SAPnish for Starters

Today's IT professional often comes across acronym-packed jargon that may be scary to many. I worked in an IT giant for a couple of years at the beginning of my career and trust me it was crazy to the core to remember the full forms of innumerable acronyms. I would curse all those people who invented these terms saying they were poor with their alphabets so forced it upon us as well. Although I hated it, I had no choice but to memorize all those terms that were relevant to my project as I had to communicate with my clients and colleagues in the preferred language. Frankly speaking, it's really not that tough to remember them if you learn it in a fun way and understand what the term actually stands for rather than blindly memorizing the terminologies. So here's a quick guide for all those SAPiens who find it difficult to keep in mind important terms related to SAP.

ABAP: pronounced “ah-bawp,” is SAP’s foundation and stands for Advanced Business Application Programming language

BOBJ: pronounced “bob-jay,” is not a type of rarely seen North American bird. It’s actually a the short form of SAP BusinessObjects, the business intelligence vendor SAP acquired in 2007. SAP is totally banking on BOBJ for its future success

Business ByDesign (ByD): SAP Business ByDesign is a suite of on-demand ERP applications. (Note: SAP also uses the ByD technology to build its OnDemand business applications.) At the close of 2011, SAP had signed up approximately 1,000 customers.

Cloud: SAP was a late comer to the cloud-computing arena, embracing it with all the enthusiasm that a five-year-old has for eating his vegetables. Which is to say, not so much. That’s changed as of late, however.

Colgate-Palmolive and Valero: two SAP reference customers (the former in consumer product goods, the latter in energy services) who you are most likely to hear from at an SAP conference. They put the “early” in “early SAP adopter.”

“Drinking Our Own Champagne”: SAP’s take on the classic “eating our own dog food” vendor euphemism. (Too many cynical comparisons have been made to the price of champagne, relative to dog food, and the price of SAP software. Woof!)

Ecosystem: as in “SAP Ecosystem.” Ecosystem makes one think of the symbiotic relationship among mammals and the Earth’s plants, oceans and land; in this case, think of the occasionally dysfunctional relationship among SAP, its customers, consultants and IT integrators.

ERP: a catch-all acronym (enterprise resource planning) for critical back-end business software, for which SAP is best known. Typically includes financial/accounting, operations/supply chain, HR (or human capital management), and project/portfolio management. The “sex appeal” of SAP ERP apps is very low, but see how “hot” your CFO gets if any of those financial apps don’t work properly.

“Game changing”: SAP executives, in 2011, began working this phrase into their presentation lexicons to describe SAP’s “innovative” portfolio of technologies and software.

Go to Market: if you meet an SAP employee with “Go to Market” in his or her title, know that it’s either someone tasked with getting SAP products delivered to customers or a “rain making” sales honcho (the Brooks Brothers suit, nice watch and iPad are also a dead giveaway)

Hasso: the first name of legendary SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner. Like Madonna, Michelangelo and Lindsay, you will rarely hear someone refer to him by including his surname, because there’s only one Hasso. (Which is probably why his interview of himself actually makes sense.)

HANA: unlike Hasso, HANA is not the name of a famous SAP executive. It is, however, Hasso’s pet project: HANA stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance and is based on SAP’s in-memory technology initiative. In layman’s terms: HANA allows your company to process a ton of data really fast.

In-Memory: you’ll hear this term often when the discussion involves SAP HANA, which uses in-memory computing principles (not invented by SAP, by the way) to analyze massive amounts of data “up to 3,600 times faster” than on SAP Business Suite with traditional disk-based databases, according to SAP.

“Innovation without Disruption”: a significant marketing push by SAP, though you don’t hear that much about it anymore. One guess: SAP ditched the negative “disruption” part and prefers to talk about the positive “innovation” piece all by itself.

OnDemand: SAP’s (slow) growing line of on-demand business applications—a.k.a. “The SAP Cloud.” As of early 2012, the OnDemand portfolio includes: Business ByDesign, Sales, Sourcing, Carbon Impact, BI and StreamWork. (Planned for later 2012 are OnDemand apps for: Career; Environment, Health and Safety; Sales and Operations Planning; Service; and Travel.)

On premise. On demand. On device: as Brad Hamilton said to a bewildered Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: “Learn it. Know it. Live it.” This is the three-pronged strategy that SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe have laid out for the vendor’s future.

Optimize: you are forewarned: You will hear this word a lot and may be tempted to use it in SAP discussions yourself: We need to optimize our customized SAP solutions. Don’t get sucked into the “Optimize” vortex!

Orchestration: a new entry into the SAPnish lexicon, you’ll be hearing more and more about this topic from SAP execs: an ability to manage your company’s data across IT environments and applications, via on-premise, in the cloud or on mobile devices. Easier said than done, by the way.

“Our Next Largest Competitor”: rarer than a week passing in which Oracle doesn’t buy another company is SAP actually referring to the “Stack Attack” by name.

Run Better: SAP’s 2011 marketing campaigns were anchored by the “Run Better” slogan, multiple tour stops and a hip video showing cool SAP customers such as Burton and Skullcandy

@sapcio: the Twitter handle for SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann, whose stock has risen right alongside his company’s. Gartner’s Thomas Otter once tweeted about him: “IMHO @sapcio has done more for SAP’s brand than a 100,000 airport posters.”

SAP Acronym-o-Rama: PI? SRM? FI? GRC? There are too many to include here, so click on this SAP glossary page to figure out that SAP product acronym that’s got you thinking WTH (what the heck?).

SolMan: though it is pronounced like the zany 1980s movie Soul Man, it has absolutely nothing to do with C. Thomas Howell, applying to Harvard or “bronzing pills.” It’s short for SAP Solution Manager, the oft-derided and chronically underused technical and application support and management tool set. Ask your CIO how the company is using SolMan to lower TCO of your company’s SAP investment, and see what happens.

Solution(s): this is a word that every SAP employee (from co-CEO down to janitor) is contractually bound to use in at least every other sentence they utter. (OK, that’s not entirely true, but you get the point.) If you abhor this word and all who freely use it, then don’t buy SAP software.

StreamWork: this is SAP’s collaboration platform, and SAP wants us all to love it like it was Facebook. Or even Myspace circa the late 1990s.

SuccessFactors: a cloud-based HCM vendor SAP purchased in early 2012 for $3.4 billion. Its CEO, Lars Daalgard, is slated to become SAP’s cloud chief and figure out SAP’s all-important cloud strategy. (No pressure there.)

Sybase / SUP / Afaria: SAP acquired Sybase in 2010, and that deal included the Sybase Unwired Platform (a.k.a. SUP) for managing enterprise applications and Afaria for device and security management. (And, FYI, Sybase people don’t think “Wass ‘Sup?” jokes are funny or clever.)

TomorrowNow: Just. Don’t. Talk. About. It. Ever.

Walldorf: SAP’s headquarters in Germany. Don’t confuse it with the famous NYC hotel and salad, which is spelled Waldorf

Hope you enjoyed learning Spanish..oops..SAPnish as much as I did writing it! In case you are interested in teaching or learning some modules of SAP online, then go through this site for more details. If you think you have more terms that are not mentioned here, please add them in the comments below.