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Business Two Zero » Blog Archive » Shai Agassi presents the new SAP, but the personality is conflicted: "Which brings me to the topic of “choice”. During all of the sessions it was painfully clear to partners and developers alike, that if you want to be doing the “cool” stuff, you have no choice but to upgrade to mySAP ERP 2005. They have over 10,000 customers on ERP ‘05, but even more still on R/3. As a customer, there was a lot of emphasis on your roadmap and action plan to get there from R/3. As a partner, you were left in no doubt that this is where you should be aiming your marketing and development resources. As an aside, I was interested by the metrics. Shai mentioned the 8,500 developers SAP has, and talked about the partners in terms of “where you should be aiming your 20 developers”, and that the sweet spot for your partner application, to get the SAP sales guys attention, should be around $250,000 (and remember that’s in addition to the SAP software the customer has to buy). He was suggesting those partners need to build a business plan and set their expectations so that it might take 3 years to be successful. This was Enterprise oriented with a big capital E!, both for customer and the partner. I’m not sure how many partners or systems integrators could handle 3 years of investment before they get any payback. Dennis amplifies this with one of the best Shai quotes, which takes us to the SAP Deathstar Ecosystem. "