SAP and Enterprise Trends Podcasts from JonERP.com

I was fortunate to have three opinionated SAP virtualization die hards, Chris Kernaghan, Martin English, and Tom Cenens subject themselves to my first official Hangout taping (note that Tom’s correct Twitter handle is @tomcenens). During the 40 minute video, we dug into some potent SAP virtualization topic.

With all the JD-OD.com videos posted, it's time to catch up with the best of the audio, including this session from SAP TechED Madrid, on "SAP Social Media: BS or Value." Taped live at my expert lounge session, this was a typical JonERP "unpresentation" with no slides, just an uncensored and hopefully valuable conversation. We talked for 25 minutes, digging into whether there is value in social media for SAP professionals and how you go about finding it.

Taped live at my expert lounge session on "SAP Tech Skills in the Age of Outsourcing," we had a great 25 minute discussion about SAP technical skills at the crossroads. The audience was about equally divided between Basis folks and ABAPpers, so we balanced the talk between SAP administration and development skills.

Straight talk about HANA is hard to come by - but not with the group I pulled together for this international call. I have rarely looked forward to a call as much as this one, because I didn't know where the discussion would lead. I suspected we would have some significant points of debate and disagreement - I was not disappointed. During this 60 minute podcast, you'll hear SAP Mentors and bloggers Vijay Vijayasankar, John Appleby, and Vitality Rudnytskiy talk HANA as only they can.

It's an annual TechEd tradition: my SAP TechEd skills chat, taped live from the Expert Lounge. Although there was some crowd noise, this recording came out pretty well and captured a range of views during a short 17 minute recording time. Since a major theme of the future of SAP technical skills is the convergence of functional and technical skills, I was fortunate to have SAP Business Process expert Jim Link amongst the participants in the taped discussion.

SAP Business ByDesign (and on-demand in general) was not a focal point of the keynotes from TechEd Las Vegas and Bangalore. To get a better sense of where Business ByDesign stands from a field view, I taped this 30 minute podcast with two ByDesign partners, SAP Mentor Leonardo De Araujo of Beyond Technologies and Ray Tetlow of Skyytek Corporation. Leo and Ray provided an honest view of the strengths of ByDesign and where improvements are needed to reach its potential.

During this 50 minute podcast, you'll hear SAP Mentors Vijay Vijayasankar and Harald Reiter give you their tips for getting the best HANA content in TechEd Las Vegas. The informal discussion then moves into the key news stories that might unfold at TechEd surrounding HANA, with the usual opinionated takes and views from the field. The last half of the podcast is an in-depth discussion of HANA skills issues based on what Harald and Vijay are learning from their work on HANA Proof of Concept (POC) projects.

Based out of Bangalore, Vijayan Venkataraman of ERP Logic is an expert in the ByDesign SDK who has more experience in the product than most people in the world. (He got his first exposure while helping to develop the SDK with SAP Labs) During our twenty minute talk, I ask Vijayan about the use cases for the ByD SDK, how difficult it is to train, the skills needed, and what features he’s looking to see in future releases.

With HANA stealing most of the Sapphire Now headlines, important mobilty questions lingered after the event. To get to the bottom of those, I taped a three way video podcast with fellow SAP Mentors John Appleby and Kevin Benedict. During this 40 minute video spiced with a bit of sassiness, we hashed out the burning SAP mobility questions and also discussed what SAP needs to pull off in TechEd season for it to be deemed a success from a mobility perspective.

The story of SAP HANA is unfolding so rapidly that it's hard to keep up - even if you are following the developments closely. Too often, there seems to be a gap between the HANA buzz and the reality on the ground. Before the SAP TechEd season kicks into high gear, now is the perfect time to take the HANA pulse. Fresh off of several sessions with the SAP HANA team, including blogger and Mentor meetings, Jon Reed pulled together three SAP Mentors for an international call to get their views on HANA as it stands today.

At Sapphire Now 2011, the central importance of HANA to SAP's vision was made abundantly clear. But as a result, that made the questions raised by HANA's ascendancy that much more important to answer. The SAP Blogger Relations team proposed the idea of doing a HANA podcast with me as the moderator and referree and I agreed. During this 40 minute podcast, you'll hear SAP Mentors John Appleby and Ethan Jewett pressing SAP on some of the key HANA questions they have been hearing from SAP customers. I jump in once or twice with thoughts of my own - otherwise, after my intro, this is a free-flowing discussion with SAP's Jake Klein and Thomas Zurek providing in-depth answers and a good deal of useful context to the HANA discussion

For this pre-Sapphire return of our semi-regular SAP BI podcast series, fellow SAP Mentor and co-host Vijay Vijayasankar and I talked with special guest James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions about some of the tougher BI questions SAP - or any other vendor for that matter - must tackle. During the 50 minute podcast, we move from a look at 4.0 to a discussion of the importance of business rules and the issues SAP needs to address with separate rules engines for operations and analytics (including two for operations, BRF Plus and NetWeaver BRM). We talk about why predictive analytics matter to companies, and why vendors struggle to deliver meaningful predictive analytics solutions. A lively discussion of the importance of unstructured data catches the three of us jousting a bit on the relative importance of text analytics versus other BI priorities. We veer into a HANA discussion before wisely saving most of that one for a different podcast down the road.

To get a better handle on the issues with breaking into SAP in today's market, I had the chance to tape a unique podcast with Tom Michael of Michael Management. The podcast includes two "students" from Michael Management's Pay it Forward SAP Training Program (PDF), which sponsored SAP training for five job seekers to help them move into SAP during a challenging SAP job market. We begin the podcast with Tom posing some questions to me about breaking into SAP in today's market. Then we enter into a free flowing discussion, with Tom and I taking any and all questions from the two aspiring SAP professionals who joined us on the call and shared their stories with us.

Since I had SAP Mentor Leonardo De Araujo of Beyond Technologies on the line, I figured we should go ahead and tape a spontaneous podcast on some topics of interest. The end result is a very informal chat that covers a series of topics, most of them SAP SME related. During the 20 minute podcast, Leo and I discuss his pending attendance as a Mentor at SAP DKOM, what he's learning about Business ByDesign as a potential future Canadian partner, and his take on the SME market and SAP All-in-One.

For several years, SAP professionals have looked forward to SAP Mentor Vijay Vijayasankar's annual blog post, "The Road Ahead for SAP Consultants." In honor of this always-provocative blog post, Jon pulled together fellow SAP Mentors Vijayasankar and Leonardo De Araujo for an in-depth discussion/debate about Vijay's skills rankings for 2011 and beyond. The result? An hour long talk that goes into detail on emerging skills in BusinessObjects, HANA and Business ByDesign, as well as how core skills like ABAP development are evolving.