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Digging deeper on databases

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:21:00 GMT

Irfan Khan, senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), Database and Technology, SAP and former CTO of Sybase, spoke to Eleanor Reader about the opportunities SAP’s complete database portfolio presents for customers to create a strategy to utilise big and unstructured data.

ISAP: There has been a lot of hype about HANA recently but SAP's database offering also includes the Sybase database products. How do the different solutions in this area fit together?

Irfan Khan: SAP acquired Sybase to drive mobility and be the leader in SAP's pursuit of mobility in the market. The database technologies of Sybase were a value-add and a bonus.

Sybase is an underpinning to all things real-time by virtue of HANA being real-time. There is a whole host of use cases [which can be accessed] by adding Sybase technology, particularly technologies like Sybase IQ which is very much complementary to HANA, where you can utilise IQ as a point solution or for BW installations running on top of HANA. So Sybase and SAP technologies are coming together under the banner of what we refer to as the SAP Real-Time Data Platform (RTDP).

ISAP: How do you see the database products evolving in the future and how will this position SAP compared to its competitors?

IK: We have a substantial install base that will provide great levels of innovation and product enhancements to their environment. Where we see the value of this collective set of technologies coming together and then being able to compete in the market is by making real-time platforms available to customers en masse.

If you compare that with the competition, what they tend to do is drive into a very monolithic and extremely closed platform. It doesn't really give customers a lot of choice in terms of what they deploy their hardware or software on, or the openness of the platform that they can choose. So SAP’s view is really to provide a platform that’s very comprehensive.

ISAP: What are the most innovative use cases you are seeing across the database space at the moment?

IK: We’re working with Stanford University on trying to help diagnose the treatment for a patient that’s suffering from cancer. Imagine once you have been given the extremely bad news that you may be suffering from cancer, you have to go through a whole host of tests that typically take anything between six to nine weeks. So the use case specifically in the space of medicine is to use HANA to dramatically increase the analysis that you are able to do in a short period of time.

In some instances, when you look at testing for particular variations of cancer, we can run 600 times faster certain tests. That will result in HANA being used to guarantee that you will be able to get treatment hopefully much sooner.

ISAP: What particular challenges for organisations does that proliferation of unstructured data present?

IK: The biggest challenge is how to harvest insights from unstructured data. Studies carried out by Gartner talk about a 650 per cent rise in unstructured data in the next two to three years. We have to be able to have a substantial capability to deal with that massive influx of data, and I don’t think a lot of customers are quite prepared, because they have been using traditional and kind of existing technologies to deal with unstructured data. You have to open up the innovation opportunities entirely because a lot of companies are accruing a lot of data.

ISAP: Do organisations need people with different skills to truly take advantage of the potential presented by big data?

IK: The skill-set is really the biggest challenge that we have to deal with. One key area that we are focusing on is really putting big data processing in the hands of the general public or general business by utilising well-known and interesting skills like SQL. You’ve got to provide a way of abstracting the complexity that big data represents. So having a single platform, which is really what SAP HANA is, that allows you to [use] big data in terms of transactions, in terms of analytics, in terms of predictive in a single platform, and perhaps even sentiment analysis if you choose to do that, is a significant advancement.

ISAP: How can organisations take advantage of more business users having access to analytics and big data?

IK: If businesses want to become much more analytically focused, there are two key things they need to do – provide much more self-service, so customers can actually start doing things and business users can start doing things for themselves without having to go to IT; and allow them to do things without being inhibited, so they are not stopped from asking certain questions, because that’s really not going to give them the outcome that they want anyway.

ISAP: Do companies need to stop thinking about just a database and instead think about an enterprise technology platform?

IK: If customers buy into a broader technology vision and are prepared to make investments in either training or in terms of mindshare, then they will gain a lot more value from more of a end-to-end type of platform.

On the Move: New director of Loftware Asia Pacific

Fri, 17 May 2013 04:48:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Enterprise labelling solution provider, Loftware, has named Andy Chew as director of its Asia-Pacific region, based in Singapore.

Chew brings 20 years of Asia-Pacific software sale experience to the role, in which he is responsible for overseeing sales and business development throughout the Asia Pacific region and enhancing relationships with Loftware’s customers and partners.

Robert Rae, Loftware’s vice president of sales and business development, says they are delighted to welcome Chew to the team.

“Andy brings a wealth of enterprise labeling experience and a proven track record of supporting partners and addressing customers’ enterprise labeling requirements,” he said.

The appointment builds on Loftware’s growth in the Asia Pacific market and further enforces its dedication to customers and partners in the region, the company stated.

“Loftware has experienced exceptional growth in the Asia Pacific area during the past couple of years,” said Robert O’Connor, Loftware president and CEO.

“As leaders in enterprise labeling, Loftware is committed to further expanding its global presence; the addition of Andy Chew in our Singapore headquartered Loftware Asia Pacific underscores that commitment.”

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SAPPHIRE NOW: SAP Fiori and the latest version of Business One announced on day two

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:10:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

In a big mobility announcement, SAP has released its first wave of new business apps with SAP Fiori and a new version of SAP Business One.

Twenty-five new apps to simplify and improve business function

SAP has launched SAP Fiori, a collection of 25 apps for broadly used SAP software functions, such as workflow approvals, information lookups and self-service tasks.

The company worked with over 250 customers to garner which of the most common business functions could be improved and simplified.

“We are on a mission to renew the experience across all of our applications. Users demand simplicity and ease of use, and SAP Fiori brings this experience to our customers,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation.

The apps can be used on mobile devices, tablets and desktops using browsers that support HTML5 and deployed as a collection of apps with a single launch pad, as multiple web apps, or consumed from SAP or third-party portals.

The first release of SAP Fiori includes apps for manager, employee, sales representative and purchasing agent roles.

Version 9.0 of SAP Business One announced

SAP has announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL.

The latest version of the SME business management solution has over 50 new features, including greater collaboration with the Ariba Network, newly integrated development environments for partners, consultants and customer IT employees and a central location for implementation and configuration tools.

The 9.0 version of Business One on HANA is now in restricted shipment, SAP stated.

Read all the SAP announcements from SAPPHIRE NOW 2013 Day One.

SAPPHIRE NOW: SAP and HP's prototype system, the latest HANA features and a new version of BusinessObjects on day three

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

The most important SAP announcements from Day Three of SAPPHIRE NOW.

SAP BusinessObjects BI version 4.1

The 4.1 version of the SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions have been released to customers.

The new advancements are designed to make the suite more unified and personal so customers can gain all their insights and information from one place, SAP stated.

Planned features of the release include SAP Lumira, support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive, improved access to Oracle's Exadata, OLAP and Essbase and new SAP Crystal Server software and the Edge edition of SAP BusinessObjects BI software tailored to small and midsize companies.

"This release will best serve our customer's needs of providing end-users with autonomy while empowering IT to provide a BI solution that allows for standardising and sharing of information," said Adam Binnie, general manager and global vice president, Business Intelligence, SAP.

"Our customers are demanding big data-ready solutions that seamlessly incorporate real time data streams and can handle multiple data sources.”

The latest features for the SAP HANA platform

SAP has shared its latest innovations on the SAP HANA platform, including features for big data and spatial processing.

One new feature is the introduction of smart data access technology for Hadoop and other heterogeneous data sources.

According to SAP, this will help customers build real-time big data applications while minimising unnecessary data transfers and data redundancy.

The platform will be further expanded with new spatial data processing capabilities “to combine geospatial data with business data, adding a new dimension to real-time business applications”, SAP stated.

A new version of SAP HANA One, a cloud offering introduced a few months ago which currently has around 600 customers, has also been announced.

The offering is packaged with access to a trial edition of SAP Lumira software and sample public datasets.

In addition, the premium edition of SAP HANA One is now available and is packaged with SAP HANA Cloud Integration “to provide integration with SAP systems and heterogeneous sources”.

Lastly, SAP announced that the integration of Sybase technologies on HANA is complete.

SAP and HP demonstrate system prototype

SAP and HP have demonstrated a prototype system using SAP HANA for the first time on the SAPPHIRE NOW stage.

The joint initiative, named ‘Project Kraken’, is a test system built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimised with the SAP HANA database for SAP Business Suite.

According to SAP, Project Kraken’s goal is to provide customers additional choice in scalability for large, online transaction processing applications, with requirements for real-time analytical insights into this data.

“The combination of our best technologies – SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure – revolutionises in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP.

“With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organisations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”

The prototype system, optimised with 16 Intel Xeon processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) central processing units (CPUs) and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads, SAP stated.

These workloads include supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data analysis.

The desired outcome of the project, according to SAP, is to create a marketable solution capable of scaling to the highest levels of memory within a single server for speeding business operations.

Read all the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW news from Day One and Day Two.

SAPPHIRE NOW: Cloud, sport and mobility the focus of SAP's day one announcements

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

All the latest SAP announcements from Day One of SAPPHIRE NOW.

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is here

Building on the announcement of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud last week, SAP is taking real-time and the cloud even further with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

The real-time platform will be the foundation for the entire SAP cloud portfolio, including line-of-business cloud applications, the cloud-enabled Ariba Network, social collaboration solutions, and a managed cloud environment for SAP HANA, the company stated.

“Our message to customers is simple: you can have your cloud, your way in real time, with a beautiful user experience, from the trusted leader in enterprise business solutions. With the new SAP HANA Cloud Platform as the foundation for all of our offerings, we are proud to be the trusted innovator to accelerate business value in the cloud,” said Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEOs of SAP AG.

SAP sets its sights on the sports and entertainment industry

SAP has been carving out major partnerships with big names the sports industry since 2012, so it was no surprise that Cco-CEO Bill McDermott was joined on stage by the commissioner of the NBA and CEO of the San Francisco 49ers to announce the SAP for Sports and Entertainment solution portfolio.

Examples of portfolio include scouting solutions for professional sports franchises, gaining insights from big data to enhance on-field performance, two-way dialogue between teams and fan through statistical insights and fantasy initiatives, more access to information for the media and better streamlined logistical and revenue operations for major events, venues and concert promoters.

“The world-class organisations represented on stage at SAPPHIRE NOW today – and many more across the world – are embracing the value that breakthrough technologies such as SAP HANA, the SAP Cloud portfolio and advanced CRM and ticketing can bring to the fan experience,” said McDermott.

SAP announces new mobile portfolio and partnership

SAP has launched SAP Mobile Secure, an enterprise mobility management solution portfolio designed to provide customers with enterprise-grade security for devices, apps and content.

The portfolio includes a new software-as-a-service (Saas) solution, the cloud edition of the SAP Afaria mobile device management solution, which allows customers to manage mobile devices for one Euro per month per device in the cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services.

The portfolio also focuses on security challenges enterprises face, such as BYOD, by enabling security of the device, apps and content for mobile devices, including iOS, Windows and Android devices.

“With SAP Mobile Secure, we want to make it easy for CIOs to bring comprehensive mobile security to all layers of their mobile infrastructure at the lowest TCO possible. The SAP Mobile Secure solution portfolio is integrated with the SAP Mobile Platform, allowing developers to build in security at the right time,” said Sanjay Poonen, president of Technology Solutions and the Mobile Division, SAP.

Part of this portfolio is the SAP Mobile App Protection solution by Mocana, following SAP’s announced partnership with the global security startup.

The partnership with Mocana is forecasted to help customers expedite deployment of secure mobile apps, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, retail, healthcare and government, SAP stated.

SAP releases self-service business intelligence offering, Lumira

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

In a move SAP is touting as the next step in its “self-service business intelligence vision”, the company has announced the availability of SAP Lumira.

Formerly known as SAP Visual Intelligence software, Lumira and Lumira Cloud are SAP’s latest offerings for enterprise self-service BI.

Lumira Cloud is built in HTML5 and allows for out-of-the-box integration on-premise data, as well as providing native support for SAP HANA.

According to SAP, users can create, share and interact with data visualisations in the cloud; upload, download and share documents from SAP Lumira; publish datasets from Lumira to Lumira Cloud; access data sets and analytics via web browsers and mobile devices; and upload and share other types of documents, such as documents from SAP Crystal Reports software, files from SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

"In today's big data environment, companies need to capture the massive amounts of data and be able to quickly make sense of it all," said Dan Vesset, program vice president, IDC.

"This means going beyond basic reports and spreadsheets to a truly self-service approach designed for ease of use and that delivers a combination of speed and engaging visualisations.”

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OpenText EIM products to support SAP HANA, cloud and mobility
Tuesday, May 14, 2013

OpenText EIM products to support SAP HANA, cloud and mobility

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

OpenText has expanded its ECM Suite for SAP Solutions to support SAP HANA, and SAP cloud and mobility solutions.

The company is the first SAP partner to offer solutions that have been fully tested and confirmed by SAP to be integrated with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.

The expanded suite is expected to extend the value of SAP Business Suite software as an end-to-end solution, addressing strategy to execution and helping enable business transformation, OpenText said.

Additionally, OpenText solutions resold by SAP as the SAP Digital Asset Management and the SAP Document Presentment applications by OpenText are available with the SAP 360 Customer solution.

“The OpenText ECM Suite for SAP Solutions is intended to offer businesses a holistic, value-based and integrated approach to managing enterprise content," said Patrick Barnert, senior vice president, Partners and Alliances at OpenText.

"With OpenText ECM suite now supporting SAP HANA as well as SAP cloud and mobility solutions we are not only reinforcing our commitment to our two-decade relationship with SAP, but also our commitment to empowering customers with comprehensive EIM solutions."

New additions to OpenText’s SAP portfolio include the Invoice-to-Pay solution – a hybrid on-premises and cloud-based solution that can leverage the Ariba network – the SAP Cloud for Travel solution and new mobile applications, such as Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions, Employee File Management for SAP Solutions, and the SAP Portal Content Management application by OpenText.

OpenText ECM is one of the five core products of OpenText Enterprise Information Management (EIM).

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Revelation Software Concepts releases Salt 2.7

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Revelation Software Concepts (RSC) today announced Salt v2.7 advanced change intelligence software for IT infrastructures based on SAP solutions.

The new version extends licensing, tightens security, delivers faster performance, allows easier configuration on load-balanced or high-demand systems, reduces storage requirements, and gives broader coverage of all licensed systems, RSC said in a statement.

“The new licensing terms and powerful new features make Salt for SAP solutions even more valuable for any size or number of systems,” said Dave Gordon, CIO at RSC.

“This new version boosts visibility into current data flows and developing issues on an SAP solution-based infrastructure of any size, while shrinking its own resource usage – in essence, it does more for less.”

Salt version 2.7 will continue to use the same maintenance-free virtual appliance dashboard already used for Salt.

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SAP merges HANA and the cloud

Thu, 09 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

In a big announcement this week, SAP has taken the next step with its HANA phenomenon by launching SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

Through the service, running mission-critical SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and new and unprecedented applications powered by SAP HANA will be possible as a managed cloud service with elastic petabyte scale, SAP stated.

Sikka admitted that cloud computing is typically used for simple applications, not mission-critical applications, so it was important for SAP to make sure the benefits of the cloud came at no compromise to its customers.

“For a little bit more than two years, we’ve been working on how can be bring the power of HANA into the world of the cloud,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and the Global Managing Board, heading technology and innovation, SAP.

Sikka said early responses to the new offering have been much better than expected, with the company currently working with dozens of customers.

“I expected a dozen to showcase and a handful would be live, but the interest kept rising. Last week we were at 47, earlier today I found out our number has gone up to 60,” he said on Wednesday.

The service is currently only available directly from SAP, however according to Sikka the company sees an opportunity to make SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud available via partners over time.

SAP announced its plans to implement an open ecosystem strategy with its managed service providers to offer the capabilities of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud from their data centres, as well as from multiple SAP data centres worldwide.

Details on this initiative, use cases and partners will be revealed at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held 14-16 May in Orlando, Florida, said Sikka.

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Infosys collaborates with SAP on retail mobile apps

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:11:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Infosys has announced it is collaborating with SAP to develop mobile applications for the retail industry.

The applications are aimed at giving consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies access to sales representatives and merchandisers anytime, anywhere.

The two companies have collaborated to develop the SAP Retail Execution mobile application version 3.0, which powers the work Infosys does for CPG companies, along with their merchandisers and promotions planners.

"SAP Retail Execution helps CPG companies boost return on brand and promotion investments by increasing promotional compliance and monitoring the success of new products,” said Rajesh Murthy, global head of SAP practice, Infosys.

In addition, the app also aids sales forces by making their mobile devices data friendly and allows them to perform in-store activities like surveys, audits, order taking, promotion compliance and other functions.

According to Infosys, it will continue to cooperate with SAP on the development of future versions of SAP Retail Execution.

“Our partnership with SAP creates new opportunities for organisations to maximise the data their systems generate, which improves the speed and confidence of their decision-making," Murthy said.

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Plaut IT acquires Malaysia-based Baseliner

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Plaut IT Australia has expanded its reach into the Asia-Pacific Japan region through the acquisition of offshore service provider, Baseliner.

Baseliner is an SAP service partner headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with a primary focus on providing SAP application management support, as well as specialising in Basis, BI, CRM, and ABAP project related services.

The company will run independently from Plaut and be led by its KL-based managing director, Charles Sigmon.

“Adding offshore capabilities to our existing portfolio of expertise enables Plaut customers to leverage competitive advantage from globally distributed talent pools and allows us to provide remote services into the South East Asian region for local and global SAP customers,” said Plaut CEO Sebastian Moore.

Plaut chairman, David Prior, said taking a controlling interest in Baseliner advances Plaut’s stated objectives of strengthening its SAP consulting services business in Australia.

“The complementary skill set of both companies will ensure Plaut delivers customers a competitive portfolio of SAP services onshore, near shore and now offshore,” he said.

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Sikka spruiks HANA and Design Thinking in first Australian visit

Fri, 03 May 2013 05:55:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Dr Vishal Sikka visited Australia for the first time last month to deliver a keynote presentation at the SAP Forum Australia.

The renowned architect behind SAP HANA and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and the Global Managing Board, heading technology and innovation, gave an enigmatic and down-to-earth presentation, as one might expect from the man instrumental in the intellectual renewal of SAP over the last five years.

A key focus of his presentation was the relationship between design and mathematics, and how they have been utilised to create SAP HANA.

“I see that in a very phenomenal way the age that we are entering is being shaped by the combination of these two things,” Sikka said.

“We have lived with the limitations of software systems – what they enable us to do and what they constrain and constrict. I believe that, in particular with HANA, we now have the ability to overcome those limitations and achieve this idea of being able to make, efficiently, all those important decisions in a certain window of opportunity.”

While Sikka delved into the technical aspects of this and explored the concept of Design Thinking, he did also provide the latest updates on SAP HANA’s expanding footprint.

He was most proud to share the results of SAP’s own internal CRM system implementation now runs on HANA live.

“We just finished the quarter on the back of my little girl HANA,” he said. “SAP, as you might image, is a 14.5 billion euro company with 40,000 users for CRM. When the quarter closed, we had 10,000 parallel users.”

SAP has also just released geographic information system (GIS) capabilities on HANA, according to Sikka. Timelines are another piece of functionality proving particularly useful.

“Instead of the insert-only character of HANA, we can now do timelines. So you can reconstruct histories and timelines of what happened on the fly. And it is thousands of times faster then any other database,” he said.

Sikka also reiterated that HANA is “by far” the fastest growing product in the company’s history.

Referring to a recent article by an analyst that stated SAP was discounting other revenues to make HANA seem more popular, Sikka hit back by saying the theory was “highly irresponsible and nonsensical”.

With more than 1200 SAP HANA customers globally – more than half of which are live, more than 310 videos on the HANA Academy, and 530 instances of HANA running on Amazon Web Services, Sikka said the product has gained a huge momentum that won’t be slowing down any time soon.

Its capacity also continues to grow, with Sikka stating that HANA would be able to run 500 terabytes of data by the time Sapphire NOW, which takes place on 14-16 May 2013, is held.

Predictive analytics are the future for insurers: Ovum

Fri, 03 May 2013 05:50:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Ovum is encouraging insurers to deploy predictive analytics as a way to improve their competitive position.

A new report from Ovum states that in order to be better prepared for future market challenges, insurers should focus on creative initiatives that analyse data from a number of sources, including social media, third parties and machine-to-machine communications.

“By concentrating predictive analytics on key areas of the business – namely business operations, marketing and customer relations – insurers will be able to determine which markets to enter or leave, shape target market initiatives and estimate potential losses for the book of business as each customer is added,” the company stated in a press release.

“Insurers are already well aware of the impending threats/challenges including tightening regulation, demanding customers, an ageing population and weakened economies,” said Barry Rabkin, principal analyst, Ovum.

“The critical differentiator for insurers will be minimising future risk thorough predictive analytics by tapping into the vast amounts of rich data.”

Rabkin added that a new role is emerging – the data scientist role – that will be just as important as the data miner role in the insurance industry.

According to Ovum, it is already seeing a growing number of insurance companies creating new departments of these types of quantitatively skilled professionals.

This role will take a deeper approach to research (i.e. collect more data and explore more hypotheses) and generate recommendations that are scalable down to individual lines of insurance business.

Ovum believes that data scientists and data miners will work closely together to discuss "what if" questions regarding their predictive analytics initiatives.

SAP simplifies rapid deployment selection with online tools

Fri, 03 May 2013 02:24:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced it will offer a new simplified experience for rapidly deploying enterprise technology.

The experience will include a set of collaborative and integrated online tools and content for scoping and deploying a range of SAP technology, from selection to go-live and beyond, the company stated.

According to SAP, enterprise customers will benefit by being able to jumpstart their implementations with a fully realised and tested, pre-assembled solution in a couple of days.

The complete solution can be launched in-premise or temporarily hosted in the cloud before go-live.

This new experience includes four steps for SAP customers to follow, including researching on the SAP Solution explorer site, selecting individual components of their implementation, deploying their fully assembled rapid-deployment solution and reusing business scope information to build a foundation for the business.

"Enterprise fears about the time, costs and uncertainty that go with implementing new technology are alleviated through an assembled-to-order IT stack that is proven and provides a solid foundation to jump-start the fine tuning, integration and data migration process," said Bernd Welz, senior vice president and global head, Solution & Knowledge Packaging, SAP.

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Two new Australian SAP Mentors announced

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:34:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

A new crop of 13 SAP Mentors has been announced, including Australia’s Simon Kemp from Plaut IT and Richard Duffy from SAP.

Kemp is the national solution lead for user empowerment at Plaut IT Australia.

With 15 years experience in the design, implementation, development and support of SAP solutions, he specialises in SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal, mobility, UI technologies, collaboration and search applications.

Described as “very curious, intelligent and happy to help others” by fellow SAP Mentor Mark Finnern, Kemp is a substantial contributor to blogs and discussions on SCN, which contributed to him being named SCN Member of the Month for October 2012.

Duffy joined SAP in August 2003 and currently works as the SAP Business One sales and marketing programs manager and duct tape marketing consultant.

His previous experience includes 12+ years running his own small business ERP consultancy before working in a variety of roles at Great Plains Software and Microsoft.

Finnern names him a “one man social media power house for SAP Business One”.

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On the Move: Presence of IT appoints Shane Grobler to strategic role

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:15:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Presence of IT has announced the appointment of Shane Grobler as director, business transformation and strategy.

Grobler will become a member of the senior management team, with overall responsibility for developing and implementing a business strategy to fully leverage SAP’s move to push more business through its partners, the company stated.

David Brookes, chief executive officer, Presence of IT said the company’s strategy is to lead the human capital management (HCM) market in Australia

“With SAP partners now taking more responsibility for software and platform growth, the time is right to look at building a strategy that will put us and our clients in a premium position to take advantage of the structural market changes,” he said.

“These changes will have a significant impact on the HCM industry, particularly in terms of interactions with vendors, service providers, and how clients deliver services within their business. Shane’s appointment is a key part of our ongoing commitment to providing leadership in the HCM industry.”

Presence of IT has welcomed SAP veteran Grobler, who with 17 years SAP experience under his belt joins them from his previous role as chief operating officer of SAP Australia and New Zealand under Tim Ebbeck, the then chief executive officer.

“With the change in leadership at SAP, and given that I had been at SAP for almost 17 years, the time was right for me to look to new career opportunities. The obvious choice was to talk to people within SAP’s ecosystem,” Grobler said.

“Presence of IT is a great business, with a strong culture that is well adapted to take on the challenge of growing through stronger engagement with SAP.”

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What’s in store for HR/Payroll in 2013 and beyond?

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Organisations need to gear up now for some significant changes to SAP HR/ Payroll taking effect in the coming financial year. Peter Stulcbauer highlights the changes you should be aware of.

Changes to regulation relating to termination payment and superannuation will have an impact on SAP HR/Payroll solutions – here's what you need to know to be prepared.

Termination Organiser Workbench

From 1 July 2012 Employment Termination Payments (ETP) will be subject to two thresholds. The first is the ETP cap of $175,000. The new second threshold is the Whole of Income cap set at $180,000. The lowest calculated threshold will be used to determine how much of the payment is to be taxed at the higher rate. Until January 2013, the Termination Organiser Workbench wasn't equipped to handle these calculations automatically. SAP has since released changes that allow you to calculate the cap to use in determining the tax free portion, if any. The enhancement involves new custom and technical wage types, new tables and screen enhancements. Along with the enhancements to the Termination Organisation Workbench, the payment summary for ETPs will be in the new ATO format. Companies using workbench will have a better mechanism to record the various components that make up the payment and simplify reporting on the ETP payment summary.

Superannuation Guarantee rate

The rate will increase from 9.00 per cent to 9.25 per cent on 1 July 2013 with annual incremental increases peaking at 12 per cent in 2019. This first increase in 10 years will impact over 50 per cent of the Australian population. Employees on total remuneration packages may need their base component reviewed and adjusted to cater for the increased rate. Employees receiving superannuation at a rate greater than 9.25 per cent may not be impacted. Any custom developments using the old rate will need to be reviewed and tested to ensure that the new superannuation guarantee rate is used from 1 July 2013.This means there will be changes to the SAP configuration and employee data. If your organisation pays employees for a period before 1 July on or after 1 July your system must use the new rate. Any employees aged 70 or over on 1 July must receive the new Superannuation Guarantee rate.

Reporting

The Australian Government has decreed that from 1 July 2013 employers have an obligation to inform employees when superannuation payments have been deposited into the employees’ superannuation accounts. This is not the date the employer sends the payments to the superannuation fund or clearing house, but when the actual payments are deposited into the employees’ accounts by the superannuation fund. However, the ATO is still in discussion with the industry on the formats and method that will be implemented. Once agreement has been reached, requirements will be published and payroll system suppliers, e.g. SAP, will need to develop a solution and roll it out to their clients. This will impact the payroll with new/modified tables, infotypes and messaging between the SAP system and the superannuation fund.

I believe this solution will not become available at least two to three months prior to the 1 July kick off, leaving little or no time for payroll clients to implement it. Instead, I believe businesses will be given a reprieve and instead may need to implement the original proposal put forward by the Federal Government i.e. to include a statement on payslips indicating the expected timeframe when the superannuation amount will be deposited. An example payslip statement could read: “The superannuation amount will be deposited in your superannuation fund within 28 days from the end of the quarter.” Either way, room will need to be found on payslips to accommodate the extra information.

Transmitting funds

The final change on the horizon is scheduled for 1 July 2014. The Federal Government has put a system in place which will streamline the transmission of superannuation amounts from businesses to superannuation funds or superannuation clearing houses. This change will utilise a standardised e-commerce format to communicate with superannuation funds and clearing houses. Businesses will have to use a single format, no matter how many different funds they send monies to. The ATO has prescribed that from January 2014, the superannuation industry must work with employers to transition to the solution by 1 July 2014. This applies to medium to large organisations, that is, any organisation with 20 or more employees. In the second half of 2013, SAP clients can expect SAP to release changes that will allow the implementation of this requirement. To date, no SAP notes discussing the proposal or time frames have been released.

This article is intended to give employers and support teams an overview of the key areas that will be impacted in payroll and HR modules between 1 July 2013 to1 July 2014. I highly recommend that businesses make themselves aware of all the legislative and SAP changes that may impact their operations by contacting their support teams, ATO website or other groups who can provide advice.

Peter Stulcbauer is an experienced payroll consultant who has been assisting clients in SAP for over 15 years, providing consulting and advisory services from blueprint through to go live and beyond, specialising in all aspects of configuration on Payroll, Time Management and HR modules. His company, Martarna, provides freelance services at client sites around Australia. He can be contacted at peter@martarna.com.au or by phone on: Perth: 08 9467 4997 / Brisbane: 07 3503 6733 / Sydney: 02 8022 8411 / Melbourne: 03 9948 4033.

On the Move: Rimini Street announces strategic Asia-Pacific appointment

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Third-party maintenance and support provider for SAP enterprise software, Rimini Street, has appointed “industry veteran” Andrew Powell as managing director, Asia-Pacific.

Powell joined Rimini Street on 8 April and will lead the continued growth and expansion of the company’s operations throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

“There is exceptional demand for the benefits of third-party support in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Powell.

“Just like customers in the rest of the world, Oracle and SAP customers in Asia-Pacific want more value from their annual support program and are seeking to maximise the return on current system investments without having to complete expensive upgrades just to stay supported. Rimini Street’s positive global reputation and dedication to client success are already becoming known in this region and I couldn’t be more excited to help the Asia-Pacific market realise the financial and service benefits of Rimini Street support.”

Powell has 15 years of experience in SAP enterprise software.

He joined Rimini Street from his prior role as general manager – commercial with NTT DATA Business Solutions, where he led a business unit responsible for designing, implementing and supporting SAP solutions for medium and large companies in Australia.

The appointment is part of Rimini Street’s strategic plan to expand investment in all major global markets in the coming years, including a “significant” increase in investment and the expansion of sales operations in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We continue to see strong and growing market demand for Rimini Street support services from enterprise software customers in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Seth Ravin, Rimini Street CEO.

“We are extremely pleased to have Andrew join our team and lead our next phase of investment and growth in Asia-Pacific. Andrew will be instrumental in bringing Rimini Street’s industry leading support program to the thousands of enterprise software licensees who can benefit from premium-level support services with up to 90 percent in total support cost savings over a decade.”

More new from Asia-Pacific...
Esker signs $700 000 deal with Malaysia Airlines
Monday, April 22, 2013

YASH opens customer interaction centre in Mumbai
Friday, April 19, 2013

SAP APJ chooses Indian partner for language localisation
Thursday, April 04, 2013

SAP launches global HANA community for customers

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:46:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP and the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) have announced the launch of the SAP HANA International Focus Group, a global online community where customers and prospective customers can exchange experience and knowledge about the in-memory platform.

The focus group is targeted at IT and business executive members and is open to all SAP user group members and SAP customers.

Along with SAP and non-SAP customers wanting to learn more about HANA, the group also caters to SAP customers who have licensed to HANA bit are still relatively new or in the implementation process and SAP customers that are currently “live” on HANA.

Tonnie van der Horst, chairman, SUGEN, says the focus group will help customers learn more about SAP HANA and fine-tune their own road map and adoption strategy.

“The focus on strategy, direct customer feedback, valuable knowledge transfer, networking and co-innovation with SAP will bring added value to influencing product directions and future decisions and investments," he said.

"SAP HANA has been built by and for our customers with very strong history of collaboration since inception," said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation.

"We are excited to continue to shape this rapidly growing platform in new directions and pave the way to innovation for our customers without disrupting their business."

To learn more about the community, visit www.ifg.saphana.com.

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Thursday, March 21, 2013

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

VCE partners with SAP to offer HANA
Friday, March 01, 2013

Queensland Rail chooses UXC Oxygen for EAM project

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:39:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

UXC Oxygen has won the contract to implement and systems integrate the Queensland Rail enterprise asset management project.

The project has already commenced and is designed to support the transformation of asset management practices across Queensland Rail and leverage the core implementation of an SAP ERP platform.

The multi-year agreement with UXC covers the initial design and blueprinting of the solution and deployment.

UXC Limited managing director, Cris Nicolli, has said reasons behind UXC Oxygen being awarded the project include its strong partnership approach, the flexibility of its SAP capabilities and the fact it is an SAP partner.

“The selection of UXC by Queensland Rail also recognises the strong leadership position being established by our UXC Oxygen business in the SAP market, particularly in Queensland, and again reinforces the overall strength of UXC in the ERP market within Australia and New Zealand,” Nicolli said.

“This is a substantial win for UXC and further establishes our credentials in winning large scale, complex projects specifically with the utilities and public sector industries. We appreciate the confidence that the executives at Queensland Rail have placed in UXC to partner and deliver this transformational program of work to the business.”

Related articles...
Hydro Tasmania chooses UXC Oxygen for ERP project
Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Oxygen Business Solutions to become UXC Oxygen
Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Oxygen to acquire Stream
Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Application Performance Management

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:00:00 GMT

Published by: Compuware Corporation

Companies make major investments in SAP applications to improve business-critical processes, cut operational costs and increase efficiencies across their organizations. But delivering best-in-class SAP services is easier said than done in today's highly integrated application delivery chain. This white paper explains how three companies proactively, with thousands of users and complex SAP environments, better managed the performance of their SAP services.

Date: February, 2013

Pages: 11

Click here to access.

Trends in the SAP contract market

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:10:00 GMT

Shane Morgan discusses the ups and downs he has seen recently in the Australian contract market, and which SAP skills he has found to be most in demand from current clients.

ISAP: How is the SAP/IT market looking right now?

SM: I work closely with a variety of large consultancies and end-users across Australia, within all areas of SAP and IT technologies. This last six months has been a rather odd period in that I’ve seen some pretty diverse claims by different organisations and SAP consultants.

A ‘SkillsMatch’ analysis study on contractor rates was recently conducted by the ITCRA (Information Technology Contract and Recruitment Association), and this revealed some interesting results. The research showed that from September 2012 to February 2013, 94 per cent of all contracts were less than a year in duration, which is 4 per cent up from previously. Only a small number of contracts were shown to be two years or more in length.

In a statement, the ITCRA also said that there was a strong result for placements which demonstrated the need for and resilience of ICT contracting. This result also occurred in spite of the Queensland Government’s delay in rolling out its ICT Resource Manager deal due to ‘operational issues’.

The analysis also showed that hourly rates reached a high-point of $108.02 in December, followed by a low of $79.89 in January. Average rates for the period were $88.75, with Business Intelligence consultants achieving the highest average rates, and Helpdesk the lowest. The greatest variance was shown by Network Designers.

A strong demand for project managers and business intelligence consultants was shown, with the weakest demand being for account managers, communications managers and systems analysts.

ISAP: Which parts of Australia have you found the busiest for SAP/IT recruitment?

SM: The last quarter of 2012 seems to have been a pretty quiet time for SAP/IT recruitment throughout the whole of Australia.

A large number of the SAP consultants I met up with said it was the quietest time they had experienced in a long while. Consultants said that while there was a lot of talk about big projects about to take off, but nothing really concrete or decisive was happening, and a lot of their own good people were just sitting on the bench waiting!
Historically, Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland have always been the most active. I do think the slight downturn in demand was expected, with some of the reasons given being:

A massive reduction in spend on new projects.
Coal mining in particular took a complete u-turn due to production costs and the peak of the Aussie dollar, as well as supply and demand.
There was also a massive influx of top talent from government and manufacturing companies, which made things seem a lot worse than they actually were.

So far 2013 has been steady. However I would say that Victoria and Western Australia are producing quite a good number of SAP roles at the moment. This may be due to a lot of our clients having main offices there, or because they have projects taking place in those states.

ISAP: What SAP/IT areas have you found to be most in demand recently, compared to 2012?

SM: I have not noticed any particular role outweighing other roles in terms of demand at this point. However last year was definitely the year for SAP EAM consultants. This year it seems to be about IS-U, CRM, and HANA plus new changes in organisations – which means change managers have been quite active throughout the states. Some clients are also looking for some rare and hard-to-find skills, and to fill some specialist senior roles.

ISAP: What’s your take on rates for SAP roles in Australia, and which areas are paying most?

SM: The highest average rates have been achieved by Business Intelligence consultants, project managers, and solution architects.

Rates seem to be quite varied, and it really does always depend a lot on clients’ budgetary constraints. I’ve seen good BI/CRM/EAM consultants get top daily dollars, but at the same time not all clients are looking for people who are so highly technically skilled and their requirements will be reflected by their budgets.
So the rates at the moment are dependent on a client’s given budget and the types of skills they are seeking. SAP roles generally pay more within the market, but a lot of our clients are looking into niche areas and are willing to pay a premium for this.

ISAP: What do you suggest people who are finding it hard to find SAP work do?

SM: A few suggestions:

CVs/résumés: one of the main issues is poor presentation with regard to résumés. It seems that some of the most well-respected consultants have some of the weakest CVs, while some of the less talented consultants have extremely well-written (and sometimes slightly exaggerated!) ones. I aim to give consultants good advice about the structure of résumés. Positive changes can make a massive difference to the overall impression they give out. A great CV won’t land you a job, but it will certainly help you to secure interviews!
Networking: going to SAP user group meetings and getting to know people in the industry is a good idea, as well as partnering with good SAP recruiters. Australia is very lucky in that we have some excellent SAP recruiters over here, particularly compared to America and Europe. In Australia, I would say we are generally much more ethical and more concerned about the relationships we form in the industry.
It’s also important to try to be as open-minded as possible regarding new opportunities.

I think overall that everyone can do a little more to put their best foot forward. If we all put in that little extra effort, I believe this industry will continue to grow and thrive in Australia.

Shane Morgan is business relationships director at SAPTURE INTERNATIONAL.

On the Move: Two new appointments at EPI-USE APJ

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:06:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

EPI-USE has welcomed two new people to its Asia-Pacific Japan team.

Judith Carelsen is the newly appointed head of EPI-USE APJ’s operations team in Australia.

According to the company, her appointment will allow Richard Potash, CEO, EPI-USE APJ to focus on the APJ expansion and Australian customer engagement functions.

“Judith brings with her a wealth of experience in SAP HCM service delivery and operational service line management,” Potash said.

“Her experience through previous principle consultant and service line leadership roles will provide EPI-USE the bandwidth to ensure successful growth in Australia and to cement our current offerings and customer engagement.”

Another new addition to EPI-USE APJ is Jacob Crane, who recently transferred from the EPI-USE US office.

Crane specialises in portal and workflow technologies with a focus on employee and manager self-service and will continue his role as a solutions architect consultant within the company.

Related articles...
On the Move: Darren Shearer joins EPI-USE
Friday, August 24, 2012

On the Move: Harms appoints lead for new SAP Consulting Services Unit
Thursday, April 04, 2013

On the Move: FourPL appointment boosts supply chain and IT strategy
Friday, April 12, 2013

SAP announces 2013 Q1 financial results

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:03:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced an increase of 23 per cent growth in non-IFRS software and cloud subscription revenue in its financial results for the first quarter of 2013.

This was the strongest area of growth for the company, boosted by a 49 per cent revenue growth in the Americas and 13 per cent growth in the EMEA region, which the company claims was an impressive result despite “continued market uncertainty”.

Despite growth in the rest of the world, non-IFRS software and cloud subscription revenue in the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region declined. SAP said in a statement it expects the APJ region to be back on track in the second quarter.

SAP HANA tripled year-on-year, contributing €86 million to Q1 software revenue.

With its annual cloud revenue run rate reaching €900 million, SAP said they are continuing to see strong growth in the area.

First quarter 2013 Non-IFRS cloud subscription and support revenue was €167 million, up 380% year-over-year. Non-IFRS deferred cloud subscription and support revenue was €377 million, which is a year-over-year increase of 95%.

“Our industry is at a fundamental transformation point, driven by the convergence of mobile, cloud and big data. SAP’s 25% growth shows that we are not only leading this change but also gaining significant worldwide market share,” said SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.

“Customers continue to choose our innovations to help them run better, and SAP HANA is the next-generation platform for all companies to innovate their business, drive speed across the entire enterprise and reduce costs. SAP’s pipeline is strong, and we are confident that we will achieve our full-year outlook.”

“Non-IFRS software and cloud subscription revenue exceeded €800 million for the first time in a first quarter. We saw very strong revenue contribution from SAP HANA and continued growth in the cloud. The solid top line performance and continued cost discipline resulted in double-digit growth in Non-IFRS operating profit at constant currencies,” said Werner Brandt, CFO of SAP.

According to Brandt, the company is still on track to deliver on its 2015 goals and its overall financial objective of profitable growth over the long term.

Esker signs $700 000 deal with Malaysia Airlines

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:04:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Esker has signed an agreement worth over $700 000 with Malaysia Airlines to automate vendor invoices into the company’s new SAP system via the Esker automated Accounts Payable (AP) solution.

With over 28 000 monthly invoices, Malaysia Airlines pursued a solution that would meet a number of requirements, including the capacity to handle its growing global invoicing needs, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with its future plans of setting up a shared services centre.

Malaysia Airlines engaged Esker to implement the AP solution with the aim to reduce operational costs, improve visibility and efficiency, and eliminate late payments.

The companies have signed a five-year contract and will begin implementing the Esker solution immediately, with the project delivery forecast for mid-2013.

Esker CEO, Jean-Michel Bérard, says they are extremely pleased to have been selected to provide end-to-end vendor invoice automation for such a significant and pioneering company.

“By implementing our AP automation solution, Malaysia Airlines can expect to benefit from numerous strategic business advantages, including: better integration to financial systems, stronger financial controls, strengthened supplier relations and improved cash flow visibility,” he said.

“In this fast-paced global environment, it is important for us to rely on the best solution so that our internal or external customer will have a seamless operation/transaction,” said Malaysia Airlines’ director of corporate services, Mohd Sukri Husin.

“We are delighted to partner with Esker to automate and streamline our invoice processing function. We firmly believe that Esker can integrate in enhancing speed and accuracy in invoice automation and addressing our business goals.”

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

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High-end customer landscapes based on SAP HANA

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Published by: IBM

A rich and extensive set of documents and training course exist to explain the functions and capabilities of both SAP and IBM solutions in detail. But how do these features fit together when SAP HANA is introduced into an existing, often complex, solution landscape? Which parts of a customer’s IT infrastructure need to be changed or adjusted?

What are the best and most effective approaches to combine integrated SAP HANA features with the capabilities of IBM components to ensure high continuity and performance, building a consistent solution overall?

This whitepaper provides answers to these questions. While focusing primarily on large configurations, the concepts explained will also offer valuable guidance for small-scale landscapes.

The paper provides a holistic view of the complete solution, not limited to SAP HANA as a database but also encompassing the SAP application servers and additional elements such as components for backup and restore, virtualization and clustering. The document explains how SAP HANA can be integrated into existing IT infrastructure landscapes, ensuring seamless scalability and fulfilling the requirements of high availability and disaster recovery.

Date: March 2013

Pages: 108

Click here to access.

YASH opens customer interaction centre in Mumbai

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:57:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

YASH Technologies has announced the opening of its first customer interaction centre in Mumbai.

The centre will feature demonstrations of SAP solutions for existing customers, as well as providing non-SAP organisations with the opportunity to learn about rapid deployment solutions, cloud solutions, SAP HANA and mobile solutions.

President and CEO of YASH Technologies, Manoj Baheti, says they the opening of a second office in Mumbai reflects YASH’s continued investment in the region.

“This new interaction centre is different than our development centre here in Mumbai. It provides customers a more centralised, intimate meeting hub to foster creativity and exchange of ideas,” he said.

YASH has nine offices throughout India, with its most recent office opening in the NCR Region of Gurgaon in November of 2012. Other offices are located in Hyderabad, Pune, Indore, Bangalore, and Mumbai.

More news from Asia-Pacific Japan...
SAP APJ chooses Indian partner for language localisation
Thursday, April 04, 2013

Big wins for Business Suite on HANA in APJ
Thursday, April 04, 2013

SAP OEM partnerships boost APJ growth
Thursday, March 21, 2013

Local SAP partners win 2013 SAP Pinnacle Awards

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

OpenText and Tata Consultancy Services have both been named 2013 SAP Pinnacle Award recipients.

The annual awards recognise SAP partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and driving customer success.

Finalists and winners in 19 categories were based on field recommendations, customer feedback and performance indicators in four categories – co-innovation, market expansion, service delivery and sustainability.

Tata Consultancy Services beat out finalists Tieto and HP to win Run SAP Partner of the Year.

OpenText was named Solution Extension Partner of the Year.

“With a partnership spanning over two decades, OpenText’s industry alliance with SAP has been a driving force in creating and delivering innovative and integrated solutions to the global market,” said Patrick Barnert, senior vice president, Partners and Alliances at OpenText.

“As our sixth consecutive win, this honour represents more than a shared vision for success; it signifies an unwavering dedication to providing our mutual customers with a competitive edge in the business world. We look forward to future achievements with SAP and eagerly await this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference, where will be showcasing our world-class EIM solutions.”

Award winners will be formally recognised at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s international customer conference being held in Orlando on May 14–16.

Here is a full list of 2013 SAP Pinnacle Award finalists and winners:

Run Together

Database and Technology / HANA Application Innovator of the Year
Finalists: AlertEnterprise | Choice Technologies S.A. | Pentland Firth
Winner: AlertEnterprise

Packaged Mobile Application Innovator of the Year
Finalists: ExpertIG | Liquid Analytics | Proaxia
Winner: ExpertIG

Technology Partner Innovator of the Year
Finalists: HP | IBM | MSFT
Winner: HP

Solution Extension Partner of the Year
Finalists: OpenText | Vendavo | Vistex
Winners: OpenText | Vistex

Database and Technology / HANA Co-innovation Partner of the Year
Finalists: Accenture | HP | IBM
Winner: IBM

Mobile Co-innovation Partner of the Year
Finalists: Capgemini | Cisco | Infosys
Winner: Capgemini

Cloud Co-innovation Partner of the Year
Finalists: Accenture | Crystalis | Effective People
Winner: Accenture

Applications Co-innovation Partner of the Year
Finalists: Atos | China National Software & Services Company | FIT Consulting
Winner: Atos

Analytics Co-innovation Partner of the Year
Finalists: NexJ Systems (formerly Broadstreet Data Solutions) | Finity Serviços de Consultoria em Informática | Shanghai Data Converging
Winner: Shanghai Data Converging

Run Further

Run Smarter

Run Greener

Sustainability Partner of the Year
Finalists: Atos | ERM | ETNA

Winner: Atos

SAP launches Sybase SQL Anywhere 16 suite

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the availability of the SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere 16 suite within the SAP Real-Time Data Platform.

The latest release of data management and synchronisation technology from SAP will provide remote office locations access to data-driven applications.

The suite enables the rapid development and deployment of database-powered applications in embedded, software-as-a-service (SaaS), remote and mobile environments, SAP said in a statement.

"SAP continues to advance its real-time database capabilities by integrating key Sybase database technologies such as SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere into its comprehensive enterprise information platform," said Carl Olofson, research vice president for application development and deployment, IDC.

"The new version of SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere includes key improvements such as expanded query optimisation for faster response times, which makes access of enterprise data on a mobile platform more practical, and security enhancements for protection of critical business data, which helps put business managers at ease regarding the distribution of sensitive data to mobile devices.”

These technologies work in combination with solutions such as SAP HANA, Olofson added, “decreasing administrative complexity, allowing SAP to enable practical, easy to use enterprise data delivery to users anywhere, any time".

Through integration with SAP HANA, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere 16 allows users and applications in distributed environments to have real-time interactions with virtually any source, and then further explore and analyse that data through SAP HANA, according to Irfan Khan, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Database and Technology, SAP AG.

“As a result of joint innovation and expertise across our worldwide engineering team, SAP HANA and SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere offer rich applications and consumer interactions from the data centre to mobile and satellite server locations," he said.

Related articles...
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SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere on-demand released
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Violin Memory storage system certified with SAP Sybase ASE

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 03:51:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Memory-based storage systems provider, Violin Memory, has announced that its Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays are now certified for interoperability with SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE).

“The Violin Flash Memory Arrays integrated with SAP Sybase ASE are a key solid-state storage component for the acceleration of business-critical applications from SAP,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, business development and ecosystem innovation, SAP.

“The certification process showed that the arrays can deliver significant performance improvement over traditional disk-based systems, delivering substantial value to customers. In fact, during preliminary internal testing, we have seen 10x improvement in the performance of SAP Sybase ASE running on Violin Flash Memory.”

Benefits of the Violin Flash Memory Array for SAP Sybase ASE include the acceleration of IO-bound online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, the acceleration of database setup operations, checkpoints, logs and ETL (Extract Transform and Load) activities, the company said in a statement.

Violin Memory has also announced it is now an SAP software solution and technology partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program.

It will work with SAP to serve new and existing customers, partners and channels to benefit from solutions from Violin Memory and SAP.

Violin products are also available in support of SAP ERP applications.

Latest news...
SAP to deliver mobility services to HP customers
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SAP to deliver mobility services to HP customers

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 03:47:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

HP Enterprise Services has announced a global agreement with SAP to deliver managed mobility services to its clients.

The HP Managed Mobility Services for the SAP Mobile Platform will help clients convert customer interactions into revenue opportunities whole improving employee productivity with mobile applications, according to HP.

The services leverage the SAP mobile platform, SAP Afaria and a range of mobile applications to provide a complete end-to-end mobile application platform.

"Forward-looking enterprises are demanding mobility solutions that empower employees on the go, create new systems of engagement and integrate these in real time with critical business applications like those from SAP," said Jules Beck, vice president, Global Enterprise Applications and Mobility Services, HP Enterprise Services.

"HP is collaborating with SAP, leveraging our deep technology portfolio and services expertise and SAP mobile technologies to create one of the most advanced mobile application solutions available to the market.

As part of HP Managed Mobility Services for the SAP Mobile Platform, HP delivers consulting services to visualise new systems of engagement through mobile channels, assess the SAP solution-based environment and mobile application architecture as well as create a mobile application strategy and roadmap.

Additionally, HP will work with clients to develop, integrate, test and implement pre- and custom-built mobile applications in industries such as automotive, industrial, engineering, consumer and retail.

HP Managed Mobility Services for the SAP Mobile Platform are available now worldwide and are priced according to client engagement.

Related articles...
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Thursday, April 28, 2011

VMware and HP smooth the path to the cloud for SAP customers
Friday, June 10, 2011

2012 SAP Pinnacle Award winners announced
Thursday, March 29, 2012

SAP partner MuleSoft opens regional headquarters in Sydney

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Integrated solutions provider and SAP partner, MuleSoft, has opened a new regional headquarters in Sydney in order to meet increasing global demand for its Anypoint Platform.

The platform connects Software-as-a-Service and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise and according to MuleSoft, eliminates “costly, time-intensive point-to-point integration”.

MuleSoft offers SAP certified integration with SAP applications and SAP certified integration with SAP NetWeaver.

The two solutions include SAP NetWeaver PI Gateway for Salesforce.com, a pluggable PI adaptor for users of NetWeaver PI who are looking for a way to integrate with SaaS and cloud applications involving the Salesforce.com ecosystem; and Enterprise Gateway for SAP, which offers bi-directional communication via application link enabling (ALE) and iDocs technology with SAP solutions.

In addition to the strategic expansion to Australia, MuleSoft have also established regional offices in Buenos Aires, Atlanta and New York.

According to the company, these are the first of many new regional operations planned.

Latest news...
On the Move: FourPL appointment boosts supply chain and IT strategy
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NXG Business Solutions acquires Controls Consulting
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Slow Australian economy contributes to ICT spending cuts: IDC
Monday, April 08, 2013

10 Places to Reduce Data Management Costs

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Published by: Winshuttle

This white paper highlights 10 key places SAP customers can reduce IT operational costs, with a focus on trimming support and data entry costs by automating data entry. It is intended both for leaders of SAP competency centers and for business process owners looking for ways to “do more with less.”

Pages: 9

Click here to access.

SAP partners with Ingram to promote mobility to SMBs

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:36:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has teamed up with computer and technology product distributor, Ingram Micro, to extend the market reach of its enterprise mobility solutions to SMBs.

By utilising Ingram’s wide distribution network of value-added resellers (VARs), SAP’s apps will reach a broader section of the VAR community.

In turn, Ingram’s VARs will now have access to the entire SAP mobility portfolio, including SAP Afaria and 300 mobile apps on the iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry platforms.

SAP will also be able to take advantage of the mobile device lifecycle management services Ingram acquired through its purchase of BrightPoint last year.

As part of the agreement, the distributor will educate its channel partners on building mobility business with the SAP mobile platform.

“We expect the mobile revolution will benefit our joint customers and resellers, while also allowing thousands of small development firms and individual developers to innovate on top of SAP's industry-leading mobile platform and solutions," said Sanjay Poonen, SAP technology solutions president and mobile division head.

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On the Move: FourPL appointment boosts supply chain and IT strategy

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

FourPL has appointed Chris Fechner to a customer advisory role focusing on supply chain and IT strategy and governance.

Fechner’s previous roles include CIO for Queensland Transport & Main Roads and overseeing the ICT program at Queensland Rail.

Anthony Hawkins, CEO, FourPL, said Fechner brings a customer CIO perspective to the business.

“Chris has shown great thought leadership in his work with QUT and also has experience that will be invaluable to our customers when looking at decisions of systems consolidation and on-premise vs cloud, having been a member of the Queensland Government panel,” he said.

Working with FourPL is a great opportunity to get across the leading edge of supply chain solutions, said Fechner.

“My long history in transport and logistics from both an operator's and regulator's perspective will bring an in-depth perspective on the customer side, enabling FourPL to better address CIO specific requirements. Above all, I am looking forward to sitting on the consultant's side of the table to hone my commercial skills around negotiation, strategy, and executive engagement in preparation for my next CIO challenge,” he said.

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NXG Business Solutions acquires Controls Consulting

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Partner, NXG Business Solutions, has announced it will acquire Australian specialist SAP Business Intelligence (BI) Partner, Controls Consulting.

NXG Business Solutions has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and provides software and implementation services in budgeting, planning and management reporting solutions using SAP’s suite EPM products.

Controls Consulting delivers reporting and analytic solutions on the SAP Business Intelligence platform.

According to Scott Taylor, CEO, NXG Business Solutions, the acquisition is a strategic one that takes the company one step closer to becoming the number one SAP EPM Partner in Australia.

“We have had the pleasure of working closely with Controls Consulting on several very large clients over the last two years, and their approach, reputation and cultural fit with NXG was second to none. Controls have a solid business and commercial background and approach BI from the same pragmatic, solutions focus as we do with financial performance management,” said Taylor.

“Having a complete capability from data warehouse to dashboard means we can now offer clients an end to end services relationship that so many have been asking from us for some time now.”

Director of Controls Consulting, Tim Noonan, will join Scott Taylor, Alan Contreras and Bernhard Jantschgi as a director of NXG and all his staff and customers will make the move also.

“We are very excited about joining NXG Business Solutions, we see this as a coming together of like minds. NXG’s reputation in the market is hard to beat. We are looking forward to extending the existing relationships and clients of both companies and being able to offer our complete solution set to the market,” said Noonan.

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Q&A: How customers are adopting SAP HANA

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:29:00 GMT

Irene Hopf, consulting architect and IBM SAP global alliance leader for analytics and SAP HANA, based at the IBM International SAP Competency Centre in Waldorf, Germany, visited Australia earlier this year. Together with Stuart Dickinson, CEO of Oxygen Business Solutions, she gave her views on how customers are making the case for investing in SAP HANA.

ISAP: Do you see SAP HANA as a strategic opportunity for better engagement with clients?

Stuart Dickinson: We see that HANA really as the next wave. What are organisations looking for today? It’s about faster decision-making, getting business value or business insight to people who need it so they can make those decisions. In the contact centres and in the field, they have traditionally been quite data constrained in terms of getting the information out there and allowing them to have those conversations. What we see HANA doing is unlocking the secrets that are sitting in the corporate repository of information and making this information available for people to turn it into better customer conversations.

The analytics and speeding up reporting is very interesting, but to me I see the real opportunity is to move SAP in the long term from the system of record to a much more dynamic platform where it becomes the system of engagement – it becomes an opportunity for people to have real conversations and leverage that.

From an integrator’s perspective, it’s about being able to demonstrate value much faster because we don’t have to go through this whole process of putting in an ERP and reporting system. It’s about getting data in there quickly, getting insight out quickly, so we can demonstrate value to the customer in real time.

ISAP: Does that make the investment decision quicker?

SD: It is a big investment. The investment will get cheaper over time as the technology gets cheaper and the consulting gets more packaged. I think the investment decision can be more grounded in fact because you can do a proof of value fast, demonstrate that value, and that can result in a business case, whereas often decision-making around ERPs and business warehouses will be longer term, whereas what we are seeing globally is a lot of clients who are doing these proof of concepts can see real value almost within months. So the business case in some ways becomes a lot easier to do.

Irene Hopf: The decision for SAP HANA, if a customer identifies the business scenario where it would be an advantage, will be different for every single customer. SAP HANA is not predominantly designed for a specific industry or for a specific size, but rather it’s across everything. I agree that we can demonstrate value easier, due to the fact that in established database-based SAP systems, you’re working off different data sets or databases in the sense of the foundation layout for the transaction and analytical systems. To bring that eventually back together again will provide enormous value, because then you are working off one data foundation again. From a vision point of view, that is very appealing to a lot of customers. What I have seen so far for those customers who adopted the technology and went into proof of concept projects, many of them didn’t even create a business case, they just trust SAP or they like the idea. What happens with business users is they say, if I could get that result in five seconds, I can do all kinds of different variations of those analyses. In fact we can make other business decisions than we were able to before, because sometimes, in classic systems you would probably shoot off a query and then it takes hours before you get a result back, or a query would time out because the system is not capable of running it, and then you don’t need the result any more or it’s out of date.

On the other hand, we see a concern of our customers not only on the business side, but on the IT side. You need to have the systems in the standard service management environment and integrate it. So in terms of things like scalability, high availability, back-up restore, set-ups of dual data centres, for example, all this needs to be maturely covered. We have good solutions there and good approaches, but due to the fact that SAP HANA is a very young product, concepts are still evolving.

ISAP: For customers who have adopted HANA, what is the best way to successfully get that value out of HANA quickly?

IH: From an infrastructure perspective, we have had tremendous success around the world with a powerful infrastructure solution for SAP HANA where we have specific components in the appliance. There is a specific file system in there which is coming out of the high performance computing area, called General Parallel File System (GPFS), and that is the ‘secret sauce’ for built-in high availability and scalability on a building block basis. That is a game-changer, especially if customers need highly available systems, if SAP HANA is used in a business critical system.

SD: The key for us is understanding that it’s not about just making things go faster. It’s about being really clear around why in a business value chain you might want to make something go faster, because you can push a decision closer to the customer, you can make a better commercial decision. Once you’re clear about that, the technology can unlock that process. For example, in a customer call centre, could you make that experience with the customer more interactive and rich, so if you unlock data around that particular customer that was previously locked up, you can create real transparency for the people who are trying to make these decisions to help customer get value and a good relationship with the organisation. Be smart about it, start in one place and then look to expand it over time. Pick a business process and say this process would benefit from acceleration, and be clear around that.

ISAP: Are customers sceptical about the ‘HANA hype’, or are they becoming believers in the technology itself?

IH: Some of them are doubtful. But there are also customers who are clearly early adopters and are running after the next new technology wave. It can be a complete game-changer for a company, and we have those use cases, where they either use SAP HANA as an accelerator to an existing Business Suite system or as the DB under SAP Business Warehouse. It’s also dependent on what region you are in. Certainly there are countries which are more conservative and countries which are more ready to adopt. However the conversation needs to be justified from a business perspective.

SD: I think it’s a concept that changes the sceptics to believers very quickly when they see something happen in real time. So it demonstrates well, and when you see it used in real business scenarios, you can take the logical leap and say, ‘within my business, how could I use that to make my business run better?’.

IH: Crucial though is that customers want to see it with their own data. They don’t want to see a generic demonstration.

ISAP If you’re seeing decisions driven by business rather than IT, does that make for a different engagement model from a consulting perspective?

SD: Generally in the market what’s happening today is that a lot of businesses are making more line of business-based software solution decisions.

IH: With the effective improvement of the usage of IT solutions in companies, the business functions and the IT department need to come together more closely. Especially for companies that are very successful, it’s mandatory that they work together. Business functions and the IT department need to work hand in hand, and if they have close cooperation within the enterprise, it’s one secret to the success of improving business results.

ISAP: Where do you see the future for HANA?

SD: For the last 10 years we have been talking about this concept of a real-time enterprise, and this is another step in the journey, taking us closer to that. I just see that accelerating – we can make real decisions in business supported by factual data and ask questions of that data on an ongoing basis. That to me is incredibly powerful and existing, because it’s where we really start to unlock some of this corporate knowledge that’s being captured in these systems, and use that in truly meaningful ways.

IH: I would expect the focus of SAP HANA to stay for quite a while on the analytical side. I have customers who are investing into SAP HANA not for reasons of speed, but for data consistency, because they have many systems which contain certain data, and that data is reflected in different formats in different systems. If they bring that into one system and have the analysis running from that one system, that is going to make a big difference for those businesses.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition 2012.

Mining and resources: A best practice solution

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:22:00 GMT

The latest version of SAP Best Practices for Mining solution incorporates the expertise of industry and partners, to meet current challenges in the sector. Eleanor Reader reports.

SAP Best Practices for Mining provides an ideal springboard for customers in the mining and resources sector, and their partners, to jumpstart their ERP implementation. Originally released in 2000 on 4.6b with the IS-Mine extension, Best Practices for Mining has a long history of joint innovation with the industry resulting in multiple subsequent updates.

In 2012, SAP released its latest version this year, Best Practices for Mining V1.606, which is localised for Australia and built on ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 6 (EhP6).
SAP’s solution expert for mining, Matthew Easlea, says this latest update is a showcase of the new functionality they’ve released in EhP6.
“We leveraged the Best Practices concept to show our deep mining industry expertise and to show how to use the standard ERP and IS-Mine add-on solutions to implement mining-specific processes,” he says.

Updating the solution

To ensure the update is specifically targeted to the needs of SAP customers, the mining industry team at SAP called on the knowledge and experience of partners with specific expertise in this area and mining company CIOs. The team regularly meets with a group called the Industry Advisory Council for Mining (IACM), where a select group of mining CIOs shared their requirements and vision with SAP. Mining experts in North America, Australia and China took these requirements and developed new scenarios to directly address the industry’s needs. After this, the SAP team travelled to China to do final development and testing, then progressed to running user acceptance testing with the partners in Brisbane.

The solution

What originated from this detailed process was a fully updated and relevant Best Practices for Mining solution. SAP uses the new NetWeaver Business Client in all 29 of the processes, resulting in a streamlined and attractive user interface to assist with user adoption, according to Easlea.

In the area of maintenance, SAP uses the new Simplified Maintenance Worker User interface, which streamlines the process of creating notifications, work orders and confirmations and dispatches the work to a user’s job list.

“We’ve also embedded TREX into the process to provide Google-like searching capabilities to the maintenance worker,” Easlea adds.

The sales and invoicing process has been updated to use the new Commodity Management solution, which provides end-to-end support for quality based contracts, as well as provisional and differential invoicing.

A new scenario has been developed which shows how to use the new Linear Asset Management functionality in maintenance. The scenario is based around a slurry pipeline and shows how the maintenance plan, work order and confirmation can be made spatially aware, Easlea says.

Finally, SAP has included a scenario based on the new Environment Health and Safety Management (EHSM) 2.0 solution, which replaces the former Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) solution. This new solution for managing safety incidents and risk assessments features tight integration with the Plant Maintenance module and was developed in conjunction with the mining industry.

Industry input

Partners play a key role in the development and testing of the solution, according to Easlea.

“Their engagement is critical. It is our partners that will be taking the best practices solution, extending it with their own intellectual property and rapidly deploying it to mid-sized mining organisations,” he says.

The partners involved in this update were Windsor Business Solutions, Accenture, Courtland/ASG Group, Wipro, COSOL and Zer01.

Mick Windsor, CEO of Windsor Business Solutions, says that because SAP is so focused on delivering best practices, they work extremely closely with the industry to ensure that their offering meets current requirements.

“The benefits that end clients of SAP will gain from our experience is that we focus specifically on integrated enterprise asset management,” he says.

“Our view is that we’re all about building reliable businesses and we do that by helping organisations improve their productivity, their safety and their sustainability through the superior management of their physical assets.”

Accenture sent an experienced SAP Plant Maintenance consultant to participate in the acceptance testing in Brisbane, gaining insight into the new functionalities in the Mining Solution template, specifically around NetWeaver Business Client for Plant Maintenance, Linear Asset Management functions, and new operational risk management processes, says Accenture Australia SAP lead, Kellie Simpson.

Key trends

Because the solution is focused on the requirements of a typical mining and minerals processing company, trends that shape the present and future of the industry can have a huge impact on solution. One key trend that influenced this latest update is the current price variance of commodity prices.

“Mining companies are focused on the commodity management process, managing the risks associated with commodity prices,” Easlea says.

Another trend is driving simplification and usability. There is currently demand from the mining industry for SAP to handle power, water, slurry, road and rail using a linear asset management approach. Safety also continues to be critical to the Australian mining industry, with Easlea saying only an integrated solution with HR, maintenance and finance can deliver real outcomes.

With solution updates such as this, Windsor believes that business process, rather than technology functionality, must always remain top of mind to ensure mining and resources companies are equipped to meet their objectives.

“The solution is always around the business process, a successful implementation and appropriate training of your people,” he says.

The new release of the Best Practices for Mining solution is now generally available to all SAP customers and partners.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition 2012.

Mining and resources: Digging deep

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:20:00 GMT

With the mining boom credited with sustaining Australia’s economic prosperity, recent signs of demand softening are igniting concerns about its future. Eleanor Reader investigates how SAP plans to help mining companies navigate safely through the uncertainty.

Shifting social, economic and political trends are constantly changing the mining industry, dredging up new and old challenges alike. A renewed focus on cost control has gripped the industry and as rising demand looks to increase into the future, the lack of skilled labour becomes a greater concern. As a result, technology as an enabler is becoming more important to the industry than ever before.

Cost control

As costs increase and certain commodity prices soften, the focus of the mining industry has returned to cost control. Operational costs and project costs have taken centre stage as the industry seeks to implement the right systems and processes to gain stability and control of their businesses. In particular, the price shift in Australia’s two main commodities – iron ore and coal – has prompted a return to a more traditional method of cost control.

Tony Parvin, business manager – mining solutions for NTT DATA Business Solutions, says he finds the refocus on operational activities/costs and project costs to be a refreshing change.

“There’s a recognition that the production demand is softening and that has led business activity for some time. There’s a surprising amount of activity going on but I think that’s a function of the recognition that as times get tougher people need to have the right systems and processes in place,” he says.

SAP is responding to this cost control trend by providing solution to mining customers that allow them to put better process controls in place, ensuring there’s consistency across their processes so they can monitor costs and report on the efficiency of the operations, says SAP Australia and New Zealand’s industry principal for resources and mining, Peter Hodgins.

“The best way to control costs is to understand where the costs are and where the efficiencies are; that’s what ERP systems can do,” he says.

SAP’s three most recent acquisitions – SuccessFactors, Ariba and Syclo – address key processes for miners, according to Hodgins.

“SuccessFactors allows them to manage their HR or HCM processes, making sure they’re aware of staff and contractors’ performance, with a focus on recruiting and retaining a good workforce. Ariba allows them to better manage their procurement spend, and as a mobility solution, Syclo allows them to manage their maintenance spend in particular, so it is more efficient,” he says.

Demand continues to rise

As emerging markets continue to surge toward industrialisation, demand in China (Australia’s biggest export partner), India and even Africa is rising, and it looks like this will be the long-term trend for a while to come.

“There’s been a blip in demand but demand is still strong for most resources,” says Jarrod Bassan, senior consultant, CSC.

While the scale of growth and the speed of growth in demand for raw material has obviously slowed, Hodgins says it is still growing nonetheless.

“I think what we’ll see is a slight change in focus as China in particular has gone through their phase of construction, so steel, iron ore and coal in particular have been a big focus. The maturing of that market means we’re seeing different demand for different materials, such as aluminium, copper and other metals,” he says.

Parvin admits that there is still a lot of opportunity with projects, as smaller organisations are recognising that having the right systems and good business processes in place are the key to success in the sector.

“There’s a recognition that there’s a lot of business improvement activities that can be addressed going forth for the existing SAP install base, but also for smaller organisations who in a sense are still on the upswing, so they might be involved in projects directly or they’re providing services to other companies. There’s still a lot of activity particularly with construction,” he says.

Lack of skilled labour

Continued market growth means that the war for talent also continues, especially as new technology and operating models remain, says Accenture Australia mining lead, Nigel Court.

New capital expenditure in the Australian mining industry was expected to rise from AU$55.5 billion in 2010/2011 to $AU73.5 billion in 2011/2012. This places huge pressure on the lack of skilled labour in Australia as resources companies must ask how they can deliver future projects.

Bassan says this is a problem that is being felt in the sector all around the world, not just in Australia.

“There are people challenges, particularly in the developed world but also in developing countries. They have a slightly different spin on the problem, but they are also faced with the challenge of getting skilled resources to mine sites.”

Bassan attributes the skills shortage to the limited number of mining and engineering professionals graduating in previous decades and to the remote location of mine sites.

“There is a shortage of people who are willing to work in remote locations. And there are also a lot of disadvantages to fly in, fly out work. It obviously places a lot of pressure on individuals and their families, so for many people it’s not a sustainable way of working for a long period of time.”

SAP projects have already suffered as a result of the talent gap, according to Parvin.

“I think its always a challenge to find the right people at the right time, I think it has been particularly difficult over the last couple of years and I’d say that some projects have suffered as a consequence of that, where the right skills haven’t necessarily been available at the right time,” he says.

“I’m probably seeing a little bit of softening in that, in that some of the larger projects have been perhaps deferred or downsized a bit. But it continues to be a challenge to find the top people when you need them.”

SuccessFactors remains a priority for SAP as a tool to retain good talent, with Hodgins reiterating the focus of recruiting, training and maintaining workers.

Digital mining

Workforce shortages is just one of the trends driving a rise in technology in the mining and resources sector. Matthew Easlea, solution expert for mining, SAP, says digital mining is an emerging way for resources companies to work smarter instead of harder, by enabling mining operations with modern technology and optimised processes.

“The mining industry, jointly with SAP, is exploring how to take mature technologies out of other industries and apply them,” he says. “Examples are automation, which has been used in manufacturing industries for a long time. But unlike clean and controlled manufacturing environments, applying this technology in remote outdoor locations, exposed to the elements and unpredictability of the mining process, remains a major challenge.”

Autonomous operation, driverless vehicles and remote operation centres are just some of the technically orientated initiatives Parvin is seeing in the industry at the moment.

“That’s driven by the need to provide as safe a working environment as possible, along with potential cost reductions through more efficient operations,” he says.

This type of automation has been another area of focus for SAP.

“We are providing the layers in between technology platforms, so if you’ve got onboard systems on trucks and trains in a plant and equipment area, we’ve provided the integration layers between those systems and the commercial operations systems, that allow you to make informed decisions about where the equipment is going and the performance of that equipment,” Hodgins says.

The very complex iron-ore supply chains in Western Australia, the coal supply chains on the east coast of Australia and iron ore networks in South America require the next-level of technology to enable them to run, according to Bassan.

“As they now break this new ground, they recognise they need the technology to enable them to scale,” Bassan says. “Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant on information technology to make them work. Operation centres bring workers away from remote mine sites and allow more of them to work in capital city environments. To do that requires systems and technology for communications and analytics, and enabling new business processes to make this work efficiently.”

Easlea says solutions from SAP, like the new release of MII v14, HANA, the 3D visualisation capability in Visual Enterprise and the ongoing work with major infrastructure players like Cisco ensures that they at the front of delivering the digital mining vision.

Decrease in easy to mine reserves

As the majority of easily accessible resource reserves have already been mined, these days, miners must often work harder for every tonne of ore produced.

“The majority of the large quality deposits in safe countries have already been claimed and are in development. Often the highest quality parts of these deposits have been extracted, so the grade of what is left is decreasing,” Easlea says. “Also, to expand production, many miners are having to dig deeper or go into more remote locations, such as mining within the Arctic Circle or the seabed mining that is currently planned in Papua New Guinea – these are difficult and new environments.”

Bassan uses the example of the mining collapse in Chile as a terrible result of the risks associated with deep, underground mining. “Mining deeper underground is more difficult, expensive and a lot more dangerous,” he says.

This brings new challenges relating to logistical and supply chain issues, and Hodgins says products such as SAP Transportation Management can help businesses to better manage and reduce costs associated with the supply chain.

Managing regulation

Mining in Australia has always been heavily regulated, with health and safety always being a very strong focus for the industry. While Hodgins says he is not seeing a significant increase in the regulatory issues impacting the sector, there is more pressure on miners to measure carbon emissions in the wake of the introduction of the carbon tax.

“There is an increase buts its not dramatic compared to what’s it has been over the last five to 10 years,” he says. “Companies are starting to focus on carbon emissions more and more now that they’re anticipating a trading scheme coming in.”

Richard Lissett, National Practice Manager – SAP solutions, ASG Group, says that his team expected more of a demand from organisations looking to track their carbon emissions.

“We've probably not seen as big an uptake as we would have expected, based on the government pressures and media noises which was made,” he says. “The rich functionality in SAP ERP and SAP Business Objects provides capabilities for tracking the current emissions requirements while having the capacity to adapt for future changes, we have not seen companies take great advantage of SAP for their emissions management and reporting requirements.”

And although other countries do not necessarily have the tight regulatory framework of Australia, according to Bassan, companies are always under the pump with the challenge to maintain their licence to operate, no matter what part of the world they are in.

“Even when operating in parts of the world with less strict compliance requirements, the parent companies are still answerable to their shareholders in the developed world and the supplier networks are so complex that they often end up using companies from all around the world. You have to apply global best practice no matter where you’re mining,” he says.

Project trends

Pressure to contain operating costs and increase productivity and efficiency are being noticed across the sector. Bassan says technology is increasingly being used by miners to address these challenges and gain a competitive advantage.

“This is about essentially being able to produce more tonnes with the same number of mines and the same number of mining machines,” he says. “Increasingly we’re seeing a recognition that technology has the capability to achieve more tonnes from the mine without additional investment in capital infrastructure. Less steel, more investment in silicon.”

Court has also seen an investment in technology across all projects and types of operations.
“Decisions are being made around technology investments, especially regarding autonomy and operational centres, with ongoing investments across commodities to understand how and where this would be effective, as well as how the technology could be scaled for longer term benefit,” he says.

Major mining capital projects are getting more intensive reviews, and the justifications must be concrete and prioritised, according to Court.

“There are a lot of capital projects constructing new mines underway. They are based on long-term plans and are continuing despite some reduction in commodity prices over the last year,” Bassan says. “The underlying reasons for doing those projects have not changed.”

Meanwhile, the biggest project trend Parvin is seeing at the moment is in the ERP space.

“The trend I’m seeing is SME’s looking to upgrade their enterprise systems, particularly ERP enterprise systems and obviously SAP is front and centre for that,” he says.

Mobility

Along with cloud and big data, mobility is one of the top three predicted technology trends of the future, and given its often remote operations and challenging environments, it is no surprise that the mining industry is utilising its benefits.

“Mobility is one of the key enablers of digital mining. We are seeing strong demand for maintenance, procurement, inventory, production and health and safety mobility solutions from companies that want to not only control their costs through streamlined processes but also attract a younger generation to the industry to replace an aging workforce,” Easlea says.

However, using a mobile device on a mining site isn’t as simple as incorporating it into an office environment. Mobility has always been a challenge in the mining sector because the geographical areas are relatively constrained, Parvin says.

“The mine might be in a very remote area so mobile solutions have some benefits in certain aspects, but often the business case is quite difficult because it’s a very harsh environment, so there needs to be a fairly significant investment in hardware and infrastructure.”

Despite this, he says there is no doubt a focus on mobility will continue to grow, especially for field service crews using it for maintenance purposes.

“They will benefit from optimised routing, access to back end systems and data,” Parvin says.

“Mobility is a dimension where we have seen interest, but not at scale,” says Court. “There has been more focus on analytics and how broader technology plays in an operational domain. Some organisations are assessing how the mobility aspects play into the process improvement and benefit delivery across client sites.”

There has been a small number of field trials that have run in various parts of the world, including projects run by the CSIRO in Australia that have looked at the use of mobile technology on mine sites in the last couple of years.

Clearly, a different range of mobile devices from the typical iPads and iPhones need to be applied to the harsh mining environments, says Bassan. As well as providing critical voice communications, today’s digital two-way radio handsets have colour screens, GPS and can be connected to corporate apps running on the enterprise network.

“We’re also seeing specialised hardened devices, ruggedized tablets and handheld smart phones that can be used even in underground environments,” Bassan says. “They’re not quite as user friendly as an iPhone, but they can provide some basic workflows and functionality, and link the mobile field worker to live data and business process.

SAP has supported its mobility strategy with the acquisition of Syclo and Sybase, which are able to provide infrastructure to manage mobile devices and also specific mobile applications for functions such as maintenance and procurement, which are critical in the resources sector.

Hodgins says being able to access apps such as these increase the amount of time maintenance or operational staff can be out in the field rather than doing admin in the office, making business processes more efficient.

“The other advantage of this is the better quality of data that is entered in the systems, because they’re not double or triple handling information, writing down things on bits of paper and coming in trying to remember what they did,” he says. “That accentuates the value of the ERP system in particular, where you’ve got better quality information and the company can make better decisions on how they’re performing.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition 2012.

Training: It’s business as usual

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:15:00 GMT

Training and change management for SAP is never “set and forget” – it requires ongoing maintenance. Thanks to new approaches, though, it’s more cost-effective than ever, as Lynton Howes writes.

“If you think training is a waste of money, calculate the cost of not training.”
– Anon.

You’ve just started with a new employer and have had the safety induction, been introduced to the key people and have been shown your workstation. You’re excited, nervous and wondering what to expect next. The company runs SAP, so applying your initiative, you search through the intranet for support content, but you are unable to find any online SAP training materials, guides or any useful information. You have been assigned a buddy, Joe, who gives you some old printed materials, which he advises are about 40 per cent out of date. Your boss asks you to get going in SAP. As you have no access yet, Joe lends you his user ID… and he lets you watch him, as part of the two-day handover. Joe’s very disenchanted with the company, seems to be disorganised and does not seem to follow the correct processes. You’re very nervous to transact in the live system, as you know that you will be held responsible for any mistakes once Joe is gone. The only form of support is an online Helpdesk service, but requests for help take days to be answered and only provide a transactional answer – without explaining the process.

After a week, your level of confidence hasn’t improved. It seems like everyone you meet has their own system “workaround”. People openly grumble about SAP, and the quality of data is poor and getting worse by the day. Excel is being used to produce management reports. You are surprised that even the most basic tasks in SAP seem like an enormous challenge for people, and yet, you’ve seen the system work so well elsewhere. What makes the situation even more astonishing is that the implementation project concluded only a year ago, and was reported to have cost around $50 million. You wonder whether this company is really for you…

“Owning intellectual property is like owning land. You need to keep investing in it again and again to get payoff.” – Esther Dyson

This all-too-familiar scenario arises easily, and it starts with the project handover. Training is the item most often identified as the single greatest determinant of success during post-implementation project reviews , yet it’s still the item which is most likely to have funds de-allocated during an implementation. If training and change management is not done effectively for go-live, the project obviously suffers. However, it is the Business As Usual (BAU) training environment that is the key to realising the return on the investment over the long term.

Providing quality, ongoing training does not have to be expensive. By applying the latest learner-centric approaches, it costs less than ever before. The ubiquity of screens (PCs, laptops, tablets and phones) in today’s workplace means that users are more comfortable with training content and support materials being accessed online and printed only when required, or never. Content is thus more easily updated as the system is enhanced, compared to the “printed manual” approach of 10 years ago.

The latest tools for recording eLearning simulations, such as SAP Workforce Performance Builder, are all about rapid development of content, requiring less expertise for developers, and also permit field-level, context-sensitive help and process guidance. This means that process and business rule help is pushed to the user directly when they are populating fields in SAP, without having to invoke help menus. The result is better training support for learners, integrated in the system, demonstrating the “why” and the “how”. A linked LMS or training portal (such as KnowHow) further enhances the overall learning experience, delivering relevant courses directly to users, and participation and completion can be easily monitored. And by capitalising on the use of social media, wikis and forums, users can generate and update shared materials; such as a user forum where upcoming changes can be announced, or questions asked. This enables self-help and cultivates engagement, while ensuring that the management team has visibility of process adherence.

All this is cheaply available, now. And rather than incurring the overhead and inefficiency of permanent training staff, expert trainers can be called in for on-demand sessions only as required, for example, when there are multiple new starters or a process has changed.

The result of is a training ecosystem which is targeted, easily accessible and up-to-date; as a result, users will use it and be effective in the system. Calls to the helpdesk go down, user productivity goes up, data quality is retained, and you have a platform for future enhancements. In short, the very benefits the project was intended to deliver in the first place.

The right training keeps a business running smoothly

Clearly, the maintenance of BAU training content and business processes is critical to achieving the return on your SAP project spend.

Attending to upkeep using the latest approaches will deliver years of productivity gains from your systems and people, at a fraction of the cost of inaction.

Reference

Mark J. Sweeney, Jr.

Education Account Manager, SAP Global Accounts (quote used with permission)

Lynton Howes is a Director of Adapt2 Consulting (http://adapt2consulting.com.au). Together with his business partner, Marié Lambrechts, they have over 20 years of experience delivering successful change and training solutions for SAP clients across a diverse range of organisations and industries.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition.

Is it time to BYOD?

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:08:00 GMT

Considering a BYOD strategy within your organisation? Adam Sivell looks at the risks, rewards and success factors.

Should you allow employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) into the enterprise? It’s a question that raises many others. Is the business data going to be at risk? Can the business save thousands of dollars a year through not buying devices? Will employees finally get the latest gadget they want?

The idea of employees using their own equipment at work is not new. Using private vehicles for sales representatives, couriers, and truck drivers has a long history in industry. Likewise, enterprise mobility is not new. Companies like Intermec and Motorola have developed fit-for-purpose mobile devices since the 1970s. What has changed and continues to advance rapidly are the sophistication of consumer mobile devices. These are now more powerful and feature rich than ever before. With the explosion of mobile device technology, early adopters immediately brought the latest devices into the workplace. Before the iPad was released in Australia, it was being used in Aussie workplaces to show videos, take notes, and access email. Therefore the big question for enterprises isn’t ‘should we allow BYOD’, but ‘how do we allow BYOD?’

BYOD strategy success factors

If we further explore the analogy of vehicles in the workplace, you will see some governing factors that ensure their successful use. Firstly there are situations (dare I say applications) where it may not be appropriate to use a private vehicle. For specialist fields like mining, police, health or where there is a need for branding, a company vehicle may be a better fit. Secondly, there are mature policies that outline how a private vehicle can be used. For example, bicycle couriers may get a fee per delivery, whereas taxi drivers must prepare and service their vehicle following strict guidelines. Another challenge to consider is that employees expect to be able to use their private vehicle in their own time for their own purposes. So what should the enterprise do to prepare for the BYOD that is already happening? A useful technique is to develop a BYOD strategy that encompasses the requirements, risks, policies, and technology.

Current usage of mobile technology

The first factor to consider is how your enterprise currently uses mobile technology. The most common answers are phone calls, emails and associated attachments, calendar, internet, and map services. These features may be low risk for most, however consider the specific risk to your enterprise and data. If a phone was found by a competitor, what data could they get access to? Could a malicious user release commercially sensitive information or compromise a government regulation?

Increasingly, enterprises already use or are planning to use mobile technology to access the corporate network and back-end systems like SAP. These uses of mobility warrant a closer review of the requirements and risks. Typically these applications fall into the category of either web-based or rich/native applications. Consider carefully what data and features the mobile applications enable. Could a malicious user download all of the customer data? Some rich mobile applications are akin to the police car in the vehicle analogy and require specific equipment to run properly (e.g. bar code scanning, a specific operating System, or utilise a printer). It may help to document each type of user and the features and applications they require.

Managing other risks and factors

While loss of IP and corporate data is of paramount importance, there are a range of other factors your enterprise should consider for BYOD, including:
• Cost of support: how will you handle problems on BYOD devices?
• Personal data: what if employee data is wiped or accessed?
• Who’s paying: for the device, data, calls, and support?
• Short lifespan: models change every six months, what will your upgrade plan be?
• Employees leaving: how do you clean up the enterprise data?

The right policies for your enterprise

This is a real ‘horses for courses’ question. I’ve worked with small businesses that love technology and utilise every feature, including geo-fencing and remote control of devices for support, but don’t require strict regulations on their data. At the other end of the spectrum, there are government-regulated industries that only use technology when they have to and every feature needs to be encrypted and locked down. In my opinion, sensible polices should protect the enterprise without hampering productivity and innovation.

When you have a good picture of your requirements, data, and risks, think about the policies that your enterprise would want to include in relation to mobile devices. These policies may in fact be appropriate for both BYOD and corporate devices. Most enterprises have an acceptable use policy for their desktops and/or the internet, and these may be a good starting point. Don’t just consider the technical policies (e.g. security, authentication, password strength, and data segregation), also think about the commercial (e.g. who pays for the data, calls, and support).

Managing the mobile fleet

I’ve seen a number of organisations where the mobile fleet is out of control and monthly fees are paid for dormant SIM cards sitting on a shelf. Consider all the device models, brands, and operating systems that you have out in the field. Do you have a mixture of old and new devices, iPhones for executives and ruggedized devices in the field?
Just because your enterprise will support BYOD doesn’t mean it needs support every type of consumer device. Look at the popular consumer device models and consider your enterprise requirements and policies. You can create a whitelist of devices that are suitable.

Supporting tools and solutions

Once you have a handle on the BYOD requirements and policies, you may need to consider a toolset like Mobile Device Management (MDM) to assist with the implementation of your strategy. Typical MDM features include:
• Application management
• Asset and lifecycle management
• Authentication, policy and security management.

An MDM solution can help segregate personal and corporate data, establish a standard operating environment (SOE), and support fleets of devices more easily. However, MDM solutions are reliant on the features provided by the operating system or hardware manufacturer. For example, you may be able to remotely view the screen on a Windows mobile device, but an Apple device might not support this feature. Likewise, some MDM products are offered as a hosted service, and others must be installed on your own hardware. To investigate the toolsets (for example, SAP’s Afaria), a good starting point is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report for MDM. If you’re thinking about IOS, a great public resource is the Department of Defence IOS hardening guide.

Employees always want to utilise the best tools, and mobile technology is an area that continues to evolve. Be prepared so that your enterprise can cost effectively leverage the benefits of mobility. Develop a BYOD strategy that considers the requirements, risks, policies and technology. Consider that BYOD is happening but may not be suitable for every mobile enterprise need.

BYOD may suit:
• Phone
• Email
• Web-based applications
• Simple workflow-style applications

• Reporting and business intelligence

BYOD may not suit:
• Applications that rely on rich device integration like RFID, scanning, keyboard, or stylus
• Tasks requiring a specific operating system or API
• Scenarios where a rugged or IP rated device is needed
• Where the business process is wholly reliant on the device

Adam Sivell has worked in IT since the mid 1990s, and is currently Practice Leader for Mobility at Fujitsu Australia. He has an extensive background throughout Australia and around the world working on more than 30 SAP and mobile projects.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition.

Engineering and construction speed adoption of technology

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:03:00 GMT

The mining boom doesn’t just reward resources companies – organisations in associated fields such as engineering, construction and professional services also reap the benefits of an uptick in activity. Michael Maslen, industry principal – engineering, construction and operations, discussed why these sectors are an emerging area of focus for SAP ANZ.

ISAP: How are the construction and engineering sectors faring at the moment?

MM: There is a couple of industry dynamics that are really causing some anxiety. One is obviously the massive construction downturn, so every single business in this sector is looking at cost containment. I cover companies that service the mining sector, such as mining services and oil and gas services companies, so when the mining sector goes through challenges and downturns, and BHP and Rio slow down their projects, my customers like Transfield, GHD and Leighton suffer as well. So they go through the slings and arrows of both the contraction and expansion of the building sector as well as the mining sector.

Because construction is down, many of the big organisations like Lend Lease and Multiplex which have really made their money in commercial construction, they are now just trying to swing into infrastructure on mining, so they can broaden their portfolio and continue to be profitable and successful.

On the technology front, from a construction sector point of view, technology and innovation are not necessarily the construction industry’s default mode of operation. In fact the only major change to the construction sector in the last 15 years is minor equipment upgrades and the occasional architectural trend. But over the last five to ten years, we have seen the advent of collaboration technologies. Professional services and construction companies are going in boots and all on online collaboration and document sharing for their clients.

Mobility is also coming to the fore, so when businesses have 85 per cent of their workforce out in the field, then mobile access to information becomes absolutely paramount. There is not a single person in this sector who is not wowed by mobile computing and by iPads, to greatly the reduce the time it takes to raise questions and variations and confirm project information. And it’s lighter than carrying around an armful of plans.

We are also seeing the popularisation of Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM is basically a building development tool that basically meshes three-dimensional modelling with information technology, to improve the way you treat information, coordinate construction documents, and visualise the physical assets being constructed. 3D modelling and CAD design is getting increasingly sophisticated and that’s a big IT driver in the industry today.

ISAP: In the engineering and construction space, what SAP solutions are they favouring?

MM: The project-based contracting type businesses have been slower to adopt basic ERP. So the interest is really in back to basics ERP 101. Across the sector, there are a lot of companies that still rely heavily on spreadsheets, and that still see IT has being a business hindrance rather than a business enabler. So the industry is still very much taking up core foundational project systems, finance and HR, but the they are also being pushed into the more sophisticated world of IT in areas like mobility.

For example, one of the customers I work with extensively is Transfield, and the ability for Transfield to win contracts is predicated on whether or not their workers, that they subcontract to other businesses, are mobile-savvy.

ISAP: What is happening in the professional services market?

MM: On the professional services front, the majority of the customers I work with are in two separate categories: the traditional white collar professional services like engineering, architectural and environmental, and IT services, through to emerging blue collar service-based industries, such as laundry or catering.

Their clients are becoming more savvy, they want more transparency in the contracts that they are taking with those professional services organisations. The commoditisation of these sectors is also driving these business, which must ‘differentiate or die’.

ISAP: What is the outlook for SAP’s penetration into those sectors?

MM: It is quite positive. When we look at these sectors, there are two or three businesses that dominate, and those companies have made their technology decision one way or the other. But there are many organisations out there that haven’t made the move into an integrated technology platform like SAP or Oracle. A lot of them might be running systems that may have worked for them in the past where they were running maybe a dozen projects, but now those businesses are expanding and having to increase their workforce.

For example, I am working with a professional services organisation with a workforce of 6000, and they want to grow that to 25,000 over the next 15 years. To be able to do that, they need to have a back office and technology platform that allows them to bring on other businesses quickly. They can’t run off spreadsheets – they need a tier one system to be able to do that. That gives SAP an enormous opportunity to invest and capture that side of the market.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer Edition.

SAP HANA: Australia ahead of the pack

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Australia has emerged as the fastest adopter of SAP’s HANA real-time technology in Asia. Freya Purnell spoke with Anthony McMahon, senior vice president, database and technology, SAP Asia Pacific Japan, about why Australian customers are making the investment and how they are justifying the value.

SAP HANA has emerged as the fastest-growing product in SAP’s history since it was launched just over 12 months ago – but this is no casual purchase. It has achieved that mantle with just under 600 customers worldwide (as of October), so that provides some indication of the significance of the investment.

SAP’s Anthony McMahon says the maturity of the Australian and New Zealand markets in terms of ERP and analytic technology adoption compared to other parts of Asia has been a key factor in our willingness to venture into the database space with SAP.

“I think there is a certain level of trust and investment that’s come with that, so that the customers are now very open to looking at innovative database platforms from SAP and anything that can help identify and extract more value out of that investment,” McMahon says.

The natural cynicism of Australian customers has also, ironically been an aid in adoption, driving a more relentless focus on generating a business case to be ascribed to any new investment, outside the normal project or maintenance budget. Effectively, they are making SAP work hard for the money.

“We have gone through the exercise of getting a business sponsor and looking at some innovative use cases for different customers, and then they can really scrutinize and be very rigorous on that business value. Once we cross that hurdle, the adoption is very, very fast,” McMahon says.

Organisations from across the full spectrum of SAP HANA are seeing this value – including fast-moving consumer goods, insurance companies, government agencies, retail and utilities – although the use cases typically fall into three broad categories: Business Warehouse acceleration, SAP application acceleration, and customer data mart initiatives.

The speed seekers

Those seeking to optimize the performance of SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) are typically driven by a need for speed. While McMahon is quick to point out that some are very happy with the way these applications are performing currently, others are looking for more.

“They are looking for a way to improve and accelerate their systems for some of their analytical applications or their operational reporting that works with BW, and HANA is providing them with levels of performance around the deployment much better than any other database platform solution in the market is offering,” he says.

In this type of use case, the IT barriers to change are fairly low, as long as the business case is there to justify the improvements.

“As they migrate the data from their existing underlying database to HANA, there is no change required to their existing applications and reports they are using out of BW,” McMahon says.

In some cases, this use of HANA is removing barriers that have frustrated companies for many years.

“The CIO of one customer, a large beverage company, said that in eight weeks of deploying BW on HANA, they are now able to get access to information in operational and senior level decision making that they have not been able to produce for 20 years.”
[subhead] The ‘better, faster, stronger’ adopters

With around 25 SAP applications now running natively on HANA, some customers are adopting the technology so they can get access to what are effectively solutions on steroids – such as BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC), Cost and Profitability Analysis (COPA), and Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FICA).

“What you are seeing is customers getting performance out of those applications that’s now justifying the use case for adoption, or they are willing to migrate to the new HANA instance because of the business value it’s giving them,” McMahon says. “An example could be on BPC, the CFOs are now able to do some month-end closing and planning scenarios that they just didn’t have the window to do at the end of quarter or month.”

The slicers and dicers

The third use case is where organisations are able to build a customer data mart powered by HANA specifically to overcome previous limitations around deep analytic ability, particularly for large data volumes.

“It’s actually a new custom data mart that’s been put in, often between your enterprise data warehouse and analytics tools. These applications might be built specifically for customer segmentation, supply chain visibility or decision support for credit risk scoring in the financial sector,” McMahon says. “Most of those we are seeing are non-SAP customers, using other ERP data.”

Getting more bang for their buck, some customers are adopting all three use cases to justify the HANA investment.

Keeping a low profile

Though more and more Australian and New Zealand customers are adopting HANA, few are willing to speak publicly about their implementations and the expected business value. Companies such as steel fabricator OneSteel, beverage company Frucor, construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu and the Super Cheap Retail Group have all become customers, but there are also adopters at the small to midsize end of the market. Footwear distribution company Aqueo became an early stage ramp-up customer for SAP Business One on HANA, and spare parts distribution company, ANPR has also gone down this path.

“ANPR has been able to get significant advantages around how much inventory they carry, the service that they are delivering to customers, the repeat business and customer management, that they couldn’t experience before they deployed HANA,” McMahon says.

While businesses seeking acceleration benefits are more open about their use of the in-memory technology, where business cases are driven by initiatives to gain competitive advantage, the level of secrecy is much higher.

“Customers are using it for new use cases in the way they might be analyzing their customer base, or changing business processes around decisions making to customer-facing staff instead of market, or taking decisions around capital investment on inventory management, because they can now predict more accurately,” McMahon says.

Building the right partnerships

While some of SAP’s existing BW partners have been quick to get on board with HANA, McMahon acknowledges that there is much more work to be done by SAP on developing the ecosystem for HANA.

“We have probably been overly cautious – we want to make sure that for any of the early projects done by our partners, the experience and the deployment goes perfectly because we really want HANA to deliver on everything that the customer believes it can do, as they have evaluated it,” McMahon says.

“To a certain degree, we have maybe held back some of our partners to make sure that we have got the right migration methodology, the right use case testing, the right project management and then over time will free up some of that IP and build out the ecosystem, because we have to do that if we want to scale. For many customers they want that choice as well – they have got an existing partner that they trust and work with.”

To achieve that scale, gaining the support of the developer, database architect and independent software vendor communitities is also a critical part of the plan for SAP, to encourage further development and innovation on the HANA platform.

“To us it is very important that the industry and many other customer see HANA as a real-time data platform, not just a real-time in-memory database for SAP use cases,” McMahon says. “You can write innovative applications, real-time applications, because all the underlying services you need to deliver that, whatever the data source, whatever the decision support layer that you are using can be done in HANA in real time.”

Though winning the allegiance of these market is outside SAP’s usual oeuvre, McMahon says the company benefits from having brought Sybase, BusinessObjects and Syclo into the fold.

“Those businesses were all about an ecosystem of application developers that was nothing to do with the SAP landscape. So we have people that have done that in the past, we just need to learn from them and make sure our programs drive that,” he says.

With these ambitious plans in play to win over both SAP and non-SAP customers, McMahon is positive that the rapid growth seen in ANZ will continue.

“Look at what some companies have been spending historically in the space and not getting the business value they expect. We have got customers really wanting to work with us on this because they do see this as a way to unlock some of the money that they might have been spending on maintenance or upgrades or duplication of infrastructure and data sets, and turn that into a very nimble, flexible solution like HANA. We don’t need the economy to grow, we just need to redirect some of that spend.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition.

Identifying the trigger points for a cloud deployment

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:55:00 GMT

In September, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) released its guide to implementing cloud services, and recommended that government agencies should identify the ‘trigger points’ that present opportunities for a move to cloud-based services. Freya Purnell spoke to Mark McWilliams, director of Datacom, which was recently been selected for the AGIMO Cloud Panel, about what those triggers points are for both public and private sector organisations.

According to Mark McWilliams, cloud adoption has been quite slow because it has tended to be positioned as a technology substitution, and with many Australia organisations already taking advantage of the benefits of virtualisation, the advantages cloud presents are not immediately clear.

However McWilliams believes that as we move into the age of the ‘Internet of Everything’, this is a lost opportunity. To truly leverage the cloud commercial model, we need to see beyond the well-publicised benefits of lower price, flexibility and standardisation.

“New business models are really driving disruptive products into previously stable sectors, and where IT departments used to be viewed as a real cost or a tax on the business, in this digital age, we really need to be viewing information and technology as the foundation of our competitive advantage,” McWilliams said.

He identified four ‘trigger points’ that could mean cloud brings great value to the organisation.

1. New business models
With cloud technology enabling some innovative and potentially disruptive business models, as we are seeing with web-based businesses such as Airbnb and Kickstarter, businesses should look at their own markets for both opportunities and threats that could be presented by this technology.

“Could a competitor take away massive chunks of your market by deploying a new digital way of doing things? With these new consumption-based cloud models, highly functional mass-market solutions can just take off,” McWilliams said. “Businesses need to think about what is going to drive the revenue of the future, and where their competitive threat is going to come from. Cloud is just the foundation enabler for this.

2. Driving business improvements
The next opportunity comes from looking internally for obvious areas which could benefit from an efficiency overhaul.

“Are you able to drive improvements in your business and become more effective and efficient than your competitors? This affects your ability to price the market,” McWilliams said. “The cloud obviously helps a lot with that because you’re able to roll out new ways of doing things – new systems, new tools, technologies – very rapidly because you’re not having to wait to implement new solutions and infrastructure the same way that you used to.”

3. Actually using big data
Big data is the talk of the town, and with the exponential growth in the number of ‘things’ – devices, sensors and so on – connected to the internet, we’re seeing a corresponding explosion in data volumes.

The challenge for business is not big data collection and storage for its own sake, but actually using it to drive customer value.

“Would your business be more successful if you could understand the data that you create from potentially thousands of sensors in your business? Cloud helps with that, because the economies of scale that cloud providers can deliver means you can be storing many terabytes or even petabytes of information very cost-effectively,” said McWilliams. “You have to consider how you actually bring the net volume of data into a product that you can either offer to attract new people or you can sell and drive revenue from. Big data is the term that’s applied to it, but cloud is the foundation of being able to really make use of this.”

4. Meeting the challenges of consumerisation of IT
BYOD, widespread app usage and the proliferation of cloud stage available to consumers has shifted the goalposts on what they expect from IT.

“People expect modern, flexible, powerful functional tools to be available in real time. Your ability to attract and retain talent in your business will be dependent on your ability to be flexible with your infrastructure,” McWilliams said, adding that the flexibility of cloud does make decisions about deploying new technology easier.

“I think that’s why we’re seeing a move away from monolithic software and hardware deals, where organisations have to tie themselves into long depreciation cycles that inhibit future choices. With cloud-enabled businesses, it’s a two-year commitment, and if I want to walk away, it’s going to be pretty easy.”

These four areas of opportunity should therefore be considered carefully in the context of what cloud can bring to the table, rather than just moving in-house technology directly to the cloud as part of a technology refresh.

“Why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to look at what businesses they’re supporting and what threats are coming into the business as a consequence of the digital age. If I just pick that stuff up and move it, am I allowing our competitors to bring a new product to market that we’re not even thinking about?,” McWilliams said. “Some people are just ticking the box and that’s a real shame when they could take it so much further.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition

In the palm of your hand

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:51:00 GMT

The pace of change in enterprise mobility is extraordinary, and organisations face considerable challenges in devising a strategy and choosing the right platform. Fortunately SAP has now given customers its clearest picture yet of its roadmap, which it hopes will clear the path to adoption. Freya Purnell reports.

According to Telsyte research, mobility is now appearing in the top five critical priorities for CIOs in 2013, with 9 per cent seeing mobility as ‘critical’ and 27.8 per cent seeing it as ‘very important’. To put this in context, mobility has now assumed a higher priority than ICT spending reduction and IT/business alignment.

Certainly SAP’s experience in ANZ bears this out, with head of mobility Andrew Fox reporting the enterprise mobility market is currently around twice the size that the company planned for in 2012.

“Just about every customer that we are currently talking to either has a plan for enterprise mobility or is working on that plan for 2013,” says Fox.

Organisations across a range of industry sectors are undertaking enterprise mobility initiatives in three distinct areas.

The first area is consumer-facing apps designed to build better relationships with customers (for example, loyalty apps in retail, or mobile banking and utilities apps which could replace call centre services).

“Then change in structures caused by the ability to reach your consumers without having bricks and mortar, for example, are absolutely enormous. Banks around the world are able to grow quite significantly without having to build a brand network. That doesn’t just apply to places like Bangladesh, South Africa or India. We are working quite closely with a number of financial institutions in developed parts of the world, including here, to deliver those solutions,” Fox says.

The second area is apps built to serve a specific business purpose.

“The business case is really driven by the productivity of the road warrior. For example, organisations have built specific apps to put in the hands of their sales force, so they can demonstrate to customers and order consumables or spare parts for them,” Fox says.

Mobility architect and SAP Mentor John Moy said there is clearly a big shift towards high usability of apps in this second tranche of mobility initiatives.

“What organisations are struggling with now is workers wanting self-service functions on their mobile, executives wanting to see analytics on iPads. All of that is very business demand-driven,” Moy says.

The third area is the mobilisation of the field worker, typically in plant and asset management in sectors such as utilities and mining. SAP’s acquisition of Syclo has added considerable impetus to this area, with implementations typically integrated with either an SAP Enterprise Asset Management or Maxima back-end.

“There is an enormous opportunity for us to deliver huge value to organisations with those field workers, delivering a 10-20 per cent performance improvement and very fast return on investment,” Fox says.

Indeed, SAP was heeding customer feedback that Syclo held the solution set they needed when it acquired the business. According to Fox, Syclo has brought a metadata driven model to the SAP portfolio, which allows organisations to change applications very quickly.

“Instead of actually writing the application to a much more native layout going into SAP to connect with the external stack, you are taking the functionality inside the system and using a metadata model to layer out into the shape and form of an application,” Fox says.

Mick Windsor, chief executive of Windsor Business Solutions, believes SAP’s mobility portfolio for asset management has been greatly strengthened through the addition of Syclo, as wall as Afaria for mobile devices and Geo.e, a joint collaboration between SAP and Esri.

“Syclo brings simplicity and ease of use to the portfolio for SAP. It’s a very powerful tool behind the scenes, but it is a very easy tool for people who are not used to technology – it’s quite intuitive,” says Windsor.

SAP recently announced operations, maintenance and construction services provider Transfield had chosen its mobile application development platform including mobile device management, mobile enterprise application management and packaged mobile enterprise applications, including SAP Work Manager by Syclo, to mobilise its 24,000 workers.

“With outsourcing contracts where they provide field service work for other customers, their ability to optimise both their profits and the efficiency of the customer is paramount, and they regard that as a huge competitive advantage as they go forward,” Fox says.

SAP’s maturing strategy

2012 has also seen SAP provide a new level of clarity on its mobile roadmap, which has three stages: step one is integrating the Sybase Unwired Platform with the Syclo Agentry Platform to provide a run-side environment for writing enterprise apps; step two is integrating this with the Mobilizer platform, the consumer app platform from Sybase; and step three, providing that unified code base both as an on-premise model and as a cloud solution.

“That’s the roadmap we will be working towards, and the foundation of what Sanjay Poonen [president, technology and innovation products, SAP] described as our attempt to be the Apple of the enterprise,” Fox says. “Because then you can write mobile applications through a consistent standard that you can publish on some form of application store, and everyone can use them because they are certified by SAP to run in our environment. It’s a brave and quite aggressive plan but we are already seeing signs that we are on track in delivering.”

Moy also believes that SAP has taken positive steps this year to show where they are going, and have made a number of excellent moves, including partnerships with Sencha, Appcelerator and Adobe, and differentiating itself by providing an application store with off-the-shelf apps.

“I think we’re at a turning point. When Sanjay Poonen took over, I think he actually provided a lot of leadership,” Moy says. “The fact that they have a roadmap to unify the whole thing under the banner of the SAP mobile platform, that the pricing has become more transparent in the last six months, and the fac that they’re now more vocal about rolling out mobility as a service in hosted or cloud-based offerings – I think that’s all been positive.”

However, he warns that it still takes time for customers to understand the way forward. At the same time, there are many other players in the market, some of whom have also been hot on the acquisition trail, including Antenna and Kony Solutions, which bought Sky Technologies in August. It’s not just big players either – small companies are also offering their own mobility platforms to SAP customers

“I think that it’s actually making it more confusing for customers because now it’s not just even SAP, everyone has a platform and everyone has a solution,” Moy says.

He says he would like to see SAP deliver mobile as a managed service, rather than simply striking partnerships with others, to make the pricing structures even more transparent.

“Not every customer wants to open up that type of relationship, because they already might be using a competitor as their strategic partner. It’s just that little bit of extra friction in the whole process, and while that’s happening, customers are getting all these options put in front of them,” Moy says. “Now that SAP is officially getting serious about cloud with SuccessFactors, maybe they should be running their own service.”

Developing an enterprise mobility strategy
Enterprise mobility is still changing so rapidly, it’s almost impossible to keep up.

“There was a quote I remember reading not long ago, which pretty much summed it up. It was about a company that had acquired another one just to get a little bit of extra functionality that they could have built in six months,” Moy says. “But then the article went on to say, six months is aeons. It’s so true, everything is changing so quickly.”

Organisations should start with a mobility strategy, but following the traditional model of setting out a five-year path probably won’t work given the pace of change.

“You want to spend some time to basically collect your thoughts around what is important to the organisation, what are the use cases that are going to bring the most value, can we prioritise and can we have a framework where we can continually keep that prioritisation fluid,” Moy says. “There are big questions about whether you’re focusing on enterprise versus consumer, because they are such massive differences in ways of thinking and what platform is best to serve those.”

Customers are common asking questions about where to start, according to Fox – what platform should they choose, should they wait for the next release, should they choose off-the-shelf or custom-built apps? It all comes back to the business case.

“If the business case for a mobile app has a payback which is months, then you start now and deliver on that payback in the knowledge that you are probably going to want to implement that application with a different look and feel in a three- to six-month timeframe anyway,” he says. “If it’s an application on a wishy-washy business case that might have a multi-year payback, you’d probably wait until we firm up the product and the roadmap so it will be easier to implement.”

While the conversation with organisations about mobile initiatives often start with mobile device management (MDM), preceding any discussions about strategic platforms, Fox says SAP is probably not the right choice if MDM is the endgame.

“If it’s about delivering the apps for this business case or to these people, and if it’s about managing multiple applications through a lifecycle, then the conversation becomes much broader,” he says.

Considering any one platform is difficult for customers at the moment, Moy says, given the breadth of options and the high level of acquisition activity.

“I think customers should look at what’s on offer, but really do some due diligence. Consider that you don’t always need your platform on-premise. I’m a proponent of considering a managed model – in other words, a platform in the cloud,” he says.

By opting for a managed service, organisations may also be able to avoid the expense of full-time resources available to manage an on-premise system – if they can find people with the right skills in such a rapidly changing environment.

“That’s actually skills just in the platform management area, there are also the skills for developing apps,” Moy says.

“Because mobile is changing so rapidly, the platforms have to abstract you from the different devices. The platform is not your traditional SAP system, which you create once every three years, it’s something you need to patch every month or so.”

[breakout] Html vs native apps
Another battle is emerging between business and IT, over whether native apps or HTML apps are the right choice for the enterprise.

“On the one hand, native is basically saying I prioritise usability above all else, and on the other, using HTML5 or mobile web, I’m minimising my development and support cost by being able to code as much as possible and provide cross-platform support,” Moy says.

In its strategic technology outlook for 2013, Gartner highlighted the complexity of the market for tools to create consumer and enterprise-facing apps, with over 100 potential vendors. The analyst firm predicts that no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile applications, so organisations should expect to employ several, but there will be a long-term shift from native to web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable.

Moy says at the moment he is seeing a lot of fracturing in the SAP world, and that the native or HTML choice also needs to be based on the business case.

“The reality is it’s possible to be native if you’re only targeting one or two specific platforms. If you have a consumer-focused app, they just won’t settle for anything less, plus your market is bigger,” he says. “If you’re building a very specialised app that might service 100 people in your organisation, the only way you might get the business case up is by building a simple HTML app. It might not be as usable, but that may be the only way you can actually get the funding and pull that off based on the value proposition.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition.

Cloud, on-premise or a hybrid: which way will you jump?

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:45:00 GMT

Transfield Services HRIS program director, Michelle de Wet, who spoke at the SAUG Summit 2012, shared the key steps in Transfield Services’ decision-making process on choosing its SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) direction.

Following SAP AG’s acquisition of SuccessFactors earlier this year, the company made some key announcements about the future strategic director for the SuccessFactors cloud-based HCM solutions, versus the SAP HCM Talent Management suite, hosted on-premise. SAP confirmed that while there will be ongoing support for the on-premise Talent Management solution, future innovation and investment will be directed towards SuccessFactors HCM modules in the cloud.

This, therefore, has implications for many organisations, which are now being forced to re-evaluate their HCM roadmaps.

Transfield Services is one of those companies. When SAP made the announcement, Transfield had already commenced its global Quantum program, which aimed to install the SAP ERP platform across Transfield Services’ operations, to drive common policies and processes. So they had to consider how to proceed – whether to continue with an on-premise implementation, or consider a hybrid model incorporating SuccessFactors.

Despite already being some way down the path with the SAP ERP model, Transfield decided it was the right time to take the leap into the cloud. The fact that the company had very little in the way of automation in the Talent Management space made that decision easier.

“For such a large organisation, a lot of our people processes are manual, driven by spreadsheets. So from a landscape point of view, it didn’t really hurt us whether we went down an SAP ERP path, or decided to go with cloud,” de Wet said.

Having already completed the blueprint phase of the Quantum project, Transfield Services was able to give SuccessFactors the complete map of its processes and business requirements, and ask the crucial questions on whether whether cloud could deliver on these.

“We were under pressure, because we had the Quantum project up and running, and still had to make sure we delivered on regional deadlines. We completed the whole change request process from end-to-end in eight weeks, which was a large achievement in itself,” de Wet said.

On 10 August, Transfield Services became the first customer in the Asia Pacific to sign up for the hybrid model, combining SAP and SuccessFactors.

Key decision factors

So what got Transfield over the line on the cloud/on-premise hybrid model?

From a business perspective, Transfield Services was looking to expand its HCM self-service offering, make it much more user-friendly, and centralise it globally.

“We really want to get better at managing our people as people are really at the heart of our business. We are a people business, we sell people with certain skills to deliver certain services, so we have an opportunity to get better at that,” de Wet said.

The attractive user-interface of SuccessFactors was a key factor in Transfield Services’ decision.

“For us as an organisation, because we had a large amount of manual processes and our workforce is mainly blue collar, we needed to make sure that the user interface is something that people will actually want to work with” de Wet said.

Transfield Services also considered the level of access and reach in the organisation.

“We have a very distributed workforce, some in remote locations across multiple geographies, so we considered the cloud providing benefits in this area” de Wet said.

Transfield Services also discovered that implementing SuccessFactors would actually reduce project implementation costs.

“The cloud is very different to SAP on-premise. There’s nothing to build as such, no customisation, only configuration, so it’s literally out of the box. You switch on a few things and design forms to suit your organisation, but really it should decrease implementation costs,” de Wet said.

Transfield also had to consider the long-term commercial impact, including operating costs, which were found to remain unchanged.

The hybrid model

Transfield Services has chosen to implement the whole SuccessFactors cloud offering, with the exception of Employee Central, as this functionality will be kept in the SAP on-premise system, and feed data into the cloud.

The future, de Wet said, is for the SAP on-premise system to include core HR, Organisational Management (OM), Personnel Administration (PA), Payroll and Time Management, while Talent Management will be held in the cloud, with an ESS/MSS Portal integrated with the cloud.

Lessons learned

While Transfield Services is still at the beginning of its implementation journey with SuccessFactors, de Wet said they have already learned some lessons along the way that others may benefit from when undertaking a similar process.

Though most are familiar with the concept that cloud has a subscription model, it may not be clear that subscription fees kick in as soon as the project begins implementation, rather than when the system is live.

“Also, it’s not really the number of users of the solution, it’s the number of employee records in the cloud that will determine the price. It’s very important to be aware of that point.”

De Wet also stressed that when considering cloud, companies should revisit their original business case and adapt it to the new functionality cloud provides.

“You may be able to deliver more benefits because the cloud operates differently. It takes a mindset change, and it’s going to impact what you do and how you manage people.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition

The Wine Society: A fine drop

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:41:00 GMT

A rapid implementation of SAP BusinessObjects has provided The Wine Society with the solution to problems in access to and use of sophisticated reporting. Freya Purnell reports.

Background
Established in 1946, The Wine Society is Australia’s oldest independent wine club. With over 55,000 members nation-wide, the society has a commitment to distributing Australian wine, and also offers wine education, events and corporate services such as private tastings.

The Wine Society has been a long-term user of SAP, first implementing the system in July 1998, and upgrading to 4.7 in 2006.

As a small business, the Wine Society has not been able to invest significantly in its SAP solution, outside of the core business functionality, according to Nick Perrin, information systems manager, The Wine Society.

“This meant the business had no integrated reporting solution, and was reliant on a combination of LIS, custom ABAPs and exports. In addition to SAP, the business required reports from our various standalone retail POS systems, from our email marketing system, and from our inbound and outbound contact systems (currently separate),” Perrin says.

Data from these disparate sources needed to be manually extracted and consolidated in Excel.

“A consequence of this was the business was heavily reliant on the availability of certain key users to generate these reports manually, and access to timely and relevant insight was limited at best,” Perrin says.

In addition to these system challenges, The Wine Society operates in an incredibly competitive market, due to an influx of online wine merchants and the high Australian dollar presenting challenges around competing with cheaper imports. In this environment, having better business insights needs to provide an advantage.

“We had already been working on a home-grown solution for this issue using SSAS and consolidating the large variety of existing exports developed over the since implementation, but we were held up at the last stage trying to resolve performance and usability issues for the end users,” says Perrin.

SAP services provider Icon Integration, which had been working with The Wine Society on maintaining and supporting its SAP environment, suggested SAP BusinessObjects as a solution that could be rapidly deployed to resolve these issues.

Peter Collett, director, Icon Integration, says, “We knew that they created a SQL server data mart that they weren’t getting much from. In the end, we said give us a box, we will install BusinessObjects and connect it to your data mart, and we will show you what it can do.”

Implementation and challenges
In undertaking this implementation, Perrin says the main aim was to provide the business with timely and accurate reports, which they were unable to do effectively with the existing manual processes.

“By automating all our key reports, as well as our list segmentation and generation, our aim was also to free resources to focus on more in-depth reporting and analysis, rather than wasting time on daily and monthly recurring requirements,” Perrin says.

The solution used SAP Business Intelligence Edge 4.0 SP4 over a SQL Server datamart to provide quick, specific access to information needed by the business – such as sales, membership and product information – in a very simple and easily maintainable deployment.

The implementation was very successful, with Icon installing the new solution very rapidly so The Wine Society could get up and running with its new reporting processes.
“Given the work we had already done on the data extraction and consolidation, in just a handful of consulting days Icon had deployed the system and trained the key IT and business users,” Perrin says.

While a challenge for The Wine Society with this project was making resources available to develop the required reports and manage the incorporation of new data into the BusinessObjects universe, Perrin says Icon was able to make a resource available quite flexibly to assist with additional training and insight.

To date, the key user within The Wine Society of the new BusinessObjects solution has been their marketing data analyst. There are now a significant number of previously manually generated weekly and monthly reports scheduled and running daily. Perrin says the business has also recently automated the generation of basic lists for its email marketing campaigns, and has currently incorporated data from its Point of Sale system and email marketing system, and working on the integration of its outbound and inbound contact systems data.

“In the three months since we implemented BusinessObjects we have already scheduled around 14 weekly/monthly reports, meaning results that were usually reported on once a month after the sales have been completed are now being reported every day, significantly improving responsiveness,” Perrin says.

Collett says the feedback from the marketing analyst is that the solution will save her hours each day, compared to the previous processes of extracting data manually and manipulating in Excel.

“That’s probably one of the reasons why this small project has proven so successful – they have someone who really has a vested interest in this solution and she is just flying with it,” he says.

Business benefits
Perrin says BusinessObjects is providing a new level of visibility and analytic capability to the business.

“As we hoped, the new solution is already providing daily insight into business performance in a way that was not possible previously with our reporting and resourcing limitations,” he says. “Key anticipated benefits include significantly improved customer segmentation, enhanced stock forecasting, improved channel analysis and opportunity identification, along with the general expectation of significantly improved decision-making. Our experience so far indicates that it will allow us to deliver on those expectations in spite of our very limited budget and resources.”

Collett says this project shows that achieving results such as these doesn’t require a 6-month or 12-month project.

“You can deploy it in a matter of days, and you can have real business benefits in a matter of days,” he says.

The BusinessObjects solution also provides a platform to make the facts needed for good decision-making, and even predicting customer desires, available for the business to act on.

“When your facts are so hidden within SAP, you need to have a sensible way of getting the facts out to the right people at the right time. The Wine Society has to know who is buying what, and almost be able to predict what their customers will want to buy,” Collett says. “BusinessObjects lets them make informed decisions as opposed to guesses.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition

Slow Australian economy contributes to ICT spending cuts: IDC

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

An IDC report has revealed that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) spending across vertical markets within Australia is set to rise from $43,408.6 million in 2012 to $49,452.6 million by 2016.

The report titled 'Australia Vertical Markets 2012-2016 Forecast and 2H12 Update' states although the annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3 per cent for the forecast period is strong, the slow growth of Australia’s economy is impacting ICT spending.

"IDC has lowered ICT spending growth due to fiscal consolidation, political uncertainty, the high Australian dollar and at a period close to the end of a mining boom," said David So, Australian vertical markets analyst for IDC.

ICT spending in Australia’s banking, finance and insurance sectors remains the largest vertical and will exceed the $10 billion mark in 2013, the report states.

The Australian government represents the second largest vertical.

According to report, the government’s ICT spending is mainly focused on generating significant cost efficiencies by deploying cloud-based infrastructure and a whole-of-government approach in its ICT procurement policy.

As a result, IDC forecasts the government's ICT spending will grow by a CAGR of 3.2 per cent for the forecast period.

The communications and media industry is the third largest vertical, registering the fastest growth in terms of ICT spending with a CAGR of 4.4 per cent for the forecast period.

"We believe that this vertical is the most exposed to disruptive technologies/innovation and thus are required to increase more of ICT spending to mitigate the risk of being disrupted by emerging businesses," So said.

"When we combine these top 3 verticals in Australia, they together represent half of total ICT spending in Australia."

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SAP Store promotes three Esker SAP Business ByDesign solutions

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:34:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Esker has announced that in addition to Mail Services for SAP Business ByDesign, Fax Services and Accounts Receivable are now promoted in the SAP Store.

To access these services, follow the below links:

Mail Services:
Esker Mail Services integrates print to mail services to SAP Business ByDesign. Documents are automatically sent to Esker’s worldwide network of mail facilities, where they are printed and put into the postal stream in less than 24 hours.

Fax Services:
Esker Cloud Fax Services generates documents from SAP Business ByDesign and securely submits them to the worldwide network of Esker production facilities. Benefits of the service include sending a fax as a service without adding hardware or software.

Accounts Receivable:
Esker Accounts Receivable is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that offers 100% automation of customer invoice delivery without changing customer preferences. Integrating directly with SAP applications, the Esker solution allows companies to automate archiving and delivery of electronic and paper invoices.

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SAP plans real-time benefits for SCM customers

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the planned availability of SAP liveCache technology powered by the HANA platform.

The reason behind the planned introduction is to deliver opportunities for deployments of the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimizer (SAP APO) component, according to SAP.

“Right now, we are in the era of the real-time, demand-driven supply chains,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, line-of-business solutions for supply chain, SAP.

“By leveraging the power of SAP HANA for the supply chain, we arm our customers with the most effective tools for intelligent reporting at the fastest speeds.”

This announcement follows a series of investments SAP has made in the supply chain management area, including the launch of the latest version of the SAP Transportation Management application and plans to acquire SmartOps.

Planned benefits of SAP APO on HANA include accelerated reporting on large volumes of supply chain planning data; out-of-the-box analytical reporting possible with streamlined data load; decision-making based on near real-time information; dashboards for different use cases, including analytical workflows, for APO-based planning scenarios; and reduction of hardware costs due to no dedicated server requirement.

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Big wins for Business Suite on HANA in APJ

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

The newly released SAP Business Suite powered by HANA has gained two big customers in Asia-Pacific Japan in the form of India’s Avon Cycles and China’s largest bottled water producer Nongfu Spring.

The new option for SAP Business Suite customers enables its business applications to capture and analyse transactional data in real-time on a single in-memory platform.

Kuljeet Singh Sethi, chief information officer of Avon Cycles, said his company has replaced the Oracle business suite with the Suite on HANA solution, adding that the power of doing business in real-time is immense.

"At Avon Cycles, we are constantly looking for ways to do things faster, smarter and more efficiently. We need to constantly manage a huge volume of bought out components - each bicycle has more than 360 components and there are over 200 models with an average of three sizes per model and three colours in each size," Sethi says.

"Adding to the complexity is the challenge of forecasting our sales as bicycles are regarded as commodities in India, resulting in a very short lead time for material requirements planning. Transforming to real-time planning and monitoring of order fulfilment scenarios are extremely critical for Avon Cycles, and we believe the SAP business suite will help make a significant difference."

APJ continues to be one of SAP’s fastest growing markets, with the president of SAP APJ, Steve Watts, saying real-time computing will have a profound impact on the way business gets done in the region.

"In many economies across the Asia-Pacific region, demographics are shifting. The favourable conditions that fuelled growth are vulnerable to increased volatility. To sustain growth in this new reality, economies need innovative businesses and innovation requires getting the right information in real time. When businesses make better decisions faster and innovate their business processes and models, the entire economy benefits," he said.

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SAP APJ chooses Indian partner for language localisation

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Language localisation software solution provider LinguaNext has partnered with SAP Asia-Pacific Japan to enable SAP solutions to be used in foreign languages without changing the SAP database.

"Many LinguaNext customers already use Linguify S. with SAP. We are expanding our next generation language technology by introducing more Indian as well as foreign languages,” said Jagadish Sahasrabudhe, COO, LinguaNext.

“With Linguify, many new business areas with strong local language requirements can now harness the full power of SAP solutions. It also enables public sector units to quickly meet official language mandates without any changes to their SAP infrastructure. With the world's leading SAP software now being available in Indian languages, all such businesses can immediately get an off-the-shelf solution instead of having to spend time and money in developing custom solutions."

The company offers 18 Indian languages and 15 foreign languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and European.

Over 50 per cent of LinguaNext’s 60 large enterprise customers are based out of India and include State Bank of India, Wipro, Tata Consultancy services, Punjab National Bank, who are using its multilingual applications.

Linguify S. supports all Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil and does not require any upgrades or patches to the SAP software or to its underlying database.

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On the Move: Harms appoints lead for new SAP Consulting Services Unit

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Harms Consulting Australia has restructured its Real Estate and consulting business units into a single SAP Consulting Services Unit that will be lead by David Gannon.

Due to the SAP Real Estate offering now integrating with more and more SAP components, it makes sense for Harms to merge its resources into a single unit, Gannon said.

“Real Estate still remains our core focus and with supplementary skills under a single business unit, this will bolster our delivery capabilities,” he said.

Gannon has more that 17 years' SAP experience working on both the client and consulting aspects, across all SAP components delivered throughout Australia, Asia, Europe and North America.

“Harms and our clients are fortunate to have the benefit of David’s extensive international experience. He is meticulous about everything he undertakes and as a result, delivers effective and innovative solutions,” said Harms managing director, Detlev Harms.

One of Gannon’s first goals as part of the Harms team is to finalise its Australian Real Estate solution “which will enable us to rapidly deliver to our clients a cost-effective Australian-based Real Estate solution”.

In addition, Harms is looking to establish a Real Estate Focus Group to further enhance its Real Estate offering into other areas, including construction and asset management.

“We are looking for interested customers and industry players to work with us to further enhance our Australian Real Estate solution,” Gannon said.

“We want to expand the solution into new SAP product areas, such as the new SAP Commercial Project Management offering which will deliver a more integrated solution into the construction space and we are looking for partners to work with us in developing this solution.”

Everjoy Consulting approved under NSW Government Contingent Workforce Scheme

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Everjoy Consulting has announced it has been approved under the NSW Government Contingent Workforce Scheme as of March 2013.

The approval enables Everjoy Consulting to provide contingent resources to all departments of NSW Government.

“We see this appointment as an opportunity to assist the NSW Government to achieve ROI through their SAP projects within a shorter period,” said Adrian Everett, managing director, Everjoy Consulting.

In addition to this appointment, Everjoy Consulting has successfully been appointed to the ICT Services Registered Supplier List for NSW Government departments who prefer engagement for fixed price solutions.

Yann Guillaume, general manager of Everjoy Consulting says it’s not just SAP roles where they have the opportunity, but across the greater NSW Government ICT strategic plans.

“Some of the IT/ERP and infrastructure landscapes we have capabilities across include SAP, Oracle Fusion, SAS, TM1, Hyperion, Microsoft BI/CRM, SharePoint, BO/Crystal Reports, Cognos, IBM Tivoli/WebSphere, Data Modellers, J2EE/Web services, ETL and SOE architecture, BI/data warehousing, RFID and lots more,” he said.

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SuccessFactors Focuses on Cloud Security

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Published by: SuccessFactors

In the past, HR management software was accessible only to companies that made massive up-front investments. Today, thanks to cloud computing, core HR business applications are available to everyone. But what about security?

SuccessFactors takes a holistic approach to information security, implementing a multilayered defense at all the touch points in the information flow-both the physical and logical, applied across the database, middleware, application, and network and communication layers-to offer complete data privacy, transparency, and audit controls.

Date: 18/9/12

Pages: 12

Click here to access.

SAP launches three new ERP rapid-deployment solutions

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 03:05:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the launch of new enterprise resource planning (ERP) rapid-deployment solutions for enterprises considering the adoption of SAP Business Suite on HANA.

The three new solutions - SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, SAP ERP for Manufacturing and SAP ERP for Trading - are powered by the HANA platform.

They include preconfigured software, implementation services, best-practices content and end-user enablement and come with a fixed price and scope.

“These new rapid-deployment solutions support IDC’s findings that emerging technology implementations are becoming shorter, and require fewer consulting and integration services,” said Gard Little, research director, at IDC for IT consulting and systems integration research.

“Delivered as a complete package with a modular approach, SAP Rapid Deployment solutions allow customers to incrementally address business needs at their own pace in a simple and pre-integrated framework that can help them unlock value quickly.”

The rapid-deployment solutions join the earlier packaged SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA rapid-deployment solution for Business Suite on SAP HANA.

The package is also available in an advanced approach to enterprise customer relationship management (CRM), the SAP 360 Customer solution.

“The promise of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP 360 Customer is to enable businesses to run faster, simpler and smarter,” said Steven Birdsall, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions.

“Now, through rapid-deployment, we have wrapped this innovation into an easily accessible package as well. We have helped reduce implementation barriers for a non-disruptive and practical transformation into real-time business. Rapid-deployment solutions are offering customers game-changing innovation with controlled risk.”

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Keynote integrates with Worksoft Certify for SAP mobile users

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:49:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring solution provider, Keynote, has announced the integration of the Keynote DeviceAnywhere platform with Worksoft Certify.

Through the Worksoft Certify Mobile Interface Extension users can now perform automated end-to-end testing of SAP mobile applications on real devices.

The integration of DeviceAnywhere is a natural progression of Keynote’s previously announced worldwide partnership to extend Worksoft’s top ranked test automation software for SAP solutions to the mobile ecosystem, the company said in a statement.

Worksoft now connects to DeviceAnywhere through the Worksoft Certify Mobile Interface Extension, extending users’ existing library to include a private cloud of mobile devices in conjunction with Worksoft's Certify solution.

SAP customers will now be able to use the Worksoft Certify Mobile Interface Extension to test both SAP and non-SAP mobile business applications.

“SAP is aggressively driving forward its mobile initiatives making the need for comprehensive mobile testing solutions more critical and urgent than ever,” said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote.

“Our integration is the ideal solution for SAP users who have come to value the dependability and quality reputation of Worksoft Certify, which they can now use along with Keynote DeviceAnywhere, the industry’s leading mobile testing platform. The partnership creates an easy-to-use automated solution for real-device mobile testing; critical for mobile growth in the SAP ecosystem.”

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On the Move: TAMS appoints head of EAM Business Unit

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:45:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Keith Johnson has been appointed head of TAMS Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Business Unit.

Johnson joins Lyndy Wallis, Keith Wallis and Mark Bosman on the TAMS management team.

His new role will see him developing standard processes and repeatable solutions as well as providing best practice solutions that will “provide TAMS customers with the ability to manage and monitor the performance of their plant and equipment, and the underlying business processes of their EAM system by satisfying the purpose and objective of the management of maintenance”, the company said in a statement.

“Johnson has been a valuable member of the TAMS team and has provided first class service to our clients as well as being a wonderful mentor to our EAM staff,” said TAMS CEO Lyndy Wallis.

“With his practical experience, knowledge and passion for EAM we feel he will further develop our expanding EAM line of business and provide the specialist support SAP EAM customers need.”

Johnson has taken his experience from a 22-year career in naval engineering and successfully translated it into the commercial EAM sector.

He specialises in the management of industrial maintenance, enterprise asset management system design, implementation and turnaround projects, reliability management and, marine engineering defence and public security.

He has consulted to clients in the Asia Pacific region, North America and South America across a variety of industries, including mining, manufacturing, utilities, oil & gas, pulp and paper, the public sector and defence.

“I am very excited about joining the TAMS team and supporting the end to end Asset Lifecycle Management Solutions that TAMS offers, with my EAM expertise,” Johnson said.

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On the Move: Plaut appoints new southern regional delivery manager

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:42:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Plaut It Australia has appointed Stephen Collins as its new southern delivery manager responsible for Victoria and South Australia.

Collins will drive customer delivery, quality and be responsible for the measurement and ongoing focus on customer satisfaction across the two states, drawing on his expertise in practice and project management.

Sebastian Moore, chief executive of Plaut IT Australia says the appointment supports Plaut’s commitment to caring for its customers and ensuring that they deliver on business outcomes

“With over 16 years’ experience in SAP CRM, logistics, practice and project management, Stephen brings a depth of understanding and expertise to the Plaut IT Australia team,” he said.

“With our increased focus on manufacturing and supply chain management in 2013, we are employing the best people in the industry to accelerate our growth objectives”

Stephen has extensive SAP consulting experience across a broad range of industries and has worked in various roles in global and blue chip organisations such as Lease Plan, Unisys, IBM, Officeworks, and Mitsubishi.

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Esker launches mobile app for vendor invoice approvers

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:18:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Document process automation solution provider Esker announced today it is launching a mobile accounts payable (AP) automation application for Apple iPads and iPhones.

The free application is designed for employees responsible for approving vendor invoices prior to payment, allowing them to access invoices in real-time anywhere, anytime.

Eric Bussy, worldwide director of marketing and product management at Esker, said the development of applications on mobile devices is a big part of Esker’s strategy.

“Our customers are always looking for faster and more accessible ways to do their daily business activities, and processing vendor invoices is part of this trend,” he said.

“The vendor invoice approval application is the first stage in our mobile offering, which will soon include new business processes (sales orders and customer invoices), and expand to Android and Windows operating systems.”

According to Esker, the mobile solution enables customers to view the list of vendor invoices awaiting approval, or those in litigation; view invoice images as they were received by the accounting department; instantly access key invoice data (e.g. supplier name and total amount), as well as any comments from previous approvers; and approve, put on hold or return an invoice to the previous approver with the option of adding a comment at each step.

The application will soon be available in the Apple App Store for all Esker AP on-demand customers.

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Business Suite on HANA available in ANZ

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:20:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced that SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA is now available to new and existing customers in Australia and New Zealand.

SAP initially made the announcement that its Business Suite – excluding SRM – would be available on its in-memory platform, HANA, in January this year.

So far 22 partners in Australia and New Zealand have signed up to implement Business Suite on HANA, including SAP solutions provider NTT DATA Business Solutions.

SAP has noted in a statement that the largest 20 businesses listed on the Australian Securities Exchange account for nearly 50 per cent of the ASX’s market capitalisation.

“Half of these businesses run at least on installation of SAP Business Suite and now can derive even greater value from the solution by migrating to the SAP HANA platform,” SAP said.

Rapid deployment solutions are available for fast implementation for customers who choose to migrate their database to the HANA platform.

SAP has developed business scenario recommendations to help existing customers identify where Business Suite on HANA can deliver value.

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Turnkey launches SAP risk management solution

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:17:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP GRC and security specialist, Turnkey Consulting, has launched an SAP risk management tool to enable organisations to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks across the enterprise in a single system.

After seeing an increase in demand for enterprise risk management solutions, Turnkey engaged SAP as a collaborator and CQS – an SAP partner and GRC specialist based in South Africa – as a co-developer to create the solution.

The new solution standardises risk management best practices and tools across the enterprise based on the ISO31000 and COSO frameworks.

Turnkey said in a statement that the informed insight the solution facilitates “provides management teams with a complete view of the threat landscape and enables them to plan and execute responses to mitigate the effects”.

“Organisations are increasingly aware that they face risk from many directions, as well as the detrimental effects these have on their operations,” said Richard Hunt, managing director at Turnkey Consulting.

“This new solution enables our customers to be proactive in minimising these threats by taking an all-important enterprise-wide approach that is straightforward to deploy.”

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OpenText launches EFM 4.0 for SAP solutions

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:14:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Enterprise information management (EIM) provider, OpenText, has launched the latest version of its Employee File Management (EFM) software to use with SAP solutions.

EFM 4.0 integrates with solutions from SuccessFactors via a new cloud connector interface feature, which helps solve growing compliance challenges associated with on-premise/hybrid environments, according to OpenText.

The additional functionality is aimed at helping Human Resources (HR) departments to drive efficiency, reduce cost, meet compliance requirements, go digital and securely operate at new levels of speed and efficiency.

OpenText EFM 4.0 also now includes a mobile app that provides an easy-to-use interface and gives users fast access to the functionality of the OpenText EFM solution.

Available on both iPad and Android devices, the app helps users securely connect to necessary resources and information in the field at anytime, according to OpenText.

“Many of our customers recognise the benefits of making their HR processes completely digital but struggle to manage content across cloud and on-premise environments,” said Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s senior vice president, engineering.

“Right in line with our EIM strategy, these new EFM offerings in support of SAP solutions can help companies take full advantage of their information across the enterprise so that they can better service employees and ultimately drive business.”

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SAP to combat fraud with new solution

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:10:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the launch of the SAP Fraud Management analytic application in a bid to help companies worldwide address the estimated US$3.5 trillion worth of fraud that occurs every year.

The application is powered by the HANA platform and takes advantage of real-time analytics to detect, analyse, investigate and prevent “irregularities or fraud in ‘big data’ environments”.

SAP Fraud Management is customised to varying business needs across industries such as insurance, public sector, banking, healthcare and utilities in order to detect fraud earlier to reduce financial loss; improve detection accuracy at less cost; and prevent and deter fraud situations.

According to a report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, ‘2012 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse’, the typical organisation is at risk of losing up to five per cent of its revenues to fraud.

"The rise of big data is forcing organisations to improve their governance, risk and compliance efforts. Being able to validate who did what, and provide a defensible audit trail, is key in addressing potential fraud," said Michael Rasmussen, chief pundit, GRC 20/20.

"There is a potential for organisations to face massive loss due to fraud. This is becoming even more of a risk with the ever-increasing amount of data being generated. Helping customers detect even a fraction of these cases would represent significant savings – employing advanced solutions to help detect and deter fraud makes sense."

SAP Fraud Management is also expected to be used by government agencies to reduce fraud and non-compliance by cross-checking tax returns or social service applications against millions of related data records in real time, to uncover hidden fraud patterns and produce alerts on suspicious transactions that may be missed by conventional fraud and compliance rules.

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SAP expansion to create 120 ICT jobs in Victoria

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:05:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Technology Minister Gordon Rich-Phillips has announced 120 new high-tech jobs will be created in Victoria, due to the expansion of SAP Australia and SAP India.

The expansion will include the establishment of SAP’s Mission Control Centre (MCC) in Melbourne, which will be staffed by up to 20 senior consultants and project directors who will coordinate the delivery of services to customers in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.

According to Rich-Phillips, over 100 additional jobs will be created to meet SAP’s growing Victorian customer base.

“The Melbourne Mission Control Centre will coordinate large-scale software rollouts and SAP India will provide software research and development,” he said.

“This partnership is a good example of Victoria and India working together by leveraging India’s software development capability and Victoria’s project management and delivery expertise.”

The latest audio and video technology based at the MCC will be used to ensure SAP’s local teams and their partners in India can work together to deliver a combined software service to customers in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Managing director of SAP Labs India, Anirban Dey said the SAP India team will work closely with the MCC in Melbourne as they provide the services that put these solutions into production across the Asia-Pacific region.

Rich-Phillips said the Coalition Government welcomed future opportunities for collaboration projects with SAP India, the company’s fastest-growing subsidiary.

“Our state’s ICT industry is dynamic, globally focused and competitive, with $29 billion generated in revenue and $2.45 billion in exports annually,” he said. “This collaboration between SAP India and SAP Australia is a testament to the strong relationship we share and the commitment to pioneering excellence in technology for which we are renowned.”

The SAP MCC in Melbourne is scheduled to be fully operational by June 2013.

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SAP OEM partnerships boost APJ growth

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:01:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP’s growth in Asia-Pacific Japan continues to sky-rocket with the latest announcement that its Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) business for the region in 2012 grew 86 per cent year-on-year.

Its OEM APJ partner base expanded by 25 per cent, with partners such as CleanPoint (Australia), Cogniscient Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (India), Huawei (China), Inteltion (Thailand), ND Software (Japan) and Quanta Computer (Taiwan) signing OEM partnership deals with SAP in 2012.

“We saw increasing momentum in our ecosystem and channels business and had amazing growth performance in 2012 in Asia Pacific Japan in the OEM space,” said Bronwyn Hastings, senior vice president, ecosystem and channels, SAP Asia Pacific Japan.

“More and more partners are adopting our mobility platform, driven by Afaria and Sybase Unwired Platform. Others are choosing SQL Anywhere embedded database, Sybase ASE database, Sybase IQ and SAP HANA. We are very excited by the ways OEM partners are innovating in their own markets by embedding SAP technology into their products to deliver more end-user benefits.”

Hastings added, “Our customers want to work with an ecosystem of a market leader. This is why we invite new business relationships through OEM engagements. SAP is a secure and established vendor with an extensible software platform that partners prefer.”

“SAP OEM partners and their customers are able to embed SAP’s platform solutions ‘everywhere’ into their products and services, enabling their customers to run better. By 2015, we plan to attract one million developers to our platforms and to generate at least 40 per cent software revenue from partners in the APJ region.”

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SAP opens Co-Innovation Lab in Singapore

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:51:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has opened its fourth SAP Co-Innovation Lab in the Asia Pacific region in Singapore.

The lab, SAP’s 21st globally, aims to accelerate co-innovation with its partner ecosystem in the region and is part of the company’s global R&D network.

The facility offers a hands-on environment for SAP, partners and customers to work together on current and future technologies, helping organisations in the region to increase competitive advantage and improve efficiencies. The focus of the lab will be on major technology trends such as cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics and in-memory computing.

"Co-Innovation Labs help our customers to get accelerated value from the latest innovation and technology through our ecosystem,” said Bronwyn Hastings, senior vice president, SAP Ecosystem & Channels, Asia Pacific Japan. “This investment will help to accelerate co-innovation within the SAP ecosystem and create a vibrant network of companies with expertise in SAP solutions throughout the region."

The new SAP Co-Innovation Lab is supported by key technology partners Cisco, Intel, NetApp and VMware, and is located at SAP’s Asia headquarters in Singapore.

"Singapore has long been a hub for commerce in the Asia Pacific, and as the region heightens its profile on the global stage, it is increasingly viewed as a centre for innovation," said Kowshik Sriman, managing director of SAP Singapore.

"SAP is committed to growing Asia Pacific’s technology ecosystem with this new lab in Singapore. We anticipate the new lab will evolve into a nexus of activity in the community for those who want to create innovative, next-generation business solutions."

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Blue Ocean Systems named SAP Gold Partner

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:47:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Business management software solutions specialist, Blue Ocean Systems, has reached SAP Gold Partner certification as an SAP Business One Channel VAR in Singapore.

The SAP Gold Partner certification is the highest accolade awarded by SAP to channel partners who participate in the SAP PartnerEdge program.

“Attaining SAP Gold Partner status validates our current competencies and underscores how our strategy and approach resonate in our marketplace,” said Arun Devan, managing director of Blue Ocean Systems.

“We will continue to work with SAP and its ecosystem to develop capabilities that meet the requirements of both our current and future customers.”

Blue Ocean Systems helps SME clients upgrade to ERP solutions powered by SAP Business One, and deploys SAP certified industry add-ons from Global SAP Solution Partners.

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Special upcoming events for SAP BI professionals

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:43:00 GMT

Two dedicated events for SAP BI professionals – SAP Predictive Analysis Technical Academy and BI 4.0 Elite Enablement – are to be held in Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore across April.

SAP Predictive Analysis Technical Academy will be held in Melbourne on 4 April and will bring together SAP partners who invested in HANA in 2012 to teach how they can increase the value they’ve already delivered and gain the insights to further their ‘trusted advisor’ states with customers.

For more information or to register, click here.

Following the success of previous hands-on Elite Enablement sessions for SAP solutions such as SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0, SAP is hosting an Elite Enablement for the latest release of SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) 4.0 solutions.

Hosted in Sydney from 15 – 19 April and Singapore from 8 – 12 April, the event will bring together top BI specialists, developers, and solution and product managers from the APJ region for a hands-on enablement session.

This exclusive session covers a wide range of topics and offers different tracks for customers and partners – for both SAP and non-SAP application back-ends. As an advanced class, it will offer deep dives into configuration, troubleshooting, best practices, and tips and tricks, with the aim of making an SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 project go-live as smooth as possible.

Click here to register.

SuccessFactors named leader in talent management software

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:40:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SuccessFactors has been ranked as a ‘Leader’ in Forrester Research’s 2013 Talent Management Q1 report for its performance and goals, succession and development, and learning solutions.

The company was ranked against nine of the top talent management vendors across 57 criteria – ranging from competency, goals, performance, succession and learning management and collaboration capabilities to strategy and market presence.

Forrester named vendors whose talent management suites met global market needs as ‘Leaders’, with SuccessFactors specifically recognised for its “competency management with integrated and third-party libraries, performance review with continuous peer feedback capabilities from multiple applications, and an intuitive user interface with personalisation capabilities”.

Lars Dalgaard, found and CEO of SuccessFactors and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, said, "I believe that this report not only validates our 'best of breed' talent management solutions and our fully-integrated BizX suite, but it also shows that success in business today is the ability to get all your talent running in the right direction at the right speed.”

SuccessFactors' talent management suite is part of a broader HCM platform that also includes a modern, global core HR system.

"Customers will continue to look for end-to-end HCM in the cloud," said Shawn Price, president, people and money, SAP Cloud. "But whatever the starting point, we recognise that the journey isn't a ‘one-size fits all’ or ‘rip and replace’ kind of transition. Every path is unique. Whether the priority is to achieve operational efficiency, drive workforce engagement, or simply get better visibility, our philosophy is to work with our customers to identify the right solutions at the right time, and implement them based on their business priorities."

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SAP acquires Camilion to expand insurance offering

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:37:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced plans to acquire the insurance product development, product life cycle and underwriting solutions provider, Camilion, in a move to expand its insurance offering.

By broadening its solution portfolio in the insurance space, SAP said it will be able to provide insurers with software tools to create new products and the ability to speed up transactions between insurance brokers, underwriters and their customers.

"With this acquisition, SAP is able to meet the needs of insurers that face a challenging new business environment and that need to make significant product and strategy changes quickly at low risk," said Simon Paris, global head of financial services, SAP. "Camilion brings deep expertise and trusted relationships in the new age of insurance applications, well recognised by customers and analysts."

Traditionally, solution suites for the insurance industry have been limited to policy, billing and claims. By adding to its current solution portfolio, SAP for Insurance, SAP and Camilion plan to create the industry’s first ‘Super Suite’.

The companies will offer an end-to-end insurance solution, SAP Business All-in-one solution for Insurance, which will include comprehensive integrated capabilities from strategy through finance to operations powered by in-memory and mobile technologies, available both in the cloud or on premise.

"We are convinced this is a 'win-win-win," said Ross Orrett, president and CEO, Camilion. "It's a win for SAP and Camilion, for our joint customers and for an industry that is modernising at a staggering pace. We intend to deliver best-in-class products and services from a combined team with unmatched depth in the insurance industry."

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SAP survey at Mobile World Congress 2013 reveals top mobility issues

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:34:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

A SAP survey conducted at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2013 has revealed the top issues that are facing the mobile ecosystem.

The survey of 300 respondents found industry leaders believe improved data speed for customers (36 per cent) and offering new IP-based services (30 per cent) are the primary drivers for operators launching LTE services.

IP-based services are set to be the main driver of revenue for operators in 2013, along with new offerings such as rich communication services (RCS) and 4G/LTE and increased data usage by smartphone users.

"Leaders across the mobile industry believe that new IP-based services, such as our recently announced SAP Rich Communication Services 365 mobile service, will be key to driving LTE adoption," said Diarmuid Mallon, lead, global mobile marketing programs, SAP. "The survey results provide a roadmap for operators looking to expand their customer service portfolio through high speed 4G LTE networks."

The lack of compatible devices continued to be an issue for mobile operators rolling out LTE offerings. Twenty-six per cent of respondents cited device incompatibility as a major obstacle.

Fifty-three per cent of the respondents believed that improving customers' retail experience would be essential to creating a successful mobile payments scheme.

Location-based point-of-sale offerings (24 per cent), point-of-sale services such as near field communication (NFC) (28 per cent) and facilitating universal acceptance of mobile payments (25 per cent) were seen as the key factors in creating a better retail experience.

"We are seeing a maturing of the mobile payments market, as we move from a service that is driven by person-to-person payments to one that must tackle the challenges of the retail environment," said Diarmuid Mallon, lead, global mobile marketing programs, SAP. "It is clear from our survey that in addition to improving the payment experience, mobile wallet apps need to support a multitude of services such as loyalty and couponing."

The anticipated leaders of future successful mobile payments offerings included banks (29 per cent); online payment schemes, such as PayPal, Apple iTunes or Amazon Payments (28 per cent); credit cards (26 per cent) or a consortium of operators (26 per cent).

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SAP Mobility Centre goes global

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 03:42:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the globalisation of the SAP Mobility Centre in response to the increasing demand for custom-built mobile apps.

Currently based at the SAP campus in Palo Alto, California, operations at the SAP Mobility Centre will extend to corporate headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, as well as company offices in St. Ingbert, Germany; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India.

"Companies want to increase workforce productivity by enabling them to make fast decisions at the point of action and bring value to their consumers by offering a delightful and engaging user experience," said Sanjay Poonen, president, mobile division, SAP.

"As a leader in enterprise mobility, the SAP Mobility Design Centre fulfils a growing demand for custom-made mobile solutions and offers a smart and easy way for customers to unwire their business. Design thinking principles and innovative user experience techniques provide the end user with solutions that are intuitive to use, while our development methodologies help ensure full integration with the back-end environments."

Customers are now able to visit SAP offices around the globe and collaborate with a team of experts composed of user experience (UX) designers, architects and developers.

The process includes designing mock-ups of the solution, which are then tested by end-users, then building the mobile solution to integrate smoothly with the existing back-end application and IT infrastructure.

Most apps developed at the centre are built on the SAP Mobile Platform.

The announcement was made at CeBIT 2013 in Hanover, Germany.

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SAP adds new capabilities to Customer OnDemand

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 03:39:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

In a bid to deliver a more personalised customer experience, SAP has announced new capabilities for its SAP Customer OnDemand solution.

SAP Customer OnDemand is comprised of the SAP Sales OnDemand, SAP Service OnDemand and SAP Social OnDemand solutions and the SAP Social Media Analytics application by NetBase.

Designed for marketing, sales and service organisations, the solution enables businesses to gain insight into their customers’ buying habits so their sales representatives can deliver a more personalised experience.

New capabilities of the solution include a new home page, which sales professionals can personalise through a drag-and-drop interface, offline capabilities for the iPad application and a “sales assistant” which guides representatives through the sale by leveraging best practice and ensuring all information is personalised to the customer.

Additional communication channels in SAP Service OnDemand and SAP Social OnDemand have also been announced, including a self-service web portal and an interface for computer-telephony integration (CTI).

SAP Social Media Analytics has been equipped with new scheduled alerting capabilities. The feature has added support for 19 new languages, including Arabic and Vietnamese, and enlisted the help of a ‘Focus Wizard’ which allows marketers to access research topics “faster than ever”, according to SAP.

A new iPad application for the SAP Customer Insight mobile app has also been released.

“Whether companies leverage on-premise, cloud or hybrid solutions, SAP is the only company that can easily integrate with any environment to surface the insight and execute the processes that deliver a new level of customer-centricity,” SAP said.

The announcement was made at CeBIT 2013 in Hanover, Germany.

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Business One integrates with HANA for SMEs

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:34:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced a version of SAP Business One for HANA, the first business management solution for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) running fully on in-memory technology.

The new application powered by HANA will integrate the capabilities of an in-memory platform with the company's existing SAP Business One application in an effort to help SMEs cope with the unprecedented growth and ‘big data’ of the convergence of social device, equipment and corporate data.

The speed offered by in-memory computing has leveraged certain features of the application, including enterprise search and interactive operational analysis.

The ability to gain deeper insight into operational analytics is expected to be a drawcard for SMEs, with the platform more suited for “scalability and better system performance in a highly concurrent environment”.

By using the same system that runs the transactional processes to offer business insights in real-time, the need for a separate data warehouse has been eliminated, which will help SMEs to lower costs and reduce IT landscape complexity, according to SAP.

Partners will also be able to create add-on solutions in dedicated industry or geographic markets, through the integration of SAP HANA with SAP Business One.

The offering was announced at CeBIT 2013 in Hanover, Germany and is planned for sale worldwide by value-added resellers in the SAP PartnerEdge program.

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NZ version of SAP Travel OnDemand

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:31:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced updates to its SAP Travel OnDemand solution, including broader country coverage and an Android app version.

The cloud-based solution was first released globally in March 2012, with country-specific versions, including Australia, released in July 2012.

It is designed to give financial officers and business travellers greater control over the way they manage travel and expenses.

With the new updates, SAP has included 16 country-specific versions, including New Zealand.

Using customised analytics, the solution now takes into account the roles of various users in the company, including business travellers, managers, auditors and CFOs.

An Android mobile version of the solution has been released, to allow for greater choice by employees.

Lastly, the solution has been integrated with the SAP ERP application and SAP Financials OnDemand solution in a bid to accelerate the reimbursement process.

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Savvis offers subscription-based HANA hosting services

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:27:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions provider, Savvis, has announced it will offer global subscription-based hosting services for the SAP HANA platform.

These hosting services will allow customers to take advantage of real-time entry into the database platform without the effort of owning and maintaining the infrastructure that supports it.

"Our subscription-based services for SAP HANA give enterprises the ultimate flexibility and scalability they need as data sets grow and analytics capabilities evolve," said Jeff Von Deylen, president of Savvis.

"When organisations tap into SAP HANA through Savvis' hosting services, they reduce the costs of owning and maintaining expensive server hardware without losing control over their operating systems and application layers."

To achieve SAP certification, Savvis’ cloud infrastructure, physical and logical security measures, processes, portal and technical staff underwent extensive testing by SAP.

Under the arrangement, Savvis will procure, configure and provision the server hardware required to support SAP HANA and will host the platform in a single environment within one or more of its 50 global data centres.

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SAP and Samsung to make Androids enterprise-secure

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:24:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has joined forces with Samsung to make mobile devices running the Android operating system more secure for enterprise use.

The partnership works to address the management and security concerns commonly faced by enterprises using Samsung Android devices.

At the Mobile World Congress, Samsung announced its next collaboration with SAP; Samsung KNOX, an end-to-end secure solution that provides security hardening from the hardware through to the application layer.

The solution will build on the foundation of the SAFE Certification and provide users enhanced security at all levels of the Android platform.

SAP is Samsung’s largest SAFE-certified partner, announcing that its SAP Afaria mobile device management solution has achieved an expanded SAFE security certification.

Having co-developed SAFE APIs, SAP supports more SAFE features than any other vendor and has the largest SAFE Samsung Android deployments globally.

According to SAP, the benefits of managing Samsung devices through SAP Afaria include unified management of multiple device models, streamlined installation of email accounts and enhanced security policies, including application white/blacks and SD card enablement/encryption.

Samsung’s focus on providing mobile devices that meet the security requirements of companies is part of its initiative to sell more Android devices to big businesses.

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SMEs establishing platforms for growth

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:18:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are using forward thinking and flexible platforms to enable fast growth in the future, according to new research by the Economic Intelligence Unit.

The study, sponsored by SAP, ‘Scaling SMEs: Building a flexible platform for growth’ is based on desk research and in-depth interviews with 17 senior directors of SMEs and other experts.

The research revealed that high-growth SMEs rely on operational strategy to define the future of the organisation and ensure it has predictable processes and lines of communication.

“For many SMEs, this entails setting up a formal structure rather than maintaining a loose, informal structure around the CEO,” the report said.

Maintaining high-quality financial statements and a balanced funding structure were shown as the biggest success factors when it came to boosting SME growth.

IT tools and systems are becoming increasingly more popular with SMEs as they can gain easier access then ever before, with cloud computing and ERP systems now widely available on an as-need basis, reducing capital requirements and costs and providing scalability, flexibility and resilience.

Preserving company culture was revealed to be one of the most important and most difficult factors for SMEs to maintain as they scale.

“Artificial or complex values do not scale well, according to interviewees. The key to success appears to lie in the simplicity of the values underlying the company culture,” the report said.

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Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:32:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

CIOs worldwide believe mobility will generate significant sources of new revenue for business and as a result are expected to invest heavily in mobile technologies, according to Accenture.

In its 2013 CIO Mobility Survey, Accenture interviewed 413 IT professionals across 14 industries in 14 countries, including Australia and New Zealand, to understand if companies are embracing ‘the importance of mobility’.

The survey revealed 79 per cent of CIOs and other C-suite professionals cited mobility as a revenue generator, while 84 per cent said it would significantly improve customer interactions.

The top reasons CIOs need mobility include improving field and customer service with instant data access, capture and processing at 43 per cent, followed by engaging customers via mobile devices at 36 per cent.

Nearly half of the CIOs surveyed said they plan to make workflow changes to better incorporate mobility into the business over the next year.

“It’s encouraging that companies are embracing the importance of mobility but they need to go further by identifying the top areas for mobile deployment,” said Jin Lee, senior managing director, Accenture Mobility.

“In particular they should look at areas that will grow, such as connected devices, and conduct a ‘gap analysis’ to determine how to catch up, or even better, get ahead of the curve. Other critical considerations include investments, budget allocation, re-training staff, hiring mobile expertise, and leveraging external experts to help develop or implement mobility strategies.”

In terms of mobile strategies, China, Italy and Brazil lead the pack globally with extensively developed mobile strategies.

Mobile device management, collaboration and knowledge sharing were found to be the three most important features to a developed mobile strategy.

The study found that security (45 per cent), budget concerns (41 per cent) and lack of interoperability with legacy systems (31 per cent) are still the main barriers cited by companies as impacting their mobile priorities.

BYOD is yet to take off, with over half the enterprises surveyed providing limited support to their employees, as opposed to a quarter that provide full support.

“CIOs must find ways to support the myriad of mobile devices entering the work environment,” Lee said. “They should also address the need to focus intensely on people and expertise. Almost twice as many companies – 40 per cent in 2013, versus 27 per cent in 2012 – plan to leverage external experts to develop and refine their strategy, indicating that mobile usage is growing faster than the market can provide in terms of skilled and available talent.”

The automotive, insurance and health care sectors are proven to be the biggest embracers of mobility, with all respondents saying they plan to reach their top mobile priorities within the next year.

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Compuware APM certified with NetWeaver

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:27:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Compuware APM 12.0 has achieved certified integration with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.

Compuware APM offers broad application and technology platform support and complements SAP Solution Manager to provide real-user monitoring for SAP solutions.

According to Compuware, the integration with NetWeaver enhances the APM platform’s ability to monitor system performance by “identifying the true fault domain for performance issues across the entire application delivery chain”.

“With the integration of Compuware APM with SAP NetWeaver, we enable IT organisations and service providers to monitor and deliver the best user experiences to their end customers," said John Van Siclen, general manager for Compuware's APM business unit.

As a result of the integration, customers will be able to manage application performance across the entire application delivery chain; view real-time application performance from the end-user perspective, down to the transaction level; find and resolve problems before they impact business results; and understand the business impact of poor performance for every business transaction.

"We have been a long-standing SAP partner, and we are focused on continuing to deliver market-leading APM solutions for our customers and service providers. The best operated businesses run SAP solutions, and they expect superior technology performance,” said Van Siclen.

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Over $1 billion in SAP revenues for NTT

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:24:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

NTT DATA Corporation has reached $1 billion in SAP software-related services globally at the completion of its fiscal third quarter.

The IT services provider attributes its ‘cohesive Global ONE strategy’ for the continued growth in its mid to large enterprise market.

According to NTT DATA, their strategy to align capabilities and client services in support of SAP solutions has provided the foundation for double-digit growth in mature markets across North America, Europe and emerging Asian markets.

“Our clients want a partner that not only has advanced expertise and success in implementing SAP solutions, but depth and knowledge in their industry,” said Kaz Nishihata, executive vice president, global business sector, NTT DATA Corporation.

“Supporting SAP solutions globally is important to us. We will continue to invest in building value-added intellectual property and innovative solutions designed to drive growth, improve ROI, and lower risks for our clients."

NTT DATA offers a large portfolio of SAP solutions and services in technologies such as SAP HANA, cloud and 16 industry-specific solutions built on the SAP ERP application for clients in the middle market.

“The tremendous growth NTT DATA is experiencing demonstrates the level of investments clients are making around the world in SAP solutions,” said Robert Enslin, president of global customer operations and member of global managing board, SAP.

“NTT DATA is a key example of what makes our ecosystem such a success. They are truly delivering added value to customers, empowering them to achieve business efficiencies and to run better than ever.”

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On the Move: TAMS appoints lead for new business unit

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:19:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

TAMS has chosen Mark Bosman to head up its new business unit, SAP Real Estate.

The new business unit is an expansion on the company’s current asset lifecycle management solution offerings, with the aim of giving organisations a greater insight into their real estate portfolio.

Bosman brings over 14 years’ SAP experience in Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa to the role, with a specialisation in SAP Real Estate.

He has worked for clients involved in the utility industry, property development, financial services, professional services, hi-tech and the public sector in various roles, including as a functional consultant, team lead, project manager and solution architect.

“I’m very excited about becoming a member of the TAMS team. TAMS’ outstanding reputation in the market to deliver successful projects and advising their clients to find the right business solution is second to none. I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to take it to the next level and to extend our reputation into other solution areas as well,” Bosman said.

Prior to his career in SAP, Bosman worked in the construction industry as a quantity surveyor and was involved in a number of large commercial and retail property developments in South Africa and the Philipines.

TAMS CEO, Lyndy Wallis, said Bosman’s appointment is key to the company’s solutions strategy.

“It is with great excitement and anticipation that we welcome Mark to the TAMS management team. His extensive knowledge and experience in SAP Real Estate as well as the construction industry are a perfect fit to enhance our ability to achieve our vision of being the leading SAP consulting partner specialising in asset lifecycle management,” she said.

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SAP releases Operational Headcount Planning

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:12:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced the general availability of SAP Operational Headcount Planning, the second rapid-deployment solution of 2013 in the HR Planning and Analytics space.

The solution aligns workforce plans with financial budgets to reduce the amount of time spend on budgeting and improves the accuracy of the budget by providing integrated process for all stakeholders.

Operational Headcount Planning was developed after SAP spoke to a number of organisations and discovered that headcount and cost planning processes are often still Excel-based exercises that result in unreliable information.

“Salary and headcount planning takes place in every organisation and is an integral part of the integrated business plan,” said an SAP spokesperson.

“This is often a cumbersome, manual and disconnected effort. Business managers need a standard process, executives need deep insight, and finance needs the real costs.”

The solution is built on the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation Platform, running on top of NetWeaver BW.

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VCE partners with SAP to offer HANA

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:04:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

Cisco-EMC cloud infrastructure provider, VCE, has teamed up with SAP to offer the HANA database as part of its new Vblock portfolio.

The partnership will see VCE deliver SAP-certified HANA software on its Vblock Speacialized System, which comes pre-installed and is delivered onsite.

The offering is part of a larger introduction of new software and hardware aimed at mid-market enterprises and solution providers looking to enhance their data centre environments.

VCE has launched two models of its Vblock system converged infrastructure offerings, Vblock System 100 and 200.

The 100 is targeted for remote office/branch office deployments and extends the value of Vblock System 200, 300 or 700. The 200 aims to expand VCE’s market reach to mid-sized data centres.

Enhancements are also being made to its Vblock 300 and 700 offerings.

“Through incorporation of the latest Cisco, EMC and VMware technologies, Vblock System 300 and Vblock System 700 families now have up to twice the capacity and performance capabilities, allowing customers to efficiently scale-up to the highest levels of operational performance,” VCE said.

Developed for the entire Vblock portfolio, VCE Vision Intelligent Operations, launched last week, integrates with VMware's virtualisation and cloud management portfolio to enable converged infrastructure management and inform customer management frameworks about Vblock Systems.

Vblock System 100 is targeted for availability in March. Vblock System 200, VCE Vision Intelligent Operations and Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA are targeted for general availability in early Q2, 2013. Enhancements to Vblock System 300 and Vblock System 700 families are available immediately.

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SAP to acquire SmartOps

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:35:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced plans to acquire inventory optimisation vendor SmartOps, enabling the company to develop ‘real time supply chain’ software solutions on the SAP HANA platform.

SmartOps provides key operating parameters and targets for supply chains management (SCM) planning. According to SAP, its solutions coordinate capacity, inventory, demand, lead-time and product availability variables that enable customers to optimise inventory and service levels.

SmartOps’ application performance will be “significantly enhanced by SAP HANA”, SAP said.

"We are at a turning point in the global market for supply and demand technology," said Abdul Razack, senior vice president and head of customer engagement and strategic projects, SAP. "With the addition of SmartOps, SAP will be able to dramatically accelerate and improve the performance of real-time world-class supply chain management solutions that give customers the decisive competitive edge to succeed and grow their business."

SmartOps and SAP have been partners for some time and intend to continue providing current customers with the same levels of support without disruption to their existing systems.

"Joining SAP is both a strategic and exciting move for us," said Martin Barkman, president and CEO, SmartOps. "Having already embraced the need for both on-premise and cloud-based solutions, the prospect of developing these on SAP HANA will propel us to new heights in technology innovation."

As part of the acquisition, SmartOps employees will join SAP. The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of 2013.

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SAP to acquire SmartOps

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:33:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP has announced plans to acquire inventory optimisation vendor SmartOps, enabling the company to develop ‘real time supply chain’ software solutions on the SAP HANA platform.

Frucor goes live with HANA in NZ

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:18:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

One of Australasia’s largest beverage manufacturers and distributors, Frucor, has implemented the SAP HANA platform to run its SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application.

SAP partner Realtech worked with Frucor to implement the solution into the company’s cloud operating environment, making it one of the first implementations of SAP HANA in New Zealand.

The project went live in December, with a continuing roll-out through January.

“SAP NetWeaver BW running on the SAP HANA platform will give us the ability to greatly simplify our business intelligence environment and process all of the data we receive from all of our activities more rapidly, to turn it into actionable business intelligence,” said Mark Palmer, IS program manager, Frucor. “In a fast-moving industry such as ours, we need to have greater visibility into our information more quickly – the SAP HANA platform will give us the capabilities to do just that.”

Realtech is testing and validating the database migration, and then managing the design, configuration, performance measurement and optimisation of SAP NetWeaver BW running on SAP HANA.

The platform integrates structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources, performs server-intensive transformation in the main memory and can work on detailed data without aggregations.

“It is the perfect solution for Frucor, because Frucor captures data in a wide variety of formats and it was very CPU-intensive to process the various inputs. With the SAP HANA platform, Frucor will be able to greatly simplify their BI environment and business users will enjoy access to greater levels of detail with unprecedented performance,” said Joanne Hand, managing director, Realtech NZ.

This implementation follows the migration of Frucor’s SAP ERP application and business intelligence systems into a cloud environment last year, a project also managed by Realtech.

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SAP approvals in the cloud: trial offer from 10seconds software

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:39:00 GMT

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Public sector pushing into the cloud

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 05:46:00 GMT

The possibilities for cloud in the public sector are significant, but can the risks and concerns be overcome? A recent win by SAP suggests they can be, and Freya Purnell reports on how the US is embracing cloud – whether government agencies want to or not.

The last quarter brought news of a significant win for SAP Australia – and in fact, SAP globally – in the cloud.

NSW Trade and Investment announced that it had signed a threeyear $14.5 million agreement with SAP to consolidate its ERP system in the cloud, utilising a range of solution including SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Payroll and cloud consulting services.

The project will involve the transition and consolidation of NSW Trade and Investment’s legacy ERP system including 16 agencies, totaling over 8500 employees, onto a single consolidated SAP cloud platform.

On the deal, Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Stoner, said that the department and its agency expects to deliver savings of more than $12.5 million annually by enabling greater efficiency across the entire organisation, as well as improve both internal and client services.

“By consolidating the department’s ERP systems onto a singlecloud-based platform, we can now focus more of our energies on building investment and jobs, and generating a positive business environment for the State of NSW,” Stoner said.

SAP Australia president and managing director Andrew Barkla said the solution would align with both the NSW Government’s goals under its Corporate and Shared Services Reform Program and the recently released 2012 ICT strategy.

The deal was a coup for Australia, representing SAP’s largest Business ByDesign win to date, and the first cloud platform win in the Australian public sector. As such, it was the first concrete sign that public sector organisations may see past the oft-cited security concerns with cloud.

On the deal, Dr Steve Hodgkinson, research director, IT Asia-Pacific for Ovum, says the project will be one to watch because it is “charting new territory in government use of cloud services in Australia”.

“The hope is that the multi-tenant architecture and configurability of the SaaS solution will enable the many agencies within the Trade and Investment portfolio to use it as an efficient and flexible shared service. If this hope is realised, it will be an important proof point for the efficacy of the cloud services model as an alternative to more traditional in-house shared ICT services arrangements,” Hodgkinson says.

He added that the timing of the project is good for three reasons. “Firstly, the benefits and risks of the cloud model are becoming better understood – and the department has gone into this project with a pragmatic, strategic approach and with its ‘eyes open’. Secondly, the maturity of cloud services is evolving rapidly, particularly with regard to the management of the data sovereignty, record-keeping and security requirements necessary to obtain the trust of riskaverse government executive and procurement officers. Thirdly, the crisis of confidence in the ICT capabilities of agencies, particularly in a shared services context, shows no sign of improving. Recent budget cuts mean that it is now difficult for agency executives to pretend that either the ICT status quo or traditional under-invested in-house approaches to application consolidation and sharing are sustainable,” Hodgkinson says.

Ovum recently investigated the experiences of a variety of public sector agencies in moving into the cloud (although none were using SAP solutions), and found that despite concerns about risk and security, cloud services were in reality better, faster, less expensive and less risky than previous ICT projects and solutions.

The results were detailed in a report titled Practical Steps to the Cloud for Government Agencies.

The US experience: driving cloud adoption from the top

Also largely driven by budget cuts, cloud has received a push in the right direction in the US from the very top, with the Obama Government issuing its ‘Cloud First’ strategy earlier this year. Under this strategy, the Office of Management and Budget will require all agencies to include a cloud option when evaluating new solutions for IT deployments, and that they default to cloud where a good option exists.

Each agency CIO has been asked to nominate three ‘must move’ solutions they will push to the cloud and migrate legacy options.

The aim is to convert up to $20 billion of the current $80 billion annual IT spend to cloud solutions, and to close down 800 data centres by 2015. Cost savings from cloud migrations are expected to be between 25 and 50 per cent.

In other work, the TechAmerica Foundation created the Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in US Deployment of the Cloud (Cloud2), which brought together representatives of 71 cloud providers, cloud users and other businesses involved in enabling cloud deployment, including Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP.

The Commission was charged with producing recommendations on how governments could adopt cloud solutions and remove regulatory barriers or policies which might hinder these cloud deployments.

In addition to a major report outlining these recommendations, it published a Cloud Buyer’s Guide for government, which outlines best practices for cloud procurement. Jacqueline Vanacek, SAP vice president and cloud computing evangelist, was a deputy commissioner on the Cloud2 Commission, and says while the ‘Cloud First’ policy “acts as a rallying cry and single point of focus for the government”, cloud initiatives were already underway.

“Because they are so cash-strapped, many agencies in the Federal Government have been compelled to look for more cost-effective solutions to do their work. So they have been considering different cloud services and deployment models,” Vanacek says. “There has been an ongoing emphasis on driving down the cost of IT through a series of steps, starting with data centre consolidation, then migration to the appropriate cloud deployment models.”

The release of draft reference architecture for cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards, which provides a standard for cloud service and deployment models, has “absolutely galvanised the world”.

“That’s really excellent to create a starting point from which we can have an international dialogue about the cloud opportunity. I just returned from Kazakhstan, where I met with government officials to advise on cloud to modernise government and stimulate their economy. They are Central Asia’s economic powerhouse, who can influence their entire region via their cloud investment. They are yet another example of the impact cloud can have around the world,” Vanacek says. [Note: You can read about Vanacek’s Kazakhstan experience in her article in Forbes.]

So given this strong push towards cloud, how is the US tackling the common concerns about security and managing risk?

“To do business with the US Federal Government, there are requirements in procurement and security authorisation according to the new FedRamp Program. So vendors have to develop their business to become approved government solution providers, if they’re not already in compliance,” Vanacek says.

“The state and local governments in the United States are not quite so bound by those rules; however, if certain vendors are already compliant with FedRamp, then states are comfortable choosing those vendors.”

In addition, selecting the right cloud model for the level of security required by the agencies is also crucial. “Agencies that require the highest level of security for their work will build their own ecosystem of private or community clouds,” Vanacek says.

“Promotional work or citizen outreach by agencies can be done in the public cloud like that provided by Amazon, because the level of scrutiny for the data is not a concern as it is for the defence-based agencies. There are some issues with adoption however – including data jurisdiction issues and a mismatch in procurement processes.

“One of the problems is that the procurement process, which is fairly labour intensive, doesn’t support the ability to take out your credit card and buy infrastructure on Amazon in a matter of minutes. There’s a big gap between the way procurement gets done and the way cloud services can provide instant IT access,” Vanacek says.

But assuming these challenges can be overcome, what might the cloud environment look like for government in the US in three to four years?

“We’ll have a patchwork adoption of cloud across agencies for different kinds of workloads. I’m very optimistic about the discussion around how to drive economies of scale with a standard cloud architecture or a cloud ecosystem. This way, federal agencies can share resources and leverage standards where they most benefit, but those agencies with unique requirements, as for security, can have their needs met as well via a separate deployment,” Vanacek says.

And while it may seem like Australia is a long way from gaining this type of momentum on cloud, research indicates otherwise, she says. “Our sentiment analysis clearly shows Australia as one of the four leading voices in the cloud conversation online.”

Case study: Recovery.gov

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 mandated an official US Government website for information sharing to “foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act”.

It is a public information site where citizens can look up how their tax dollars were spent in the economic stimulus package. It was the US Federal Government’s first solution to move to the cloud. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) adopted an Infrastructureas- a-Service solution because the cost savings over an on-premise solution were “tremendously compelling”.

Multiple vendor applications, including SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for business intelligence tools, and Microsoft SharePoint for content management and global data warehouse, were implemented on the Amazon EC2 Cloud to facilitate time-based analysis and reporting. In addition, advanced geospatial analysis and mapping capabilities were implemented to allow users to explore their communities of interest for funded initiatives and other attributes like unemployment and diversity.

“Recovery.gov is a benchmark success for government transparency because it took only 22 days to implement from feasibility study to production. And making government more transparent through public disclosure of budgets and funding is a hot topic all over the world,” Vanacek says.

The move to the cloud resulted in both lower IT costs and the ability to add capacity on demand to support fluctuations in user access. The expected savings were about $750,000 during the current budget cycle.

Source: Cloud Buyer’s Guide

This article was originally published in the Inside SAP 2013 Yearbook

10seconds Software

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:00:00 GMT

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Placing your bets on big data

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 04:50:00 GMT

With the variety, volume and velocity of data increasing rapidly, IT executives are faced with the reality that traditional databases and architecture are simply not going to cut it any more. So when it comes to big data initiatives, how do you make the right decisions to achieve the best value? Freya Purnell reports.

The term ‘big data’ may only have started to gain momentum a short time ago, but already it is on the priority list of IT leaders everywhere.

Craig Stires, director of IDC’s Asia-Pacific Business Analytics Research, explored the expanding opportunities and challenges presented by big data at the IDC Asia- Pacific Business Analytics Conference recently in Sydney. Why does big data matter so much now?

There are two things changing the market, according to Stires – timing and competitiveness. With any data project, it takes several years for data warehousing efforts to bear fruit.

“By the time organisations that have a big data strategy now start to get results, they will have an 18-24 month lead on competitors, and they’re going to have advantages once they get that right.

The organisations which haven’t started now and that will wait until they feel the pressure, they are going to be getting squeezed,” Stires says.

IDC recently surveyed 1000 IT executives across the Asia-Pacific, covering CFOs, line of business representatives, and executive IT, and asked what their top three business priorities were.

Across both the IT and business functions, these were looking at acquiring new customers and reducing churn, expanding into new markets, and applying innovation to gain competitive advantage.

Fast-adopting industries

Across the Asia-Pacific, there are three key vertical industries that are growing adopters of big data initiatives – banking and financial services, public sector and telecommunications.

Banking and financial services: Always a leader in using analytics and data to drive competitive advantage, big data initiatives are now being used for the prevention of financial crime, achieving optimisation through customer insight, and for risk-adjusted portfolio management.

Public sector: While not perhaps driven by the same competitive pressures, there are more and more use cases emerging as governments seek to drive better services for citizens. Defence initiatives, projects requiring critical mass in the areas of power, water, diseases and emergency response, and analysing social media sentiment to gauge citizen reaction to events, are among the projects being implemented.

Telecommunications: With huge marketing dollars invested in reducing customer churn, big data initiatives such as peer influence mapping are helping to provide new insights. At the global level, there are several other industries which are pushing ahead with innovative big data initiatives.

Retail: Particularly in the online space but also for traditional bricks-and-mortar retailing, big data capabilities offer the potential to not only provide new insights into how and why customers buy, but to intervene in their usual purchasing cycle – for example, preventing purchase abandonment by offering time-sensitive offers, for example, as well as cross-session shopping basket analysis, and premium pricing of advertising.

Manufacturing: In addition to enabling better forecasting and supplier and inventory optimisation to reduce holding costs, big data could also assist in identifying preventative maintenance opportunities – and therefore, prevent costly lot of the time the data is just being used as a measurement to work out when you should shut something down. But what’s more interesting is if at that low noise level, you can start to see trends and patterns that are going to predict a breakdown is coming, you can do preventative maintenance ahead of time,” Stires says.

Energy and resources: Of particular relevance in Australia, big data initiatives could help mining companies obtain more accurate stockpile valuations forecasts, even in highly volatile markets. At the other end of the production cycle, social sentiment analysis on the impact of projects – similar to that used by the public sector – could help companies understand the potential public and community response to a particular development or corporate social responsibility or PR program.

Making the investment

IDC conducted a software survey of 500 Australian organisations, asking where they were looking to use big data.

“People talk a lot about social, but the reality is the first wave of big data projects are going to be focused on analysis of operations-related data and analysis of machine or device data,” Stires says. “It’s not big data in the outside world, it’s big data within the company. People are starting with what is going to make sense first.”

Talking to CIOs, there are currently investments being made into three different groups of big data-related projects: 1. Projects driven by requirements for near real-time response, such as customer service, fraud detection, network intrusion, and workflow automation.

2. Projects focused around analytics, using more and better information to improve the operations of the company, including customer insights, complex event processing, modelling external and unstructured or semi-structured data.

3. Projects focused on improving the capacity of infrastructure to cope with big data, covering data centre, private cloud, disaster recovery and data governance.

The big data solutions available currently can be grouped into four tiers:

“These solutions then need to map over to the technology. For real-time projects, we look at solutions that are going to span those first few tiers.

The areas that involve analytics, we need solutions that are going to span analytics and discovery and data management, and for those infrastructure issues, you need solutions that are going to span data management and infrastructure,” Stires says.

IDC sees big data as having four key components – volume of data, variety of data types, filtering the data of most value, and velocity of data inputs.

Most CIOs are trying to stretch an inflexible budget over as many of these areas as possible, but this involves making constant decisions about what will be sacrificed.

As the business adds in ever more areas for the ‘wishlist’, the need to handle more data, handle it faster, handle larger volumes and so on, also increases.

Stires says that where there has been a change in the environment and the ecosystem is that big data solutions and technologies can now manage more of these requirement simultaneously.

“So what you’re able to do now, which is really different from two years ago, is you’re able to handle more data, you’re able to handle data faster. Being able to do more with the budgets you’ve got is pretty important,” Stires says.

IDC research has also revealed the biggest challenges when it comes to big data. In the Australian market, the top two are the cost of technology infrastructure and looking at what data is relevant, followed by having inadequate analytics skills or staff.

“This comes down to having a stronger business case for that investment. Just saying we’re going to do a big data initiative is not enough – it has to be looking at how we solve business problems,” Stires says.

Creating a competitive big data strategy

Stires recommends three key actions for big data success.

“When selecting a business case, look at the areas where there is a specific competitive pain, an area where you think you can make a significant competitive difference. Based on that, you can start to get buy-in from the user group, you can get support from the IT group, you can start to work on funding, you can start to work on measuring it. So select an initiative tied to competitive goals.”

Second, start to build a skills and capabilities roadmap, defining what skills, technologies and capabilities will be needed over time, so that these can resourced adequately.

The third factor is choosing solutions focused around your needs.

“Just pulling in a piece of infrastructure is not going to be enough. Having a company that has some ability to span across those four tiers, and help guide you through and provide some best practices and blueprints, is going to make a big difference as well,” Stires says.

“The decision that you make today and where you start moving is the difference between being able to have that competitive advantage and get that lead or being squeezed.”

This article was originally published in the Inside SAP 2013 Yearbook

Building intelligent transport systems

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 04:36:00 GMT

The Future Logistics Living Lab threw open its doors recently to welcome a new partner, Trimble, and provide an update on developments towards more intelligent transport systems. Freya Purnell reports.

The Future Logistics Living Lab, based at NICTA’s Sydney offices, is a community of industry and research partners working on solutions to real-life logistics problems.

It currently includes more than 20 participants, including NICTA, SAP, Fraunhofer, the Australian Institute of Export, Casella Wines, DB Schenker, Ericsson, ESRI Australia, FourPL, Google, GS1 Australia, Hamburg Sud, Linfox, Ortec, Victoria University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney.

Trimble launches transport and logistics solution

Transport and logistics solution provider Trimble Navigation recently launched its fleet management system, FleetWorks, in Australia.

The FleetWorks telematics solution, designed for road trucking fleet operators, is a sophisticated positioning solution for fleet management combined with on-board computers and a back-office system. The solution monitors and reports on driving performance and vehicle location in real time, assisting fleets to operate more efficiently, safely and with less impact on the environment.

The on-board computer also offers functions such as logging of driving and vehicle data, navigation assistance, two-way communication and transmission of transport orders from the InterLAN shipping application.

Tom Scahill, Trimble transport and logistics division, business area director, ANZ, says the solution has already demonstrated significant operational performance improvements across Europe.

“Typically, a fleet will see a return on their investment in FleetWorks after six months through cost savings achieved from a reduction in fuel usage and an increase in driver productivity. Fleets can also expect to see savings from lowered maintenance costs and fewer insurance payouts to repair vehicle damage and workers compensation,” Scahill says.

Due to its open and scalable architecture, the FleetWorks solutions can be implemented with business applications, including SAP’s Transportation Management solution, with many customers in Europe and North America implementing the solutions together, according to Stephen Reid, supply chain solutions, SAP.

“The integration capabilities have enabled near- to real-time communications between FleetWorks Mobile Data Terminals and SAP Transportation Management, providing status updates, GPS locating and proof of delivery to all relevant users of SAP,” says Reid.

SAP outlines logistics roadmap

Supply chain is a key strategic investment area for SAP, with a mission to become “the world’s best supply chain execution provider, and a thought leader in supply chain convergence”, according to Reid.

Its supply chain execution platform links the back-end ERP system with SAP Transportation Management and SAP Extended Warehouse Management, overlaid by SAP Event Management to provide track-and-trace capabilities, alerts and exception management. This solution is currently in the rampup phase in Australia. SAP Transportation Management SAP Event Management SAP Extended Warehouse Management SAP ERP Beyond this, SAP is working together with ecosystem partners such as Trimble to truly extend visibility and decision support across the supply chain.

“We can now provide not only visibility of what’s going on in the back-end of the business, but also what is happening on the road with goods in transit. This is crucial – it provides a customer service capability which hitherto we have had difficulty managing,” says Reid. “It also provides a view for compliance, and we can bring all the analytics that are being stored on in-cab devices back into the SAP Transportation Management system and present it on dashboards within the solution itself.”

Using an end-to-end solution also provides the opportunity to achieve process automation and scalability, and having on-road devices in the mix enables transport operators to obtain realtime alerts and respond to exceptions as they occur.

In line with its broader strategy, SAP is also bringing its mobile capabilities to bear in the transport and logistics space, according to Reid – using mobile devices to interact with backend systems through apps providing track-and-trace or freight capabilities.

SAP’s in-memory technology is also being utilised to vastly improve processing response times, especially when using large volumes of real-time information on freight and transport, or conducting complex calculations for load and route optimisation.

Transportation systems of the future

With the role of the Future Logistics Living Lab to drive collaborations to make logistics more efficient, greener and safer, there are several intelligent transport system projects underway, according to Dr Glenn Geers, technology director of infrastructure, transport and logistics at NICTA.

Drivers already experience intelligent transport systems through traffic management controls, and the in-vehicle tracking provided by solutions such as FleetWorks take this another step forward. Going even further, Geers says, will see vehicles connected through disparate air interfaces, using the most appropriate system – whether that is via 3G or an extension of Wi-Fi technology.

The brave new world will be vehicles being able to warn drivers of impending events such as collisions, and even for vehicles to communicate and take evasive action without driver intervention.

Similarly, in the freight and logistics area, in the future containers could be imbued with intelligence so they actually become part of the transport ecosystem.

“What’s happening now is that there are a huge number of sensors that are being deployed, and this ranges from sensors that are specifically deployed to look at traffic, to social media, timetables, and real-time bus and train systems,” Geers says. “What you want to do is put that together in some sort of distributed way. Ideally the traffic system will self-organise from measurements it is making in real time. Then you have the cars thrown into the mix – which are all sending and receiving messages, and so they can all become controlled.”

While the technology to facilitate these types of intelligent transport systems is reasonably well proven, the challenge is achieving scale.

“Even the large trials to date have only focused on a small number of vehicles, so they’re staged interactions. When you have multiple six-lane motorways, will it actually work? So getting the whole short-range communication system to work between the vehicles is certainly critical,” Geers says.

Another challenge is gaining support from transport agencies to build roadside infrastructure necessary for these systems.

From a logistics perspective, gaining buy-in from all the respective parties to actually exchange information is also a challenge, because much of the information required is considered proprietary, but Fraunhofer is working on a solution.

“Imagine taking a document which uses invisible ink on the pages, and you only have the key to a few pages. You can see what you need to see, maybe a page on either side of the one you are using, but authorities like the Customs department might have visibility of the entire chain,” Geers says.

With many of the logistics companies using SAP back-end systems, NICTA is also in talks with SAP about the role it can play in the exchange of information in this way, as well as leveraging some of its contacts in the area.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP 2013 Yearbook

Securing the right SAP skills

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 04:28:00 GMT

SAP Mentor and Victoria University SAP academic programs director, Paul Hawking, led a panel session at the SAUG Summit 2012 on how to ensure you have the right people with the right skills working on your projects. Fellow SAP Mentor and independent consultant, John Moy, and Leanne O’Connor, managing director of recruiter Systems and People, shared their insights.

Starting the search

The first step is truly understanding what is needed for a role, which requires a detailed job specification. Then it is time to begin the search for candidates.

With the SAP skills market still tight in Australia, O’Connor said the days of simply posting an ad on Seek and finding a good candidate is gone.

“You only get active candidates that way, which is around 10- 15 per cent of the whole market. You need to tap into the passive market, so using networks to find people is definitely the best way,” O’Connor said.

Moy agreed, saying that he always starts with his personal networks, which, seeing as he has been in the SAP industry since the mid-90s, are quite extensive.

Even when using personal connections, a vetting process is crucial, O’Connor said.

“Even with LinkedIn recommendations, you need to know who is recommending the person. If you don’t know someone and they are out of your network, you need to go through a process of formal and informal reference checking, so you know that they are a valid person with a recommendation that can be trusted,” O’Connor said.

Finding someone with the right background for a particular role is important.

“At least in the development space, I don’t rely so much on years of service. Some people have only done one area, even if they are in the same role for a long period,” Moy said.

When looking at candidates’ CVs, O’Connor said you should look for continuity of employment and long contracts.

“If there are short-term roles, you should ask the candidate to explain the gaps – it might create warning bells,” she said.

Moy only views CVs as a tool for creating context for the interview. Working on the customer side, he went one step further to ensure the candidates he hired could deliver the goods.

“I don’t care if it’s someone from off the street, or from a consultancy, or from a recruiter, I have to vet the person myself,” he said.

“When I was a development lead, I built a test and would test them on the laptop. If you have Web Dynpro, for example, in your skill set, there was a tickbox on the start-up screen that would add sections to the questions. Some people came clean straightaway and said they didn’t have the skills.”

Tackling technical interviews

Technical interviews are a crucial part of verifying the skills of potential hires, but if you can’t meet someone in person, is there a risk that the person you only speak to on the phone isn’t the one that will start work?

Moy said that statistically, he knows he has been less successful with phone interviews, particularly where candidates have not completed his test.

He also recalls a situation where a colleague contracted someone from overseas on the basis of a phone interview, and was convinced that the person who arrived to do the job was different from the person they spoke to.

O’Connor says while there might be a place for initial telephone interviews to ask some qualifying questions, a faceto- face discussion is definitely needed for a hiring decision.

Moy agreed, saying that now there is no excuse not to conduct video interviews if distance prevents candidates from attending in person.

However, he also cautioned that there has to be a rule about typing during an interview, having had experiences where candidates were Googling the answers to questions.

Another tip for interviews, according to O’Connor, is asking scenario-based questions.

“You can fairly quickly work out whether the person knows what they’re talking about,” she said. “You do get a better gut feel for people face-to-face.”

During the interview process, hirers should look at a candidate’s body language, their phone manner, and the written language in their CV, including their spelling and grammar.

“I always ask the candidate if they wrote their own CV. You can tell a lot from someone’s CV.

It depends what the role is, but if it’s a project director or project manager role, it’s no good if they can’t speak and communicate,” O’Connor said.

As an extra guarantee of competence, O’Connor said in the UK, it’s common do use a trial start, which is a paid day that acts as an extended job interview.

“It might be more relevant for developers, but it can show that they really know what they are talking about,” she said.

Certification

While certification does not necessarily provide a guarantee of skills, it is an extra factor that might mitigate risk, but O’Connor reminds hirers to always sight copies of certification.

“I personally worry about just trusting a document. I know one of my colleagues once said that someone sitting next to him was using Google to buy a certification,” Moy said.

Having said that, he said he did find a link between ABAP certification and performance in his test.

“It is harder in the functional areas, because it is really important to have that business experience, but I have found some correlation,” Moy said.

Hawking added that there will be a new initiative coming soon from SAP which will allow customers to check the certification of the consultants they hire.

The last word? Hire slowly and be diligent about screening candidates.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP 2013 Yearbook

New version of SAP Sybase IQ released

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 04:06:00 GMT

By Freya Purnell

SAP has announced the availability of SAP Sybase IQ 16 software, the latest version of its disk-based column store analytics server.

Sybase IQ is a critical component of the SAP Real-Time Data Platform, as the near-line-store to the SAP HANA platform, enabling data loading volumes in the order of petabytes, rather than terabytes.

According to SAP, the latest version is faster, more secure and more adaptable, so further extends its already robust logical data warehouse offering with software that helps organisations extend and exploit the value of big data to achieve insights that were previously impossible or impractical.

"SAP Sybase IQ 16 is an important delivery in our vision for a comprehensive real-time data platform and represents the joint innovation and expertise of SAP and Sybase teams," said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation.

"SAP Sybase IQ 16 is integrated with SAP HANA platform and provides flexible and logical data management options to meet unique business and technical requirements. SAP Sybase IQ accommodates mixed workloads and large numbers of concurrent users. The software runs on a wide variety of commodity hardware platforms, supporting lower total ownership costs for companies that rely on data-driven decisions and processes for a competitive edge."

"This latest release of the SAP Sybase IQ product line, now fully integrated into the overall SAP strategic direction, continues the vibrant innovation that has been its hallmark with technology for handling petabyte scale data," said Carl Olofson of IDC. "One such innovation includes the ability to make new data available as it is ingested so users can query it as it is mapped to columnar structures. This eliminates what had often become a bottleneck in processing large data warehouses. With this capability, SAP Sybase IQ should enable users to take full advantage of the ever-growing volume of new business data."

SAP ANZ teams up with University of Queensland

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 03:38:00 GMT

By Eleanor Reader

SAP Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) has entered a partnership agreement with The University of Queensland (UQ) to offer SAP uAcademy courses to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and business students.

The partnership is a strategic move by SAP to increase students’ industry skills and give them greater opportunities in the workplace.

UQ’s head of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), Professor Paul Strooper, said the collaboration will allow UQ to offer their students comprehensive training on SAP solutions in a convenient and cost-effective manner.

“The skills gained through uAcademy will not only support the Queensland workforce, but also Australian and global industry demands,” he said.

Under the uAcademy program, UQ students are provided with access to a self-paced learning environment, enabling them to achieve expertise in specific SAP solution areas.

SAP Education director, Francesca Salvo, said that as SAP continues to innovate, new technologies are launched into the marketplace and resources must be provided to manage these.

“Mobility, database, applications development and cloud computing are seen as key skills in the ever-changing business environment,” she said.

“Partnering with the University of Queensland to provide the SAP uAcademy program will increase the much-needed SAP-skilled workforce in Queensland.”

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SAP releases new cloud offerings

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 03:03:00 GMT

SAP has released two new cloud offerings as part of their social media strategy.

The offerings, which according to SAP will change how business people interact with customers, colleagues and partners, include the SAP Jam social software platform and the SAP Social OnDemand solution.

SAP Jam combines the best parts of SuccessFactors Jam for enterprise social networking and allows colleagues to easily connect, enabling them to collaborate through data, content and processes at work.

"The enterprise social software market is maturing quickly with a 39.8 per cent year-over-year growth rate in 2011," said Vanessa Thompson, research manager, IDC, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies.

"Today's organisations are looking to collaborate in real time and in context, inside and outside the firewall, to include employees, customers, partners and suppliers. SAP Jam can provide the ability to intelligently filter information so that employees can, with system help, surface important information in the work context."

Aimed at helping marketing organisations improve their social media approach, SAP Social OnDemand uses real-time monitoring, routing and escalation to hone in on key trends and simplify the process of prioritising and engaging on social media.

According to SAP, the solution ensures that critical conversations are not missed and that responses are appropriate, based on a poster's profile that includes social influence metrics as well as customer data from other enterprise systems.

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SAP pulls out of SAPPHIRE NOW in Madrid

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:55:00 GMT

By Freya Purnell

SAP AG has announced that it will not be holding its SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid in 2013, instead focusing its efforts on "dedicated customer-centric events" for customers and partner in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

SAP plans to expand existing SAP Forum events and schedule additional SAP Forums in key markets, with programs and content to be customised to the needs of local and regional customers and partners.

In a statement, SAP said "a regionally focused events strategy will be more relevant and easier to participate in for SAP customers, more geographically relevant for SAP partners and more supportive of individual SAP market units".

Chief executive of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group, Craig Dale, said it was a shame that SAP had pulled back from the major European SAPPHIRE event, but said that in recent years the cost of travelling to and attending the event had become more difficult for users to bear, with many instead looking to UK-based events. He said SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe had committed to attending the UK & Ireland User Group conference at the end of the year instead.

New version of SAP Sybase IQ released

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:40:00 GMT

By Freya Purnell

SAP has announced the availability of SAP Sybase IQ 16 software, the latest version of its disk-based column store analytics server.

On the Move: Chaudhuri appointed as SAP India MD

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 03:54:00 GMT

SAP has appointed Suprakash Chaudhuri as managing director, SAP India & Subcontinent.

Chaudhuri has been acting in the role since mid-2012, following the resignation of previous MD Peter Gartenberg. He will be responsible for all market-facing activities, customer operations and sales, consulting, partner ecosystem expansion, and marketing.

“The SAP leadership team expressed great appreciation for the business and market leadership Suprakash provided as the acting MD for SAP India since Q32012,” said Steve Watts, president, SAP Asia-Pacific Japan.

“India with over 4900 customers has become one of the best performing businesses. Suprakash, in his new role as MD, will continue to drive SAP’s strategic innovation roadmap and shape and sustain our industry leadership position in India.”