jonerp.com SAP Technical and Career site
Just a quick post to highlight Jon Reed’s SAP technical and career related site
One useful page is the “hot skills” section which contains a list of hot SAP technical skills (although he does agree that “hot” is a bit of a stretch in the current economy). Jon admits to not being a huge fan of lists, but they can drive discussion. His lists (such as his SAP Technical Skills list), especially, I find to be thoughtfully selected, and his comments on why this or that item makes the list add value to that.
An earlier post of mine on certification linked to some podcasts and posts on SearchSAP.com I’ve since found out that most of this was organised and collated by Jon, as he has worked as their resident SAP career expert. Since I found this content so usefull, I’d like to point you to his own SAP training and certification podcast page. It covers (amongst other things) online training and the range of SAP training options. An example of his content, in this case on SAP certification:
One good exercise is to review current SAP jobs on sites like SearchSAP.com and see what kinds of skills are required. See how often certification is listed as required or preferred, and what other skills are needed. This will not only give you a better idea of what skills are truly hot, it will also help you to see how important certification really is (or isn’t). I think you’ll be surprised at how few SAP jobs actually require certification in order to apply.
Simple, sensible, straightforward advice, but…. its the only place I’ve seen it said.
5 SAP Strategies that architects and executives must understand
Most companies that use SAP do so because they have bought into the idea of deploying a broad, single vendor business suite. For large organizations, this is typically a multiyear, multimillion-dollar effort to transform the business. It can be a career maker or breaker, and most certainly it can make or break the company itself, but often we find the executives involved don’t pay much attention what SAP is doing after the contract is signed
One issue is that their ‘event horizon’ is just not big enough. Afterall, the blogosphere is full of article on Ruby and salesforce, and there’s new stuff to learn every day. Additionally, the SAP ecosystem is massive. For example, in 2007, Satyam alone had nearly 5,000 consultants and developers working for its SAP practice, and it had plans to grow its ERP practices by 50 percent during the next few years. At that time, the average deal size of a SAP implementation at Satyam was about $1.6 million, just on professional services.
Five SAP Strategies to Know
1. Product Release Strategy.Traditionally, SAP released products and made major changes to the underlying functionality on a (roughly) five-year schedule. So twice a decade, SAP’s customer base faced a tough decision. They could ignore the product improvements that their maintenance fees had helped to fund, or they could invest a significant amount of time and money in an upgrade project, which was usually disruptive, expensive and introduced a large amount of change for the user base. It was quite common for companies to delay or defer releases. However, the risks associated with lack of support meant that most organizations wouldn’t go longer than eight to 10 years between upgrades.” (For more on SAP’s maintenance fees, see “SAP Raises Software Maintenance Fees for New Customers” and “The Man Behind ‘Half Off’ Third-Party Software Maintenance.”)
In late 2005, SAP finally started to fix this release gap with the shipment of the Netweaver Products, including ERP 6.0. Instead of having to implement five years of enhancements and improvements in one massive project, SAP now allows you to implement a continuous innovation strategy. The major applications in SAP ERP and the SAP Business Suite are now upgraded through enhancement packages issued every six to 12 months. These enhancement packages are provided at no cost to customers on maintenance, and deployment is optional. Each enhancement package includes new and improved functionality across a variety of product and industry applications.
What this means for SAP customers is that they can upgrade their systems gradually without the kind of massively expensive and disruptive projects that have traditionally characterized SAP upgrades. For example, ERP 6.0 has shipped three enhancement packages already. SAP executives have realized that organisations with global deployments, multi-terabyte databases, and tens of thousands of users simply cannot afford to do monolithic upgrades anymore.
2. Growth Strategy.SAP has a business strategy that is fundamentally focused on organic revenue growth. As an organisation, they have always been confident about their ability to develop new products and improve existing ones. More recently, though, the company has moved to both expand its product offerings to its customers with acquisitions and mergers, as well as move into new markets with products like Duet. (See “SAP Pays Partners, Goes with Gusto for SMB Customers” for more on SAP’s SMB strategy.)
However, SAP derives most of its revenue from its installed customer base. In short, their objective is to ensure that customers never stop buying licenses, maintenance, and services. This means SAP is constantly working to upsell existing ERP customers into the full Business Suite, and it has invested heavily in products aimed at information workers who don’t necessarily use transactional applications.” (For more on software licensing, see “Software Licensing and Pricing Is Still Too Complex and Costly.”)
Therefore, customers should expect their SAP sales reps to be pitching: self-service applications, financial and business performance management, Microsoft Office integration, and much of the ‘Business Objects’ portfolio of reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.
SAP believes its customers are inclined toward a single vendor strategy, and will work hard to capitalize on this tendency.
3. Platform Strategy. The current SAP platform strategy was originated in 2003, when SAP packaged up its technology components and unveiled the earliest version of the NetWeaver product set.
The idea was that the underlying technology and architecture would be seperate from the business applications. SAP had to build the platform anyway in order to develop its service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based product line. They believed that making it publicly available would enhance SAP’s reputation as a technology leader, and it could potentially become an additional source of product revenue.
SAP has continues to refine and market the idea of a “business process platform,” which is made up of SAP’s Business Suite applications, a repository of enterprise services, and the NetWeaver technology platform. What’s important to understand is that SAP customers have to use NetWeaver because their applications won’t run without it. That means that the optional components, such as SAP’s business intelligence, portal, and integration, become an easier choice than other competing products, just because they are already available and installed, waiting to be used.
4. Industry Strategy. A major SAP attribute over the years has been offering products to key vertical industries that had unique needs in their applications. Based on a combination of internal and customer sponsored development, SAP now has more than 25 separate industry solutions across a range of industries from mining and manufacturing to higher education and financial services. These are supported by collaboration between product management teams, dedicated developers, and industry value networks (IVNs) of customers and partners that define the requirements for these extensions. This has enabled SAP to corner market share in the high-value oil and gas, chemicals, and life science industries.
More recently, SAP is useing the same “blueprint” to go after other industries, such as retail, insurance, education, banking and public sector. It’s likely that SAP will use acquisitions, investments, and partnerships to address these industry requirements (essentially, buying industry expertise).
The downside of this is that Customers in areas where SAP is very well established may find that their enhancement requests have a somewhat lower priority than industries that SAP has designated as strategic. Customers or prospects in the new areas that SAP is addressing may find SAP willing to commit resources and sponsor joint development projects in order to fill holes in industry applications. Furthermore, Companies in these industries that are willing to be referral accounts will have lots of negotiating leverage if they are willing to tolerate immature applications.
5. Product Strategy. Ten years ago, SAP was known as a one-product company, with a much less confusing naming convention for its products and releases (R/1, R/2, R/3).
Since then, SAP has accumulated dozens of products with a massivce number of options, variants and names. In some cases, this was the result of miguided marketing (SAP R/3, MySAP.com and EnjoySAP were essentially the same thing). A more dominant reason was the industry consolidation that resulted in large ERP vendors like SAP competing in many adjacent software categories, such as CRM, supply chain management, and product lifecycle management. These products are complementary products to existing ERP systems. They aren’t aimed at the CIO and IT but at the business users, in areas like performance management, regulatory compliance and analytics.
Large enterprises, especially, must take a very long view of their application strategy. One of the important issues for is knowing what happens after 2013. The SAP Business Suite maintenance windows are stable until then, apart from the regular enhancement package releases. However, they must consider the risk, how slight it is, that they may be faced with another product transition like the one from R/3 to Netweaver
The current Business Suite should remain SAP’s flagship product line well beyond the 2013 maintenance window. While the earliest forms of Netweaver were officially launched in 1999, development has recently completed on a fully SOA-based suite, and there are still a significant percentage of customers that haven’t upgraded from R/3. Launching another new product would alienate these groups, and (currently) SAP is under no pressure from its customers or its competitors to move to a new technology and it is unlikely to be in the next few years.
Support Package Manager - Reset Queue
Occassionally, when loading Support Packages or SPAM/SAINT Updates, the Support Package Manager (transaction SPAM) can get a bit ‘confused’. A colleaugue had this problem recently, where she was attempting to update the SPAM tool on a 4.6C system. The result was that the Support Package Manager was reporting Queue_Not_Empty .
Some times the cause is simply forgetting to confirm / finish the last SPAM/SAINT update. Once you’ve eliminated this, you need to start checking what the TMS mechanism thinks has happened. To check what is in the TMS buffers, logon to the Operating System, change directories to /usr/sap/trans/bin and execute the following: Basically you need to reset the SPAM Queue to match the TMS buffers. To remove entries from the internal SPAM Queue, uUse the function module (transaction SE37) OCS_RESET_QUEUE. Execute it with parameters IV_TOOL=SPAM, IV_FORCE=X. To remove entries from the TMS buffer, execute the following command (change directory to /usr/sap/trans/bin first), where SAPKXXXXX is the ‘offending’ Support package or SPAM/SAINT Update: Before restarting the Support Package import, ensure that you’ve removed all files from \usr\sap\trans\tmp and make sure there is no other TP process or R3trans process running in the system at Operating system level. Usefull Links:
tp SHOWBUFFER
tp delfrombuffer SAPKXXXXX
Errors During Support Package Manager Phases
SAP Patch Manager (SPAM) PDF
Critical security flaw in SAP GUI
An ActiveX vulnerability detected in the SAP GUI may possibly be exploited by an attacker to gain access to critical files and sensitive data. According to an advisory issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the vulnerability can be exploited remotely by an unauthenticated hacker. The flaw is in the ActiveX control, MDrmSap, which could crash Internet Explorer when handling malicious code, US-CERT said. The advisory also states that the vulnerable ActiveX control can be disabled in Internet Explorer by setting the appropriate kill bit, or by disabling ActiveX in the Internet Zone,
The Danish vulnerability clearinghouse Secunia gave the flaw a highly critical rating. To exploit the flaw, an attacker must trick a user into viewing a malicious website or email message, Secunia said.
SAP issued an update correcting the flaw. If you don’t have an OSS ID, you can view a PDF copy of the note - However, the one on the SAP site is guaranteed to be up to date, whereas the one here may not be.
How to determine SAP Table Buffer Requirements
I had one of those ‘doh’ moments during a recent SAP performance performance tuning workshop. The instructor, Tim Bohlsen, pointed out a remarkably easy way to discover how large a table buffer that a running ABAP WAS system instance requires to reduce buffer swaps to zero.
This is important because the easiest way to reduce your database I/O in ANY application, SAP or not, is to reduce the need to go to disk. Keeping data in the Application buffer improves response time by reducing the time (both the CPU time and the I/O time) requiried by the DBMS to continually retrieve that data.
In the case of an ABAP engine, you use transaction ST02 to determine if there is any swapping going on in the first place. In the case shown below, both table buffers have some swapping - it is a relatively well tuned HR/PY system, so there isn’t much table buffer swapping despite the sytem being up for two months. Oh, and there isn’t much point in doing this on any other system except the one you wish to tune as it will be extremely difficult to replicate the load of the target system.
Select the images to open larger versions in another window or tab
In this case, we will look at the Generic Key Buffer, since it is the the worst of the two Table Buffers. Selecting the buffer in question, by double cliking on the line, results in a screen showing a little bit more detail. This has some usefull navigation features. As shown below, we are looking at the current status of the buffer, but we have the option to look at the history of the buffer. This can give us an idea of when the swaps occurred, which we can then track back to certain workloads. Moe importantly, we can look at the current status of the individual objects in the buffer.
Now we have the statistics for individual tables (or parts thereof ) that are currently loaded into this Buffer. This data is usefull in and of itself, which I will touch on in a later post, but first, select the Next View button.
The value highlighted below is the total value for Size maximum [bytes]. This is the sum of the highwater mark for each table that has been loaded into the buffer so far. In other words, the amount of storage required to accept all data requests that should be buffered, without swapping, since the instance was started.
Now, you could put this value straight in to the appropriate profile parameter and restart your system, but there are a couple of caveats.
- If a table is marked to be buffered, but has not been read yet, it will not be included in the buffer or, therefore, the buffer size yet,
- You need to examine the detail of both the snapshot and the history to determine if the correct tables are buffered or if they are correctly buffered (the Invalidations total suggests that there is some work to do in this area), and, most importantly,
- This does not tell you if you have sufficient storage available to fulfill any increase in the buffer size without causing problems elsewhere
So, make sure your system has been through a pay run, or a month-end (or whatever the appropriate business cycle is) before you use this method to measure the requirement,
use sappfpar to validate the storage requirements of your new profile parameters, and
be aware that this is only the first step towards efficient use of all of the available resources.
This won’t fix all your performance problems. However, it is an important first step. Your database vendor may make the most efficient database engine there is, but calling any DBMS to get data will always be slower than getting that data from memory.
Web 2.0 Reality Check, against SAP Portals
Dennis Howlett has stirred up a hornets nest recently by pointing out that the Web 2.0 Emperor has no clothes, especially when it comes to the enterprise.
Enterprise has had enough of incremental step change where the ROI is questionable at best. The trending down of technology prices goes some way to redressing that imbalance but arguing that technology is cheap ergo high ROI is facile. As I have repeatedly said on this and other blogs, there are genuine barriers to adoption that make even free look expensive. My Irregular colleague Susan Scrupski thinks that’s a griping argument. Sure. But it is recurrent and current with few easy answers in sight. I suspect a part of the problem is because those most active in pushing these solutions have little idea about organizational dynamics or what makes people tick. I don’t say that lightly. Check out Oliver Marks blog and his experiences at large organizations.
Why does this matter in the SAP world ?
For a realistic comparison, my last SAP implementation (not upgrade) had a gloabl reach, required 5 nines reliability (scheduled application downtime is 6 hours every 3 months), and a Disater Recovery metric of 30 minutes RTO (with an RPO of 10 minutes) after a data centre disaster, for multiple mult-terrabyte databases. The customer’s management team was experienced, knew the implicit difficulties in this, and knew it would cost money. However, they were able to justify the spend, based on their business requirements.
Compare this SLA against the Google Apps Mail outages in March 2008, the Google App Engine failure (June 2008) and another Google Apps outage in October 2008.
You don’t have control over the cloud, which means you don’t have control over your data, whether you’re talking about the physical security, or secured access once the data is available.
On the other hand, with tools like ESME, the wikis and rooms available on SAP Portals, and sensible well designed Web Dynpros, under pinned by the new Java Engine architechture, you have the technology to provide your users and customers with Web 2.0 like systems, in a secure, scalable, stable environment.
Howto avoid irj/portal in the portal URL
Actually, its a bit of a cheat. What happens is that you’re telling the J2EE WAS that if there is no page specified (such as …/index.html), then open the page …/irj/portal.
1. Go to j2ee visual administrator
2. For each Server, Navigate to Cluster-> Server -> Services -> HTTP Provider
3. Enter /irj/portal in the Start Page Text Field
4. Click on Save Properties
5. Restart this service from visual administrator
Access http://yourserver.yourdomain.com and your portal login page should come up.
This means that your SAP J2EE Engine Start Page will still show up if you http://yourserver.yourdomain.com/index.html
Getting an SAP job
The most popular SAP-related question I see is some variant on “How do I get into SAP?” The promise of a rich career with the world’s largest enterprise applications company attracts a lot of interest from university graduates, IT professionals seeking to switch fields and consultants eager for recurring engagements.
Rather than offering specific advice, because evryone’s position is different, I’d suggest that you educate yourself about the various business and technical contexts in which SAP operates. The more you learn, the more you’ll learn which part of SAP appeals to you, or even whether SAP is right for you in the first place. It’s an investment that may get you into the SAP door, and it will keep paying off, as you will get into the habit of staying up to date with SAP developments.
An excellent resource to help you build your SAP intelligence is SearchSAP, who have an excellent catalog of podcasts containing valuable advice and direction for SAP job seekers. If you don’t have the time to listen to them immediately, download them and listen to them on a commute to work or on a plane. Some notable recent podcasts for SAP job seekers:
- SAP and SOA: Want to know how SOA is changing the SAP careers field? Listen to SAP expert Rabi Jay explain how SOA is changing SAP’s product set and rewarding particular skills over others.
- The SAP skills shortage: What it means for you. The good news for SAP job seekers is that SAP demand is higher than qualified supply. Some areas of SAP are more open than others. In this podcast, David Foote explains which SAP areas are paying the most and which areas are not as hot.
- SAP explains its certification program: SAP offers three levels of certification. Learn what the levels are, why SAP thinks certification is important for hiring managers and why getting certified by SAP partners instead of by SAP may be pointless.
- How can ABAP developers survive in a NetWeaver era?: ABAP is SAP’s proprietary development language, but recent moves towards SOA (particularly in NetWeaver) have offset the once-unchallengeable status of ABAP. Developers should listen to this podcast to learn how to polish their skills for the SAP jobs of tomorrow.
Another extremely good resource is the SAP Developer Network. This is designed for practicing SAPers, so the Getting Started link is about getting started in the Software Devloper Network, but some usefull posts include:
- Trial Versions of SAP Software: How to obtain and install the free trial versions of SAP software. The best news is that these will run in Virtual machines, so you can install several different versions (Linux, Windows, DB2, maxdb) and experiement.
- SDN Subscriptions. SDN subscriptions offer on-line convenience, lower-cost, term-based access to the educational content, SAP software and the related services, designed for peopel and organisations who know they need SAP knowledge, but don’t have access to (or can’t afford) full time class room training and consulting.
2 ways to Measure Exact Throughput of a TCP IP network
One of the sizing issues with an SAP system that doesn’t receive due consideration is the network capability; not just speed, but throughput. It’s always usefull to know what your Network is capable of, especially if you have lots of data to move (Support Packs / Support Stacks and so on). But how do we find out?
NetCPS (a single executable file) is rather simplistic, with no fancy features as the author (credits to Jarle Aase) says. It pumps 100MB of generated data (without accessing the HDD which could mess with the final result) and then displays the result in form of average speed stated in both KB/s and MB/s. You can also get source code if you’d like to do some further tinkering with it, or port it. Everything you need to know is on the webpage or available by using -help switch.
Another, more sophisticated, tool (without being too big) is Iperf (a single executable, with source available on the same page). Settings are changed by use of various switches.
For example, the image above shows the port used is changed to 1234, amount of sent data set to 200 MB, interval of reports set to 2 seconds for better accuracy and report format set to MBytes. The usual -help switch brings up further instructions for changing the many additional switches and settings available with this tool
SAP Certification Changes and SAP Careers
On a recent SearchSAP podcast, SAP explains the new certification options that are available. There’s also some detail coming to light on the SAP Certification site.
The original level of SAP certification is now called the “Associate” level, aimed at inexperenced practitioners. SAP is also rolling out the “Professional” level certification for people with more extensive project experience with system integration, and applying the “Associate” skills against the Customer requirements. This is a more rigorous certification program, where project experience will be mandataory, so may carry more weight with Customers and therefore employers. Most of these certifications are available now.
There is also a third level of certification on the way also, called the “Master” level, designed for the Project or Team Leader with 10 years or more experience. These should be available from the 4th quarter 2008 onwards. Some other key points to takeaway:
- if you’re going to invest in certification, invest in SAP’s own three-tiered certification offering, which is the only official, SAP-recognized certification offering in the marketplace. Lots of third parties currently offer SAP ‘certification,’ but SAP is going to be more aggressive about regulating these kinds of claims.
- Certification is most important at the early stages of an SAP career, but fades in importance later on. It is in response to this that SAP offers a ‘master’ tier of certification to recognize and reward senior-level consultants and their experience.
- SAP’s certification seeks to encourage and enable lifelong learning. It is part of the process of becoming a better SAP consultant. Thus, certification is not an end but a means.
- There are plans to enable a social network, providing personalised training paths and discounts based on your existing and planned certifications.
Some sample questions are already available on the levels, certification focus areas, and exam preparation.pages, including
- SAP Certified Development Associate – Java with SAP NetWeaver 7.0
- SAP Certified Development Associate – ABAP with SAP NetWeaver
Depending on where you are located, and at what stage you are at in your career, you may be wondering if SAP Certification is worth spending time and money on anyway. In the BASIS field particularly, the arguments revolve around SAP specific skills versus real life experience, especially nowadays where there is so much more to maintaiing SAP systems than just the SAP systems themselves. The article does have a useful comment from John Reed, the SearchSap Careers Expert. I’ve pulled some extracts from John’s comment:
Back in the 1990s, it was possible to land an SAP job with “certification only” because there weren’t enough experienced consultants, and “Big Six firms” on large project sites were able to field teams with plenty of junior-level consultants who did not have any hands-on SAP experience other than their classroom certifications.
And there are fewer “big bang” type implementations where companies just open the floodgates and hire hundreds of consultants regardless of experience level. As a result, even though the SAP consulting market is very healthy, the power of SAP certification to land that all-important first project has diminished over the years, and I don’t expect that power to return.
Sometimes I have found that SAP hypes its own certification, but often, I find that it’s the job seekers themselves who latch onto certification and hype it for themselves.
…..many aspiring SAP professionals view certification as the easy (if expensive) way to open a door into the SAP field that is not always easy to open.
how many SAP jobs require certification? The answer is: only a small percentage. Project references are so much more important,
I think knowing how to make your current skills appealing to SAP customers and their IT departments may be more important. One good exercise is to review current SAP jobs on sites like SearchSAP.com and see what kinds of skills are required.
The key to breaking into SAP remains hard work, good overall technical and business skills, and savvy self-marketing.
Some of his comments resonate with me and my career. I had general Mainframe Systems Programming (DOS and MVS, CICS and a mixture of Databases) experience, but also Windows PC programming experience, when I applied for a job at an SAP R/2 site that was looking for a Capacity Planner. I was able to leverage my mainframe skills (JCL, CICS, Assembler, and DB2) into a Job with the R/2 BASIS group. A couple of years later, I applied for a job with an outsourcing company with a strong SAP Practice, on the condition that I was to be transitioned into R/3 BASIS. This was back when the 3.x releases of SAP were being implemented.