SAP continues to remain the enterprise software company that everybody else want to beat. Enterprise software for the large Fortune 500 market is fairly saturated and in the future, the stratospheric growth that SAP and others experienced in the last decade needs to come from somewhere else. I asked this and other questions to a panel of experts to find out what they thought about the future of SAP, the direction it was taking and what it takes to be an SAP consultant.

Our distinguished panel of experts strongly believe that even with the current downturn, demand for SAP consultants will hold and will grow as the economy improves. This and more from a panel of SAP experts who have been there and done it.

A brief introduction of the panel -

Michael Krigsman

Michael is a recognized authority on enterprise software, providing advise to technology buyers, vendors and service firms. His resarch efforts created a model of collective intelligence that quantifies and measures governance issues that cause most project failures. He is frequently quoted in the press on IT project and related CIO issues. He is currently  serving as the CEO of Asurent, Inc, a consulting company dedicated to reducing technology implementation failures. Michael graduated with an M.B.A. from Boston University and a B.A. from Bard College. He is a Board member of the America's Cup Hall of Fame and the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, RI. He can be followed on his popular blog Project Failures. Follow him on Twitter.

Paul Hofmann

VP Research at SAP Research Americas and China since 2006, Paul built the Academic Research Program for the SAP Labs. He joined SAP in 2001 as Director for Business Developement EMEA SAP AG. Paul has a strong background in research as Senior Scientist and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, US; Munich Institue of Technology and Darmstadt Institue of Technology, Germany and is an expert in computer simulations and graphics. He has authored numerous books including books on SCM, Performance Management and Productivity of Supply Chains. He maintains a blog on the SAP Developer Network.

 Jon Reed

An independent SAP analyst and SAP Mentor Jon writes on SAP skills and trends. He is the driving force behind JonERP.com, an interactive Web site that features Jon's SAP Career Blog and his podcasts for SAP professionals. Jon has been publishing SAP career and market analysis for almost 15 years, and he is the author of the SAP Consultant Handbook. Recently, Jon was named a "PAC Fellow" to formalize his contributions to PAC's SAP Services Research Program, and he is a frequent contributor to PAC's "Feeding the SAP Ecosystem" blog. His Tweets.

 Ron Duijzer

An SAP consultant since 1998, Ron has had hands on knowledge of all things SAP including R/3, SAP CRM , SAP BW, and SAP Supply Chain Manager. He is currently a consultant at Philips Medical Systems / Philips Healthcare.

Dan Perron

 Founder, President and CEO of CRP Solutions, Dan is a certified Basis / Netweaver consultant, an experienced project manager as well as a successful entrepreneur. He co-founded and chaired the Colorado local ASUG (Americas' SAP User Group) chapter, was vice chair of the Technical Track for the national ASUG and chaired a national forum on Systems Management and Database Administration tools. Dan is a graduate of the Indiana University School of Business - Bloomington, Indiana with a major in Decision Science and a minor in Japanese language and East Asian culture.

Thomas Woelfel

A senior functional consultant, Thomas has over seven years SAP consulting experience. He has participated and led all aspects of the SAP life cycle, developed course manuals, created custom courses, and provided hands-on project team training for numerous SAP installations. He recently started Click Technology Partners, a full service SAP consulting firm.

Q: How and when did you get started in SAP?

Michael: Around 1995, my company started performing work as a vendor to SAP. Among the many projects we worked on was developing the AcceleratedSAP set of consulting tools. This project, and other related activities, continued for about 10 years. As a result, we were in the center of SAP's efforts to reduce implementation time and cost.
Not a very usual SAP career path, but certainly an interesting one.

Paul: I started to work at SAP summer 2001; in the middle of the .com crisis and just before 9/1. Before, I was a plant manager at BASF, the biggest chemical company in the world. It was quite a change. At BASF, our products were transported on trucks and train out of the factory. At SAP we produce intangible SW and help people create intangible investements (biz processes, know how, etc.) to increase their productivity and market capitalization.

Jon: 1995...founded an SAP division in a recruiting firm and launched my "Opportunities in SAP" career newsletter, where I first started writing about SAP job and skills trends. I didn't know SAP from tree sap, but I kept going.

Ron: I have studied logistics with the focus on integration. My speciality was information logistics: the correct information at the right time at the right place. ERP was the job for me. At that time I had to choose between BAAN and SAP. I had chosen SAP, fortunately.

Dan: I first saw SAP while working for Andersen Consulting - now Accenture - at Procter and Gamble in 1993. Since 1994 SAP and related technologies are about all I have worked on.

Thomas: I was pulled into an implementation project from the business and was taught SAP as a member of the project team. From there I took the opportunity to stick with SAP work and bounced around a bit and finally went independent after 3 years.

Q: What are your thoughts on SAP's plan for the SMB companies? Will SAP consultants still be able to demand their high salaries & rates?

Michael:  SAP has invested substantial resources in various SMB products, including Business byDesign. By definition, smaller companies do not have the large projects or budgets of larger companies. Therefore, consultants cannot expect to receive the high rates as in prior years. The difficult economy amplifies this even more.

Paul: SAP will be very successful in selling its new solution -Business By Design- for SMB. We see already a strong pick up of our solution in the market. Business By Design is a full blown end to end solution, not just a best of breed solution like Salesforce CRM. There will always be a demand for high end SAP consultants. The State of California and Maryland run already SAP. Imagine Germany or USA running SAP. Imagine big banks doing their retail business with SAPs real time ERP. Computing power will grow in two dimensions - scale out (cloud computing) and scale up ("big iron" being able to handle 100 of millions of SQL transactions per second). The scaled up HW will allow to run very big installations for banks, government, international finance and trade, etc. This will create demand for high end consultants. Further, there are many new applications like sustainability and risk management to be added to exisiting ERP systems. Every second dollar of world trade runs over an SAP system. This number will increase; with it the demand for very skilled SAP consultants.

Jon: I'm impressed with the options, including the Business One and All-in-One products. However, they need to solve the riddles of their SaaS SMB product, SAP Business By Design (BBD), to truly do well in this market segment. As of this writing, SAP still has major hurdles with BBD in terms developing the right business model for a major rollout.

With rare exceptions, SAP consultants have not been able to "demand" high rates for quite some time now. SAP salaries are still on the high end of IT salaries, but it's a misconception that the SAP consulting market is a lucrative playground for rate-driven mercenaries. I do think rates will be lower in general in the SAP SMB space, but a bigger challenge is that the projects are MUCH shorter, leading to real difficulties in sustaining consulting revenues - especially for independents.

Ron: The consultants currently in SMB are not demanding high salaries (at least they are not worth it). The consultants for the complete SAP are the high salaries more than worht.

Dan: SAP has had various messages over time regarding the SMB space. From my perspective, Business One has never been a viable option for a true ERP implementation, and Business By Design has been de-emphasized and may be on its death legs. Business All-in-One is a viable solution but SAP has at times struggled to give a consistent, coherent & cohesive message to customers about their options for fixed scope / fixed price solutions.
The best SAP consultants will continue to demand strong rates and salaries, but the model for success at the individual level is changing in two different directions. On the one hand, successful consultants need to provide more broad, general skills rather than narrow focus. On the other, for specific roles the skills will need to be deeper rather than broader. In all cases, simply being a senior SD, Basis, or FI/CO consultant will not suffice in future.

Thomas: I think that SAP has a very solid offereing. I have done 3 SMB implementations and have seen great success for the clients.
I think after the lull we have there will be an increase in about 6 months time, but not as much as we were at 1 year back.

Q: What is the future growth area (modules, business) for SAP?

 Michael: Two areas:

First, specific modules will follow growth in particular vertical markets. To understand this, examine the economy to observe growth and match up the relevant SAP modules.
Second, the entire SMB business will grow. Margins may be lower, but growth will happen.

Paul:  ERP for SMB, sustainability, risk management, analytics, social networking, Business Network Transformation (Co-Innovation, Supply Chains competing against each other instead of companies), and collaboration (growing out of the enterprise silo).

Jon: In the long run, I see growth in areas of SAP that help customers use SAP better and more enthusiastically (as in better GUI designs), use it from more locations (as in mobile devices), use it more intelligently (as in SAP BusinessObjects), access it in a heterogenous context (as in web-based integration), compose on top of it (as in SOA and BPM), and use it in more of a process driven context (as in becoming Business Process Experts and using more process modeling tools). Some of the growth areas from this statement are obvious. Others include: object-oriented programming, web-based programming "open" standards, systems integration and Enterprise Architecture via NetWeaver and other third party middleware platforms, and functional work that goes beyond "silo configuration" into process-based approaches. Workflow automation and event-based management approaches always look promising. Data visualization tools such as Xcelsius are sure to be a factor. Executives like visualized data they can act upon. But that data has to be clean and real-time - another challenge/growth area.

Ron: Who can tell? I expect two things: integration on IT level and integration on business process level.

Dan: SMB is the largest space for net new implementations. There are also opportunities for deeper penetration or additional functionality within current installation base (even going as far as complete re-implementation), upgrades, BI solutions - including BPC / Outlooksoft & BOBJ, and some fringe growth technologies like 'green content' and GRC.

Thomas: I think that SAP will follow the areas of oppurtunity and spending: which at this time is health care, government, etc.

Q: What are your thoughts on SAP training offered by training companies? Is it worthwhile?

Michael: As with everything else, choose the vendor wisely. Some training providers develop quality content while others offer material that is poorly written or out of date.

Paul: Yes, there are about 2 trillion dollars invested in intangible assets in the US. Most of it is related to IT investment. SAP is the leading biz SW company in the world. Demand for biz SW will grow. Accenture hired in 2008 (the crisis year) over 10,000 graduats as new consultants. This is a no brainer.

Jon: SAP training companies need to be assessed on a case by case basis. What individuals need from training versus what project teams need from SAP training are very different. Individuals need to decide if they want training for prestige or other reasons. SAP Academy classes are most prestigious on a resume. However, in some cases, you can take non-SAP classes and still pass the SAP Certification, which can be a good balance between prestige and affordability. There are now a range of on-demand options available, including SAP's own Learning on Demand (LOD) site. In many cases, the specific SAP knowledge you need will help you to narrow your options. I believe strongly in investing in continuing self-education inside and outside SAP training. Which training you choose is really up to you and your career goals. Since training in SAP doesn't guarantee you a job in SAP once you have it, be very careful about expecting your life to change after you get the training. In many cases, that's not the case. I'm a huge fan of SAP's new BPX (Business Process Expert) certification. SAP is requiring all its own application consultants to get this training - why not be one of the first outside of SAP to complete it?

Ron: Not in general; I have to evaluate different training companies before applying for a training.

Dan: My biggest problem with 'training' as offered by professional training organizations - rather than consultants who also implement SAP software - is that you tend to get the textbook answer rather than real-world practical experience. Specifically, I asked a trainer at a class I attended on Solution Manager for his real-life experience using a specific Solman feature. He responded with a review of a previous chapter in the course. When I pressed, he admitted that he had never used the functionality in question on a project.

Thomas: I think it is with the correct company - some are not too strong, but others like ERPtips are good.

Q: What is a likely career progression for a SAP consultant?

Michael: A technical consultant can become an architect and principle solution designer. A project manager can grow into a program (or portfolio) manager. A business solution designer can become a strategy consultant if he or she really understands a particular industry.

Paul: The sky is the limit. SAP consultants have the unique capability to bridge technology and business. This skill set will be in ever higher demand. SAP will steadily grow in its core business and there have been billions of dollars already invested in SAP. Companies will use ERP systems more strategically for their business. ERP is and willl grow to be the tool for innovation for companies around the world. Many companies have already a Chief Process Innovation Officer. This is an example of a very likely position for an SAP consultant.

Jon: This is again an individual question, depending on the end game of the individual. SAP consultants can eventually become Consulting Practice Managers, Internal Project Managers, senior independent consultants, or founders of third party SAP consultancies and software firms (I've seen examples of all of these). The key is defining your long term career goal, and then working back from there until you can clearly define the next step you should take. If there is any doubt, find a mentor in the position you aspire to and learn from them how they progressed to where you want to someday be. Having said that, a common promotional path for an SAP consultant is: junior (1-4 years), senior (4-6), expert/master (7+). Once you get into senior territory, you usually start getting more team lead opportunities. However, even at that point, you are still likely still a hands-on consultant as well as a team lead. Once you get some team lead skills, you reach a big crossroads: you get your first team lead or project management job offer that is not as hands-on. That's a big crossroads, because once you leave hands-on SAP implementation work, it's not easy to get back to it later. That's why having that clear vision of your ultimate career objective is crucial, so that you will know what to do when you hit that important crossroads.

Ron: in general four types of SAP consultants: job hopper type (only interested in money); SAP consultant to project manager; SAP consultant to business consultant and the SAP consultant who do not change.

Dan: In general, consulting is not for everyone. For those who are naturally more disposed towards consulting over in-house positions, I think the progression ideally begins with Big 6 (now Big-2 perhaps?) experience, followed by work at a smaller, boutique SI, and possibly moving towards completely independent work for direct clients. Most people struggle to maintain a balance between developing new client opportunities and delivering on current engagements, so boutique SI's tend to be landing points for senior consultants. From there, the biggest challenge is how to retool and stay current on technology. Senior consultants look to conference such as SAP Tech Ed and some of the WISPub conferences as 2-for-1 opportunities: they can network with possible clients while getting updated information & training on new functionality and technologies.

Thomas: 2 options continue as an independent and ride out some rocky times or get absorbed into a perm. position and work that progression.

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I would like to thank Michael, Paul, Jon, Ron, Dan, Thomas for taking the time to share with all of us their experience, thoughts and advice.

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