Since I first began working in the world of SAP in 1995, there have been three "crossroads" periods. The first was 1999 when the Y2K driver dried up and no one in North America was licensing anymore and the dot com craze (erroneously, as it turned out) seemed to have superseded the quaint notion of enterprise wide software. The second was 2004 when SAP got a second wind and the term NetWeaver fully entered the lexicon.
We are now going through a new crossroad, fueled obviously by a global fiscal crisis, in which SAP is both mature and, in many ways, boring. I do not think of boring as a bad thing. I think of it as predictable, knowable, and comforting. Back when SAP was pushing out new versions every six months or so, it wasn't boring, it was grit-your-teeth annoying for clients, systems integrators, and just about everyone involved with the exception of industry analysts who thrive on chaos.
I have been writing about SAP since early 1996, first with a thin book entitled "In the Path of the Whirlwind, An Apprentice Guide to the World of SAP" and later with the (still going) "SAP Blue Book, A Concise Business Guide to the World of SAP". From 2001 to 2007, I worked as an industry analyst but in all other years have been deeply involved in SAP consulting. Having seen SAP reach this new crossroads, and at the urging of colleagues and associates, I am starting this blog with the hope of cutting through the new phase of SAP fog whenever it curls its way into the industry. Observation of this industry tells that this will occur roughly every other Tuesday or after the latest flurry of SAP press releases.
Subjects will center not on how SAP works (I will leave that to SAP.com and myriad other blogs and websites) but on what you do with SAP and how to gain value from it. I have no expectations of any ability to withhold criticism of SAP (the company, if not the software) so readers can rest assured that this blog will not have an SAP imprimatur.
I definitely welcome input, contributions, and criticism from all and sundry. The more candlepower the better.
