As SAP Turns up the Dial on Certification, Partners & Vendor Clash!

For the past couple of years, SAP has been ramping up its partner certification program to move beyond entry-level resource training, to include more experienced consultants categorized by their rather new "master" and "professional" levels of certification, aligned with increasing complexity of the SAP product footprint and technology stack.

While acceptance by partners has been rather mixed by company and by region, I have been aware of a recent push by SAP to certify the consultants in its ecosystem... and for some very honorable reasons. First of all to ensure quality in a rapidly growing pool of resources (many of which coming from offshore can be suspect), and of course to lessen the amount of botched implementations, which typically end up giving a black eye more to SAP rather than the IT services partner. However, I believe that for all of these good reasons, SAP is basically missing the point, and is somewhat out of touch to a degree.

Adding some fuel to the fire, a Colorado-based jewelry retailer, Shane Co., declared bankruptcy, and in part blamed the failure of a $36 million SAP inventory management system project on its decline. It might also be due to the worst U.S. economic situation in decades, but that's just one of my crazy ideas I guess... ;-)

With this in hand, SAP has unfortunately taken the old route of blaming its partners for some of this recent bad news. Leo Apotheker recently was quoted last week by ZDnet as saying:

"I don’t give a s**t if it’s Accenture or IBM. I care about the customer. I find it shocking people are walking around talking to customers and have no experience on [SAP]. [Consultants] get hired of people and have no clue. It’s annoying but that’s a fact. Let’s start by certifying people...” (BTW, I have made this my first nomination for "Best IT Exec Quote of 2009" - check back later in the year to see if Leo wins...)

After this eloquent exchange, Leo went on to highlight HP/EDS as being one of its first large partners to sign on for certification of all of its SAP consultants. Soon after, IBM announced a major expansion of its relationship with SAP rival, Lawson Software, to support its new strategic push into HCM. Touche!

But let's get to the heart of the matter... dealing with or at least speaking with most of SAP's large IT services partners, the question of whether to certify their consultants comes down to dollars and cents, plain and simple! For any of the top 20 providers of SAP-related consulting services, the process of certifying their consultants would cost millions at a time when new projects are slowing down and profits are becoming lower. IT services companies, like all other companies, are scrutinizing their costs and investments right now. Can certification be a good way to bring new/entry-level resources to a reliable and billable level? Yes, and in most cases I advise companies to consider that. But should all consultants be certified? Hmmm....

On the other side, at least from my experience, SAP customers are not asking for certified consultants. Today when an SAP customer is considering an external services supplier, they are interested in references, the experience of the project consultants, and whether that experience maps well to their own industry needs. Make no doubt, experience (especially during a downturn) is king, and that simply cannot be taught in a classroom. New technologies? yes! Experience? no! And while in the mid-term, there will certainly be a need to up-skill consultants to more of the components of Business Suite 7 and Netweaver, customers are not yet flocking to these new technologies during these difficult times.

So at the end of the day, customers are not asking for certified consultants, nor (at this juncture) are they prepared to pay a premium for certified consultants. They are willing to pay a premium on experience, and this is why IBM, Accenture, Deloitte Consulting, along with substantial challengers, such as CSC, Capgemini and T-Systems, are winning projects and market-share.

In particular, IBM and Accenture own over 22% of the worldwide SAP consulting services market, and have the skills and reputation to disregard certification... A combined HP+EDS, which was the company sited by Leo, is forecasted by PAC to be under 3% market share... two very different situations and set of offerings, in fact. While HP+EDS is certainly a legitimate and growing player, and in my opinion, has an excellent opportunity around the "cost of running" SAP; it is still developing its positioning on this market, and may not be indicative of what all services suppliers should do.

So is there a place and value from certification? of course... Is it right for all companies and all consultants? I'm not convinced this is the case today.

I've activated comments on the blog and would love to hear your thoughts!