Ask the SAP Career Expert Archive

SAP Career Questions for B2B Workforce, Feburary 2008 edition How effective is MDM for clients & is that a good line of SAP career to get into right now? JR: I'm glad you asked this question and I like how you are thinking about your career path. I hear from a lot of folks who are interested in chasing what's hot, but they never ask the all-important question: how effective is this supposedly "hot" product for companies After all, consulting opportunities almost always break down to a simple question of supply and demand, and if a product is not embraced by the SAP customer base, then the demand will be limited. And when I say "embraced by the SAP customer base," I'm not just talking about a handful of deep-pocketed flagship customers. That is not enough to fuel demand. MDM, SAP's Master Data Management product, is an interesting case to consider. At first, the demand for MDM was more limited, but as the functionality in MDM continued to increase, the customer base has started to install MDM with greater frequency. With the current MDM release version 5.5, we are seeing a warmer customer reception than ever before. MDM ships with NetWeaver so that helps with product acceptance, though the last time I heard, you do have to pay an add-on fee to activate the MDM component. We hear a lot of talk about how MDM is crucial to eSOA, SAP's SOA initiative. The reasoning is this: you can't build successful web services without a standardization of data types (SAP often calls this "one version of the truth"), so as usage of eSOA heats up, then the popularity of MDM should increase also. I buy into that line of thinking, but that doesn't necessarily boost the MDM consulting market immediately. One thing I can tell you is that starting at SAPPHIRE in 2007, and continuing at TechEd last fall, I began to hear from more customers who are seeing a positive bottom line result from MDM. At TechEd, I sat in on a very well-attended presentation on MDM that demonstrated how an SAP customer could use MDM to identify and eliminate duplicate customer records. This may sound like a small thing, but cleaning up master data can be a very big deal. In the example I watched, the end result of cleaning up the customer master data was the ability to truly track who the highest revenue customers were. Before the data was cleaned up duplicate customer data was really distorting this information. And without good, "actionable" information, companies cannot make good strategic decisions. So where does that leave an aspiring MDM consultant? Well, as a long term career path, I like SAP MDM a lot. I believe it's here to stay and that it will only gather more momentum for the reasons I just described. But to answer the other part of your question, I'm not sure that MDM has generated enough consulting demand to justify a specialization in MDM right now. I'm sure that some consultants will find a way to pull this off, but for now, I'd be tempted to combine MDM with a core bread-and-butter skill set. The obvious choice, to me, would be the NetWeaver BI and MDM combination. BI is arguably the hottest area of consulting in SAP today, and when you combine the two, you have two related products, one proven (BW/BI), and one emerging (MDM). To me, that's the ideal combination for now, and as MDM gains more acceptance from SAP end users, then I will like it more as a primary skills focus. Jon, your career answers are a big help to the SAP community. I am an ABAP programmer concerned about my future. I know Java, and I am interested in SAP Financials also, so I am confused about whether I should move to NetWeaver or SAP FI and which has a better future. Your thoughts? JR: This is a great question and I get a lot of variations on this question from ABAP programmers who are justifiably concerned about their future. The good news is that ABAP programming is not going away anytime soon. However, many ABAP projects can be done offsite, so that means that the option of offshoring reduces the rates for ABAP programmers by spreading the work to more off site programmers. In the future, offshoring is going to impact more areas of SAP than just ABAP programmers. I believe we will see more offshoring on the functional side also. Basically, what we need to concern ourselves with is any area of SAP where skills can become "commoditized." Once it becomes easy to package and outsource a particular aspect of a project, rates for that specific skill will go down. So all SAP professionals need to keep their skills on the cutting edge and commit to staying one step ahead of skills that mature and then become commoditized. So how does that affect ABAP programmers? Well, anyone involved in SAP development needs to stay ahead of the pack, but that doesn't necessarily mean abandoning ABAP for functional work. In fact, it's often a mistake to completely leave one area of SAP for another. The reason? In today's SAP market, your value as a consultant is influenced by how much project experience you bring to the table. The trick to remaining marketable is to keep your core skills intact but to build on them. With that in mind, it's possible for an ABAP programmer to move into SAP Financials or to stay on the development side. Of course there are other options, such as moving into team lead roles, but I'll limit this answer to the scenarios described by this question. This individual is on the right track, because he is saying that he doesn't plan to abandon ABAP if he "goes functional." In that case, he would play a techno-functional role drawing on his technical background but also using SAP functional skills on the financials side. During this upgrade wave, SAP Financials is certainly a viable career choice, but for this person, I would only recommend it if they have already programmed within the FI module. Most ABAP programmers do gravitate towards working within certain modules, so if you are looking to make a functional transition, you will provide the most value in the area you have already programmed in rather than just picking a random hot area on the functional side. But for this person, an SAP development career is still a viable option also and there are still many good project roles for senior SAP developers. He is already on the right track by adding Java skills to his ABAP core. I believe the most sought-after SAP programmers will be a "hybrid" of ABAP and Java skills, though by "Java" I mean all kinds of web-based development protocols, including open standards like XML and SAP's own flavors of these protocols. I would agree that staying in SAP development means mastering NetWeaver, but that is a broad statement. NetWeaver is really a bunch of different components and no one is going to become an expert in all of them. I believe it's less a matter of focusing on one tool and more a matter of understanding what the tools are ultimately for. In this case, much of the development work we can expect in SAP environments pertains to better integration both inside and outside company walls, building "customer-facing" applications and services. Increasingly, this will involve the use of service-oriented architecture (SOA). SAP's version of this is called Enterprise SOA, or eSOA for short. Another promising avenue is anything that leverages transactional data for reporting and analytical purposes. We call this field "Business Intelligence," and any SAP developer that can get some NetWeaver BI exposure has certainly upgraded their skill set. Describing all the NetWeaver and eSOA tools, it is possible for an SAP developer to master would take me a lot longer than you probably have time to read today. But what I would suggest as a first step is to learn as much as you can about the NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE). NetWeaver CE is SAP's next generation Java-based development environment, and within CE, there are many different tools to learn about. There is a free version of CE available on the SAP Developer Network, and while it doesn't have all the CE components in it, you can still get a good feeling for CE by using this tool. Choosing the right SAP career path is an individual decision, but I hope I have given insight to a couple of the main options that SAP programmers face. Ask the SAP Career Expert Archive