SAP Partner Kick-Off Highlights, Certification, and News Roundup

As an SAP Mentor, I am sometimes allowed to sneak into places where I don’t categorically belong. In this case, SAP employee and fellow SAP Mentor Darren Hague encouraged us to register for the January SAP PKOM sessions. The PKOM (short for “Partner Kick Off Meeting”) is SAP’s opportunity to set the tone for the partner ecosystem for the year.

The PKOM online event was a cross between a pep rally and an interactive session where partners got the info they needed to better represent themselves and SAP. Turns out my participation in this year’s event helped to spark a hot debate on the merits of SAP certification that sucked in many “thought leaders” in the SAP community. In this blog entry, I’ll tell you how this debate got started and also share a few other trends I observed from this year’s PKOM.

To the best of my knowledge, these were the first PKOM events that SAP held “virtually.” I like the virtual conference format. I don’t think of it as a perfect substitute for a face-to-face event, but used properly, these virtual events can achieve critical mass on key topics and get questions answered. I ended up botching my schedule for the North American version of the conference, so I pulled a vintage all nighter and caught the Singapore version late on Monday, January 19th. I call it the Singapore version because I set my clock via Singapore time. The point is that it served all those who didn’t fit into the North American time slot.

What I like about SAP is that they are careful to gear message to constituency . You hear a different emphasis at a partner event than you would at a customer-focused event. In this case, an excerpt from Zia Yusuf’s keynote caught my eye regarding the importance of SAP certification in the coming year.

So, on Tuesday the 20th, I posted two not-so-innocent “Tweets” on my JonERP Twitter Feed:

Zia Yusuf = strong keynote w/ good specifics. One point: SAP is going to strongly encourage customers to hire CERTIFIED consultants #pkom Yusuf = emphasis on certified SAP consultants is part of overall SAP theme of year: Emphasis on quality resources. #pkom

I say “not so innocent” because I’ve learned that anything I Tweet on SAP certification tends to spark a lot of response. No disappointment here – a burst of Tweets soon followed. This led to a talk on Skype with ZDNet Blogger, “Enterprise Irregular” and fellow SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett from his home in Spain. Dennis might be the most effective “discussion agitator” in the SAP community, and his views on the importance of certification are just the thing to guarantee a worthy debate. Later that same evening, Dennis posted a blog entitled "Should You Be Certified?" on the SAP Community Network (SCN).

Last time I checked, there were more than fifty comments on Dennis’ blog post and counting. I won’t share my own views on SAP certification in detail here, as you can find them on Dennis’ comment thread and also on my own SAP Career Blog.

Here's what I take from this “certification blowup”:

1. Zia's emphasis on SAP certification during the partner event is no accident. SAP is sending a strong message to its partners that they need to think of SAP certification as a competitive differentiator, as well as part of SAP’s own stated commitment to improving the quality of consultants. Whether an emphasis on SAP certification will result in better consultants is open to debate. What is not debatable is that SAP intends to stress this point. I already heard back from one consultant who reported to me that his firm has already announced to its employees that they need to be on top of their certifications.

2. Everyone in the SAP community agrees that there is a need to better calibrate the quality of consultants that are available to SAP customers. The question of how to do that is what has provoked so many comments in Howlett’s blog. There seems to be an optimism, at least amongst SAP community members, that the transparency of such rating systems as LinkedIn, or even eBay, could be applied to assessing SAP consultants (and consulting firms) in a more open manner. It’s good to keep in mind that ASUG, SAP’s North American Users’ Group, has just such an undertaking in place with it’s ASUG Edge consultant ratings site, but the fact that it sits behind a firewall and requires subscription for full participation may present an obstacle for adoption.

So that’s one topic to keep an eye on that came out of PKOM.

There were two other trends I made a note of:

a. SAP sees Business Suite 7.0, set for spring rampup, as a REALLY BIG DEAL. This release is set to be fully service-enabled, also sporting embedded analytics throughout. I find the Business Suite focus more than a little interesting, only because this does not seem like the year when the typical customer is going shell out for a suite of business applications. This seems more like the year of incremental improvements than the “year of the Business Suite.” The themes I personally see for the year are SAP Business Objects and RunSAP/Solution Manager, with the former involving smaller-scale projects with a focus on ERP ROI, and the latter being a way for SAP to shift the maintenance issue away from cost increases and towards the value proposition behind Enterprise Support and post-go-live optimization. But who cares what I think? SAP is going to be talking A LOT about Business Suite 7.0; it will be interesting to see how the market reacts.

b. The EcoHub matters. I guess I should have figured out that EcoHub is a big deal due to its “fourth tab” status on SCN next to SDN, BPX, and the Business Objects Community, but I didn’t quite get it until PKOM. EcoHub is going to present third party SAP software firms with a whole new level of visibility to pitch their wares to the marketplace. During a PKOM chat session, it was also mentioned that EcoHub would soon be opened up to SAP services partners as well as software partners, though I did not see a date posted for when SAP software partners will have the ability to be featured in EcoHub. Visibility within EcoHub seemed to be part of a broader message about how SAP partners can get access to the eyeballs on SCN. To those partners who are interested in more SCN visibility, I would suggest contacting your SAP rep directly.

Finally, I want to point out a useful podcast series that is picking up steam. The “Enterprise Geeks” just issued their third podcast. This is an informal back-and-forth podcast format created by a collection of some of my favorite SAP technical practitioners (though not all of them work for SAP or are SAP-focused all the time). Their third and more recent podcast features a good discussion on SAP certification as well as some other helpful topics.

These days, the best thing about following the SAP market is that we all pretty much have access to the same breaking information. The challenge is what to do with it all. Those who want to make a real impact will figure this out.