July 08, 2005
SAP TechEd - unfair treatment for european developers
As some of you might know, I earn a fair amount of my daily bread rolls through SAP development. Now that I do freelance work, I decided to invest into my skills and visit one of SAP's developer conferences: TechEd. Like every year, there are TechEds all over the world: this year Vienna, Boston, Tokyo and Bangalore were chosen. Since I am based in the UK, visiting Vienna is the obvious decision (unfortunately it is also the most expensive option, but that's fair enough). When I started researching each of these conferences a bit more, I soon discovered that SAP offers certification courses for their developers too. Part of the offer is that -included in the registration fee- SAP offers certification exams for their Netweaver product whilst visiting the conference. "What a marvellous idea!", I thought. But when I clicked a bit further into the individual conference descriptions, I found that not all parts of the SAP development world are equally treated by the software giant. In fact, Vienna -and for a while Boston, too- did not offer any certification opportunities for their visitors. So far, only Bangalore and Boston (which looked like a late certification entry) offer the valuable extra exams. There is no information available on Tokyo just yet - Vienna will definitely not have any certification opportunities.
I was and still am very disappointed about this state of affairs and the unfair treatment of european developers and turned to Shai Agassi's (member of SAPs executive board) weblog on the SAP developer network. Shai writes on there about "fighting the common enemy" and Outsourcing/Outtasking. I took the opportunity and posted a comment. He kindly replied:
Michael,Fair point. We are trying to establish TechEd in India, as an entry to the market we have to behave like the rest of the market behaves in India. In the future we will probably need to re-evaluate this policy of no-charge.
As you can imagine, I wasn't really happy with this response, as it still doesn't tell us european developers why there are no certification opportunities at the european edition of TechEd and if SAP will start to treat us all equally again.
Lastly, I have also inquired about the registration fee for TechEd in Bangalore, as SAP does not mention it on their website: 15,000 Rupees (ca. $350). In comparison, the Boston registration is between $2045 and $2345. I leave it up to the reader to form an opinion about this. Of course you can argue that salaries and cost of living in India are lower as well, but when I spoke to a SAP developer from India about this, he only shook his head and said: "15000 Rupees is peanuts.".