Wednesday, February 24, 2010

SAP BW 7.2 is replaced by SAP BW 7.3

-update February 24, 2013 – For BW version 7.4 refer to BW 7.4

Not even could get on the market and SAP BW 7.20 was discontinued and will be replaced by SAP BW 7.3. It was freshly announced (probably starting of calendar week 09 of 2010) that quoting: “7.20 Release will be consolidated into the SAP NetWeaver BW Release 7.30”. This is official statement form SAP as published on OSS. SAP is saying that they decided because of feedback from customers participating in its ramp-up program. Customers wanted to have BW in more complete and integrate fashion. Also there is and strong demand to have less upgrade steps. 

In upcoming version of SAP NetWeaver BW 7.30 which will benefited of a full SAP NetWeaver technology platform release will be introduced support of NetWeaver hubs. Moreover there will be tighter integration of the SAP Business Objects tools and support for SEM, enhanced Business Planning and other BW add-ons; plus support for Teradata and HP Neoview. Current development of BW 7.3 will include all features of not released 7.2 into one go-to release. 

Planned release-to-customers (RTC) for 7.30 is in the second half of 2010. 7.30 Beta program is targeted for late 1 half of year 2010.

Version 7.2 was supposed to be new big step of BW after version 7.0 introduced in 2005. Seems that SAP prefers slower product introduction just to do not make customers unhappy with not finished products.

See further details here.


For feature list of upcoming SAP BW 7.3 see this SDN paper

-    Update 08/05/2010 –
See SDN’s official news and update page regarding SAP BW 7.3.






-    Update 04/11/2010 –
See Features of SAP BW 7.3

See collection of materials related to SAP BW 7.3 

Saturday, February 13, 2010

New oil to SAP engine?

First quarter of calendar year 2010 and especially beginning of February will have significant impact on SAP’s future as a company. On Feb. the 7th SAP announced that is coming back to co-CEO structure and new co-CEOs are Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. Effective immediately Léo Apotheker stepped down as sole CEO due to discontinuing of his contract. Moreover Vishal Sikka (Chief Technology Officer) joined SAP Executive Board. Couple of further thins happened as well. SAP Supervisory Board requested that Hasso Plattner (SAP Co-Founder) continues to be a part of SAP by acting as strategic advisor to new SAP co-CEOs on technology and product development.

What is a background all of these? Apotheker as none techie person was completely unpopular within companies. He made couple unpopular decisions during his less than one year tenure as CEO. He increased a maintenance fee that was heavily critiqued by SAP user groups around the world and by analysts. He laid off employees as for first time in company history as his response to financial crisis. New hot trends on market (cloud computing, SaaS software) are not followed by SAP as their customers would required. This is a case of Business ByDesign which is still not available for customers in wide range. Some SAP products (SAP PI) have not been advised to be used for strategic projects by IT analysts as their future is unclear. There was no clear strategy in product road-maps within portfolio.

What can SAP hope in future under co-CEO management? To restore customer confidence, to make clear decision across products, move and act faster in area of could computing and SaaS software. Here SAP could possible by some niche vendor to make huge progress there. ORACLE as the biggest competition has now in their hands hardware vendor (SUN Microsystems). We will see how market will accept this but they are able to coma with complete solutions comprised of hardware and software as well. In conjunction to this some analysts say that time when SAP will be acquired by some other company is approaching.

It will be interesting to observe if this new oil will fuel SAP engine to full throttle or not.

Read more at following pages:

http://blog.enterpriseadvocates.com/2010/02/07/news-analysis-saps-ceo-leo-apotheker-resigns/

- update 06/02/2010 -
The new co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe wrote an open letter to SAP customers. Within this they ensuring customers about investments they have made in SAP is protected and valid. More SAP accelerates the pace of the innovation of solution delivery in terms of On Demand, On Premise, On Device, and in the Orchestration IT environments. In addition they ensure that SAP's global customer base is among their greatest assets. See full letter here.