Stories about: Sapphire

The Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG) is forming a new global community for customers of Business Objects, the business intelligence vendor that SAP bought earlier this year, the organization announced this week.

It took the United States just 45 months to defeat the combined forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. It has taken SAP 48 months to get Business ByDesign, its SaaS (software as a service) play for the SMB market, off the ground. And it still isn't ready for prime time.

SAP is developing new business process management (BPM) tools under the code name "Galaxy" and will first release them in the third quarter, it announced Tuesday at its SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando.

Executives from IBM and SAP said the two companies won't fall out even though they now compete head-on in the market for BI (business intelligence) software, with their respective purchases of Cognos and Business Objects.

Roughly 75 percent of SAP's overall customer base is made up of small and midsize enterprises, the software vendor announced at the start of its SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando on Monday.

SAP is putting the brakes on the rollout of Business ByDesign, its offering for small businesses, it said Wednesday, as it reported first quarter net income down 22 percent compared to a year earlier, on revenue up 14 percent. The quarter is the first to incorporate the results of Business Objects, which SAP acquired Jan. 21.

In the 19th century, British mathematician Charles Babbage invented the "difference engine," a mechanical computer that had an enormously complex arrangement of levers, ratchets and gears. Had this prototypical chunk of steampunk machinery ever been completely built, it would have weighed several tons.

For years, the key to jumpstarting a network professional's career was getting a Cisco, Microsoft or other technical certification. But now CIOs, IT recruiters and salary specialists say demand is waning for hardware- and software-oriented certifications.

IT hiring managers are finding that SAP's expanding footprint in the enterprise ERP software market requires broader skills to fill open positions. That was one of the main take-aways from April's Sapphire '07 Atlanta, SAP's annual international customer event. Many hiring managers we spoke with voiced how difficult it is to find qualified candidates whose skills can support current implementations.

SAP users this week applauded the vendor's road map for adding service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies to its software, though some acknowledged that they aren't yet ready to use the new capabilities.

SAP this week unveiled a set of integrated on-demand ERP applications, code-named A1S, for midsize companies that is due to ship next year.