Hiring full-time employees is difficult because many SAP workers prefer to work as contractors or consultants, Dolan says. They like to be involved in development and initial deployment but are less interested in ongoing support of SAP systems. Dolan says she has the same problem in finding employees to manage MIT's Hyperion systems.

"People who have that skill are fairly scarce and many of them are contractors or consultants," she says. "There's got to be some shortage because if there were ample people you would see more [contractors and consultants] moving into employee ranks."

Nearly every time MIT hires an SAP professional, it is forced to offer salaries higher than the college originally budgeted for, Dolan says. Typically, salaries exceed the initial budgeted amount by 10 to 20 percent, she says.

SAP professionals have been able to command higher salaries than other IT workers for at least a few years, Dolan noted, pointing to research completed by Hewitt Associates in the fall of 2004.

SAP work was the most lucrative in IT at that time, exceeding systems administration salaries by 25 percent, the survey found. SAP work also paid more than systems integration, data warehousing, information security, Web infrastructure, and network engineering.

While the laws of supply and demand are driving up the price for SAP workers, applying the term "shortage" to this situation may be misleading, says Herbert Lin , senior scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.

"This is sort of basic economics of labour supply. There's a shortage at a given price," Lin says. "If the salaries were $10 million a year, there wouldn't be any shortage at all. ... What employers mean is 'I can't find enough people at the wages I want in order to hire the people I think I need, so I'm going to have to raise wages.'"

According to Foote, though, some employers cannot find workers even when they are willing to raise salaries. This is true in SAP, as well as SAN administration, he says.

"That's another area where we have people saying 'I've got the money, we can't find the people," Foote says.