Gartner Looks at SAP, a conference by Gartner and focusing on SAP, was held at Sun City from 27 to 29 June. The conference was very well attended and provided some interesting information. Overall. the quality of the presentations was good, though at times the content left quite a bit to be desired. Gartner is a typical consulting organization: the standard answer to most probing questions is “that depends”.
Delegates were provided with a bound hardcopy of most presentations. That proved very useful and made following the speaker a lot easier. Notes could be added into the descriptive narrative below each slide. In most cases, the Gartner guys provided a fair bit of information together with suggested action items below the slide notes. A nice touch!
With the exception of very few presentations, the main focus of the talks was the concept of the Competence Centre (CC). Maybe I’m missing the point here, but in my opinion the SAP CC concept is well established an requires little in the way of extensive investigation and discussion. Sure, some corporates may well consider it a new topic, but in my experience SAP customers and partners have dealt with the issue of support and some form of internal, formalized competence team since the mid 90′s! The Netweaver product stack creates new challenges due the sudden influx of many different products requiring various skills and more hardware resources, but there was little advice offered to delegates on that topic. Overall, I considered the amount of time spent on the support and CC aspects a bit of waste.
There were some interesting points arising from the CC presentation (I was listening 
). The use of an internal marketing team to make dull and boring activities such as support and testing more attractive to employees was discussed and is an angle I had not considered before. With the right incentive program and mentorship, even testing can become a fun pastime, it seems! From Gartner’s research, business-oriented support accounts for almost 50% of all activities and costs within an organization using SAP. That 50% includes super user involvement and business process support to a large extent. Technical support takes up almost 36% of the expenditure.
A short overview of Netweaver and the expected SAP strategy was provided. Obviously, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) features prominently. Gartner’s take on SOA is that it’s widespread adoption is inevitable, provided some of the technologies required to make it a practical reality mature. SAP’s Exchange Infrastructure (XI) product for middleware use is only now considered usable, and will need to mature much further to make it a viable component of the SOA architecture considered by large corporates. Similarly, SAP’s Master Data Management solution will need to provide more features. There are obviously competing products that provide similar solutions. Gartner’s take on this is that in-depth investigations are required to ensure that the correct mix of products are selected. It may not always be cost-effective to bet the whole house on SAP solutions.
The main focus areas identified by Gartner within the Netweaver stack are the Enterprise Portal, Exchange Infrastructure and Business Warehouse. These are the technologies currently experiencing the most widespread adoption and potentially being the most mature of the Netweaver offering. MDM, Mobile Infrastructure (MI) and Auto-ID are lagging behind, primarily because they provide niche solutions and due to the fact that the are still immature.
Gartner’s view is that some form of ESA (Enterprise Services Architecture) will be available in 2007, together with a repository of web services. It is obvious that Netweaver will form the core of the new release of the mySAP ERP suite. Use of the Visual Composer is recommended and has, in Gartner’s experience, provided numerous organizations with tangible benefits.
A good presentation about building a business case provided various interesting factoids. Involvement from all business stakeholders is important, as is the focus on the correct areas. People and processes need the most attention, whereas technology should take a back seat. The suggestion of structure and content of a sample business case document was provided and is very useful.
Two talks on the manufacturing and process industry. These topics are certainly not in my field of expertise, but always prove to be interesting. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is seen by Gartner to become the next wave for manufacturing industries. Companies being able to configure and manufacture products based on customer demand is seen as the logical next step. To some degree, this is already a reality but will offer even more flexibility to consumers in the near future.
This Gartner conference wasn’t everything I had expected. Overall, it provided a decent selection of material. I do feel that the focus on SAP support was slightly misplaced, as there are more pressing issues and questions around at present. Other than that, definitely worth the visit, as is Sun City
Germany and Argentina tussled in the first match of the evening. Argentina seemed to have the upper hand until their first goal caused the Germans to up the ante. After that, Argentina seemed to step down a gear and permitted the Germans to dominate. Equalizing during the latter part of the second half, Germany had the upper hand for some time, but was unable to capitalize. The match entered extra time without any decision. A penalty shoot-out had to decide the winner: Germany won by 4 goals to Argentina’s 2.
Germany meet 
Italy in the next round.
Google seems never to stand still. 
To complete the Google roundup, there’s the addition of a 
The guys from 
Brazil meet 
France in the next round.
Ukraine in the next round.