The BASIS of SAP - Latest Comments

Re: Install SAP on Amazon Web Services #1 – The Environment

Monty Kalsi — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:12:37 -0000

Martin - Excellent instructions on SAP/Amazon AWS. We would love to have an expert like you on cumulusIQ Knowledge Marketplace. We have just launched the virtualization category and wanted to see if you would want to share your expertise.

Best,
Monty

Re: jonerp.com SAP Technical and Career site

sapmdmtutorials — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:15:43 -0000

Grete Post

Re: Upgrade to SAP ECC 6.0

GanttCharts — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:54:15 -0000

Very good post - I enjoyed this and it answered some questions I had.

Re: How to determine SAP Table Buffer Requirements

Sagar — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:59:25 -0000

hi,

good one ,, however how could we estimate the sizes for other buffers in ST02, especially the EXP/IMP,ESM,NTAB & TTAB

regards
SM

Re: jonerp.com SAP Technical and Career site

Jon Reed — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:49:29 -0000

Martin,

Thanks for your kind comments about my site. I've been meaning to post a comment to your blog for a while and this is certainly a relevant topic. :)

To give your readers something useful, I can tell you that my approach to analyzing SAP market trends is to combine a view of the future of SAP with a realistic look at the skills that are in demand in the present. This is not always easy to do, because sometimes the most-hyped skills (like eSOA skills for example), are not in huge demand on today's projects, but they remain important skills, in my view, to work towards for the future.

You're totally right about getting a gut check on job demand simply by searching job engines. SearchSAP uses the Dice.com search engine. I prefer Dice.com (or SearchSAP which is the same) over other job boards because I believe that the best volume of SAP contracts is found on Dice. When you do keyword searches on Dice, you can get a reality check on what skills are truly in demand. For example, for all the hype about SAP Duet, a search of Dice.com as of tonight shows only two Duet-related jobs, out of 55,000 IT jobs/contracts. This tells me that even though Duet is having some market acceptance (which we know for a fact), we also know that it's not a skill that's being contracted out currently. One more distinction I would suggest on Dice.com is to vary your searches between a full job description search and a job title search. For example, NetWeaver PI appears in 41 job descriptions, but it does not appear in any job titles in a "job title only" search. This is a way to learn which skills are currently part of a broader skill set, versus an SAP skill that has become important enough to stand on its own at the center of a job description. (and yes, I haven't overlooked xi - netweaver xi appears on 61 more job descriptions but only in one job title). At any rate, we can draw some important conclusions here about the skills in demand currently in the SAP world.

You're also right that while I do have some "hot SAP skills" list, I tend to be a little skeptical about hot skills lists in general, and I include a disclaimer in each list about the flaws of such lists. There's always a flaw in chasing hot SAP skills rather than building on your core competencies. Perhaps one of the only benefits of the economic downturn is that we are no longer hearing those breathless reports of SAP skills shortages. Even a year ago, I was trying to tell people that SAP skills needs were NOT across the board. There is still demand for certain SAP skills profiles, but it requires a combination of deep SAP experience topped off with the latest SAP technology exposure and some consulting polish. I write in detail on these various skills combinations on the site.

OK, I could go on but this is getting kind of long.

As one more benefit to your readers, I wanted to share my podcast feeds that I usually only share with my registered members on JonERP.com. I now have 39 podcasts pertaining to SAP skills and the "human side of SAP implementations" on JonERP.com - all of these are on the RSS feeds. The vast majority are interviews with key SAP experts or analysts. Perhaps you and I can do one of these sometime.

My RSS podcast feed for RSS readers (works well with Google Reader or podcast RSS players):

http://www.jonerp.com/rssfeeds/podcast_rssfeed.xml

My iTunes Store feed (all free podcasts):

http://www.jonerp.com/rssfeeds/podcast_itunesfe...

Martin, keep up the great work on the blog and I look forward to contributing further.

- Jon Reed -

Re: Support Package Manager - Reset Queue

martin_english — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:44:24 -0000

Thanks for the kind words, Gary

Re: Support Package Manager - Reset Queue

BusbySEOTesting — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:27:53 -0000

This is helpful. I wish I've known of your blog when I was still working on an SAP project. Look forward in getting more insight hereon and refer this to SAP user friends too. Cheers!

Re: Getting an SAP job

Daryl James — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:46:26 -0000

Great post. You're right, most look for specific advice with too many variables left unanswered. I like your approach. Thanks for the resources too.

Re: Getting an SAP job

Damian Cox — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:50:09 -0000

Hi Martin,

I couldn't agree more. My background is similar to your but I went the Analyst programmer path and there has been more than one occasion where I have been grateful for learning my trade under sysprogs who cherished every operation and every slice of memory.

Things aren't so different these days in SAP land and the premise that being a competent programmer is far more valuable than being able to code still holds true. Language is essentially irrelevant in the end ... that's what manuals are for,

These days I run data conversion teams and I will always take programmers and techno-functional guys that understand business processes over those that simply "know ABAP" or "know LSMW".

I liked reading your comment.

Damian Cox

Re: Getting an SAP job

martin_english — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:16:19 -0000

Actually, I'm not an ABAP developer. I'm a BASIS (old skool name) / Netweaver Technical (new name) Consultant. While I've been in IT for over 30 years, I've only been doing serious R3 / Netweaver BASIS work for about 8 years or so. While the other 22 years have little or no direct bearing on my R3 work, the experience - in mainframe systems programming, performance management and database administration - was a very good fit for the role of BASIS administrator of the old R2 systems (very basically, it was a 'green screen' mainframe version of SAP, that was proted to UNIX client server architechture as the original R3 2.x release).

As this was phased out, I moved over to implementing and supporting R3 and Netweaver systems. In also made sure that employers knew I was interested in R3, by keeping up with industry news and demonstrating that I knew what was out there in SAP products and services.

I still try to keep up to speed with all things BASIS, in as many releases as possible; for example I probably spend 10 - 15 hours a week supporting systems that are out of support for one or more of the operating system, DBMS, or SAP release. However, i also keep my hand in by installing and running the SAP provided trial installations..

Re: Getting an SAP job

FHIQ — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:35:28 -0000

How did you get your start doing sap abap developer work, and what career moves did you make to get to your current position?

Do you need a particular educational background?

Re: Getting an SAP job

Daryl James — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:49:24 -0000

We have a wealth of SAP Trend data and freelance opportunities over at oDesk that might supplement the suggested resources in this article. Just check out www.odesk.com/trends/sap.
- Daryl
oDesk

Re: Web 2.0 Reality Check, against SAP Portals

Darren Hague — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:18:55 -0000

That's exactly why we chose SAP NetWeaver as the target platform for ESME. We realised that if we were to deliver an Enterprise-focussed micromessaging system, we absolutely had to avoid the notorious downtimes experienced by the likes of Twitter.

Re: Generate SAP Installation Key

rajagopal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:02:11 -0000

i want i want SAP installation please send me

my mail ID mraja_gopal07@hotmail.com

Re: Mastering SAP Technology 2008 Conference

martin_english — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:12:38 -0000

What is interesting is that all these (with the exception of Wiki's) are available in SAP's Enterprise Portal product right now, with Wiki's due in mid / late 2009 (its based on confluence which i know jsp likes).

Re: Mastering SAP Technology 2008 Conference

jsp — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:42:50 -0000

" I was struck by how underutilised the SAP portal was in most sites (in Australia at least), with little or no use of Collaboration, Knowledge Management etc."
Spot on - I find many companies in ANZ might use EP as the front end but will opt for Documentum and E-rooms over KM and CROOMs. I wonder will this trend continue as Wiki's and Blogs have become more widely acceptable alternatives to structured knowledge management and collaboration.