, it’s arguably bigger news than any of the press releases handed to the media at TechEd. I heard from more than one reporter who was a little taken aback by being trumped by a big news story right after TechEd formally ended.

All those reporters who dutifully filed stories about the modest news at TechEd would have loved to have this Business Objects story to sink into during the conference. I’ll be writing more about the impact of the Business Objects acquisition for SAP consultants in upcoming SAP Career Blog entries, so check back for more on that. We also touched on this issue during the "TechEd in Review" podcast I did with Krishna Kumar recently.