Not at SAPPHIRE in orlando? Get a wrap up of day one proceedings with Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, John Appleby, Harald Reiter and Vijay Vijayasankar.

The event is also streamed so live and recorded action can be viewed via the SAP Virtual Events website 

A recent crackdown by SAP AG on companies that it considers are indirectly accessing its software without paying for it could spell trouble for some longstanding customers of the software vendor, an analyst firm said this week. Under SAP's licensing terms, an indirect access scenario occurs when a company's employees or business partners, who are not licensed SAP users, accesses SAP software via a third-party application interface, said Dave Blake CEO of UpperEdge in Boston.

SAP AG (SAP), the biggest maker of business management software, said a “very solid pipeline” of new deals will help meet growth targets as demand picks up for mobile programs and software to process large amounts of data. First-quarter net income jumped 10 percent from a year earlier to 444 million euros ($587 million) helped by record sales in Asia, the Walldorf, Germany-based company said today. Analysts had estimated profit of 476 million euros in a Bloomberg survey. 

Clearly, the “hiring stakes” are high at any point in an organisation’s development. I would argue, however, that they are at their highest during a time of great change or transition, e.g., before or during an ERP implementation. In fact, the financial implications of a bad ERP hire are astronomical. Not only can a bad hire derail the project by not performing his or her anticipated duties, but actually can sour the entire work environment in an incredibly damaging – and long lasting – way. It is no secret to readers of this blog that employees of a company in the midst of an ERP project are frequently defensive, frightened, angry or just plain bewildered.

With organisations’ interest in cloud-based computing reaching new heights, the focus of work has shifted to migrating entire enterprise platforms. By early 2012, Accenture moved more than 250,000 mailboxes and nearly 11,300 shared-services sites to the cloud, the largest such migration undertaken to date. To achieve this, Accenture needed strong project management skills and the creation of at-scale migration tools and processes, as well as overcoming technology integration challenges.