In my previous post, we took a look at Ryan Craig’s Forbes article entitled The Biggest Tech Talent Gap Can Be Found In The SAP Ecosystem and zoomed in on some of the specific talent gaps that customers are wrestling with.

In the article, Mr. Craig predicted that one way this talent gap would be filled was through partners that see the value in filling the market with new and upskilled resources. Today, we’ll explore that idea a bit further and see what sort of lessons we can learn from other talent ecosystems throughout history.

Lessons Learned from the Mainframe Era

When I first got started in the SAP space, the majority of projects I worked on were for customers that were replacing legacy mainframe systems with SAP R/3. Believe it or not, at that time R/3’s client/server architecture was considered to be cutting edge technology and there was a lot of excitement with it.

As a young, naïve techie type, I assumed that these companies were moving to SAP simply because it was just a superior solution. However, I was surprised to learn that, in most cases, the business looked at SAP as a step back rather than a step forward. After years and years of customizations, the reality was that these legacy mainframe solutions were almost perfectly tuned to the business’ needs.

Although these customers certainly saw the value in SAP, many of the motivating factors for moving to SAP had more to do with risk management:

• Internal IT staff developers were nearing retirement age and COBOL developers were becoming increasingly scarce (and therefore expensive).
• From a risk management perspective, SAP felt like a safe bet as R/3 had a large and vibrant ecosystem surrounding it.
• Moving to a more standardized ERP solution was perceived as a way to minimize customization requirements and reduce TCO.

ABAP's Not Dead - But It's Also Not Sexy

Fast forward to today and we’re seeing some of the same issues repeating themselves. More and more ABAP developers are nearing retirement age, and it’s getting harder and harder to find resources that have experience working with new dimension technologies. As the saying goes, “ABAP’s not dead”, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that it’s sexy.

While many assume that increased demand will trigger resources to upskill and fill these talent gaps, it’s worth noting that the significant spike in demand for COBOL resources around Y2K didn’t really move the needle that much in terms of attracting new talent into that ecosystem. As a computer science major during that timeframe, this reporter can confirm that there were very few people signed up for COBOL I and COBOL II. For the most part, this spike in demand only managed to draw a few resources out of retirement to cash some fat checks.

With the notable exception of the SAP University Alliances, the reality is that there aren’t many young students learning about ABAP and other SAP technologies. To blindly assume that these students will change their minds because SAP skills are in demand is to ignore the fact that these resources also have exciting opportunities in other ecosystems (e.g., Workday, Salesforce, Dynamics, etc.) that are embracing more open and modern technologies.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t want to paint an overly gloomy picture here, but I think that many within the SAP community are ignoring the signs that the ecosystem is in decline. If you’ve been around the SAP ecosystem for a while, consider the amount of buzz that used to surround the SAP Community Network, openSAP, etc. Every time I visit these sites, it feels a bit like a ghost town compared to their heyday back in the early 2000s. Maybe SAP and its partners can recapture some of that magic, but the competition for quality resources is going to be stiff.

In my final installment in this series, we’ll play some money ball and look at ways of rebuilding SAP talent rosters in the aggregate. Stay tuned, and as always, we’d love to hear some of your thoughts on these topics.