There’s talk lately about high demand for SAP skills —a seemingly perennial issue debating the merits of which can draw as much passion as any political argument. This time, among those in the most demand are SAP BusinessObjects skills.

That there would be a high demand for BusinessObjects skills lends itself to reason. SAP purchased the company nearly four years ago, and soon after announced the BOBJ tools would be the strategic BI front-ends; SAP would phase out support for its NetWeaver BI/BEx line (read here for more on BEx support policies). And SAP shops are indeed moving there—according to an insiderRESEARCH report, more than a quarter of the 321 SAP customers surveyed said they were evaluating, actively working or had completed projects to integrate SAP BusinessObjects software.

In fact, Xcelsius (or Dashboard Design, as SAP now calls it) and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services are two of the hottest skills requested by his clients now, says Darren Winnie, VP of Solution IT Inc., a Boston-based consultancy that specializes in business software implementations, support and staff augmentations. Solution IT started seeing a surge in demand for BusinessObjects skills in the fourth quarter of last year, when companies started to loosen the grips on projects held up due to the recession. High demand means these skills are now more expensive—up as much as $20 per hour over the last year, Winnie says.

But is there truly a dearth of these skills in the market, or are other factors at work?

A BusinessObjects History Lesson

Understanding the present situation requires a glance back at the past. In the old BOBJ days, there used to be universe developers, report developers and users, says Dave Rathbun, BOB founder and author of the popular blog “Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence.” Therefore, it wasn’t too difficult to find a “soup to nuts” expert.

But BusinessObjects skills got more complicated as BusinessObjects did. Within a decade of its launch, BusinessObjects has introduced a true enterprise platform that could run on Windows, Unix or a combination of both. So even before the SAP acquisition, the marketplace was becoming more fragmented, Rathbun says.

And much like Crystal versus Webi, SAP was initially a competitor—or if not a competitor, at least it was not always considered complementary for BusinessObjects, Rathbun says. SAP partners actually had no compelling reason to learn the technology simply because it was not commonly requested. In fact, after SAP purchased BusinessObjects, some SAP partners went out and purchased BusinessObjects partners in order to get a jumpstart on the technology.

Now add SAP into the mix—namely, those thousands of BW customers trying to come to grips with the fact that BusinessObjects is now the strategic BI front-end. So there are somewhat specialized BusinessObjects experts, many of whom haven’t had reasons to learn SAP prior to the acquisition. And there are SAP shops that now need BusinessObjects skills.

But Is There a Skills Shortage?

Recipe for a skills gap, right? But is it more nuanced than that?

“For the most part, you have to go back to the 1990s to find a market where there’s truly a skills shortage; it implies the market is in the hands of the job seeker,” says Jon Reed, SAP Mentor and founder of JonERP.com. “Back then, you’d give people whatever they asked for. That’s not the case now.”

First off, it’s worth noting that many consultants and customers interviewed say that many SAP shops, especially SAP BW ones, prefer an IT employee with SAP skills implementing BusinessObjects products—which, depending on the application and the project, may or may not make sense.

“If you’re going to report from BW cubes and use Web Intelligence, then the report writer doesn’t need to know how the cube is built any more than they had to know how the universe was built,” Rathbun says. “But if you want your report writer to also be able to talk intelligently to the cube folks and make appropriate requests for enhancements that would improve the report, then, yes, they should have some background.”

In the SAP world, there are three main skill sets: developer, administrator and functional, Reed says. BusinessObjects doesn’t really have that functional equivalent; it has architects/admins and developers/analysts. While the former role may require some BW knowledge, the latter role really does not, he says.

“It’s nice to have an SAP background there, but it’s really about SQL and BI work,” Reed says. “It doesn’t have a lot to do with the landscape side.”

Plus, he adds, it may not be that difficult to train a Basis person on BusinessObjects.

The same may be true for the reverse situation. For instance, Michael Welter, who started off solely working in BusinessObjects, says he learned SAP along the way, by working on projects and attending a five-day class on deploying BusinessObjects on SAP.

“You take a BusinessObjects expert and you give them just enough SAP information to get by, and they could do it,” says Welter, who is a consultant at Claraview. “I’ve picked up a lot more than I would actually need, and I would by no means call myself an expert in SAP.”

With this in mind, one factor that may be holding down supply is political. Such a situation looks like this: Companies that have SAP software and BusinessObjects software (perhaps for non-SAP data) installed, but each side has its own administration and management. One side may end up feeling as though if they train the other side, those people may take over their jobs. So where is the incentive to help out?

Meanwhile, there have been thousands of people hired to implement SAP that human resources could now be pushing management to “repurpose,” which holds back hiring any new people.

And finally, there are the technical issues. With BusinessObjects XI 3.1, there were some enhancements in integration with SAP, but they were still really on “separate-but-not-quite-equal” footing, Rathbun says.

“It’s not until BI 4.0 that we really see good integration, which means until BI 4.0 is released and in the market for some period of time, there simply isn’t a good platform to develop integrated skills,” he says. “That gives us a technical obstacle to overcome in addition to any of the political or financial issues.”

Above all, clients may just be looking for something that doesn’t exist. Rathbun recalls comments on BOB about a re-post of a job advertisement. The client was looking for five years of BI 4.0 experience. The software, of course, isn’t even generally available yet.

“The experience people are looking for really isn’t there yet,” he says.

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1 Comment for Wanted: SAP BusinessObjects Skills — Can Supply Meet Demand?

Naresh

I like the 5 years of BI4.0 experience -:)

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