Bloomberg : SAP Shares Fall After Software Architect Agassi Quits (Update1)

SAP Shares Fall After Software Architect Agassi Quits (Update1)

By Kenneth Wong

March 29 (Bloomberg) -- SAP AG shares fell after the resignation of Shai Agassi, the top software architect in the battle against Oracle Corp. and a candidate to succeed Chief Executive Officer Henning Kagermann.

The shares fell as much as 2.4 percent to 32.83 euros, and traded at 33.06 euros as of 12:08 p.m. in Frankfurt. Agassi decided to quit after SAP's board extended Kagermann's contract to 2009 last month, Chairman Hasso Plattner said on a conference call yesterday. Plattner had planned to make Agassi a co-CEO to succeed Kagermann.

Losing Agassi may hurt Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, the world's biggest maker of business-management software, as Oracle uses acquisitions to take a bigger share of the $56 billion market. Agassi, 38, took charge of product development globally in 2005 after becoming SAP's youngest and first non-German board member in April 2002.

``Agassi has been the lifeblood within SAP over the past few years,'' said Stefan Slowinski, an analyst at Societe Generale in London, who rates the stock ``hold.'' ``His departure is not a vote of confidence for SAP's expansion plans, or the company's ability to reach aggressive 2010 financial targets.''

SAP's head of sales Leo Apotheker, 53, takes over immediately as deputy CEO at the company.

`Sole Position'

Apotheker, a German based in Paris, joined SAP in 1988 and became a board member in 2002. He's fluent in five languages, and he earned a master's in business administration from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Apotheker's appointment ``puts him in sole position to be the successor'' to Kagermann in 2009, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst John Segrich said. He rates the stock ``underweight.''

Agassi and Apotheker were considered by analysts and investors to be the top candidates to succeed Kagermann. Plattner said in retrospect, Agassi ``most likely was not happy'' about Kagermann's contract extension.

``It became apparent that Shai was not comfortable committing to a 10- to 15-year period,'' Plattner said. ``I regret Shai's decision, but I respect it.''

Agassi is the chief architect of a new generation of software that can be integrated with competing products to help companies manage such tasks as payroll and inventory. Redwood City, California-based Oracle has spent about $20 billion on acquisitions since 2004 to add similar applications. It agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions Corp. for another $3.3 billion this month.

Oracle Lawsuit

SAP's 2006 software license sales, an indicator of future revenue, missed analysts' estimates and the company's own forecast. The company in January forecast its profit margin will decline for the first time in seven years because of spending to push sales to smaller companies. SAP wants these customers to generate $1 billion in additional revenue a year from 2010.

Last week, Oracle filed a lawsuit in the U.S., claiming SAP stole its software code on a ``grand scale'' to offer cheaper product services. SAP said it would fight the lawsuit.

Born near Tel Aviv, Agassi earned a bachelor's degree at Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He started his first company at the age of 21. In 1990, he recruited his father to help run a company called Quicksoft Ltd. He renamed it TopTier Software Inc. and moved the company to California before selling it to SAP in 2001.

`Best Job'

``I have the best job at SAP right now,'' Agassi said in Paris last May. ``I get to innovate and to create, and you can't ask for anything more. The rest is less than negligible.''

Agassi, who steps down April 1, will pursue his interests in environmental policy, alternative energy sources and issues related to Israel's future. He will remain Plattner's consultant and keep an office in Palo Alto, California, where he's based.

``We would not be surprised to see Mr. Agassi accelerate plans to run his own company,'' Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Mohammed Moawalla wrote in a note.

Agassi plans to start a company that will make electric vehicles in Israel's northern town of Beit Shean, Ma'ariv newspaper reported today, without citing anyone.

SAP was created in 1972 by Plattner and four other software engineers from International Business Machines Corp. Plattner handed over many of his day-to-day responsibilities to Agassi ahead of stepping down as co-CEO in 20

Alphablox Features Wish List

Writing to Santa-BM,

Undeniably, Alphablox architecture and component models present a very flexible and powerful of incorporating analytic capability into whatever web-based applications that your enterprise currently maintained.

With greater power comes greater responsiblities are very true indeed. To be up to 80% productive with Alphablox solution, the architect and developer need to face a very steep learning curve especially if their background on design pattern, J2EE web applications, and some-what JSF-type of knowledge are not strong.

To put it in simple form, I see Alphablox as conglomeration of part-of-JSF (There are other JSF competitors, but I wouldn't mention them here since they are not the part of standard J2EE stack) and AJAX suite of technology.

The thing that I like JSF is not just about their wonderful architecture and well defined component framework. The most important is the promised upcoming tool support that allows you (developers or designer) to visual create, debug, test and deploy JSF component. Without this support, it's like .NET Web developer using code editor to create web pages. WYSIWYG? Forget it.

The problem with Alphablox (As of 8.4.0.1) is the missing of these tool supports.
I don't get report designer in DWE design studio. I don't get testing environment for my custom made UI blox. I can't even test my report without actually put them into the server and press F5 key. Of course, some of you might argue and say to me "Please spend some $$ to buy WSAD 6, cheap skate!". Ok, I accepted that suggestion. But the point is DWE as an integrated and promised to be end-to-end BI platform should at least provide a minimal report development support. Look at Microsoft SSRS, althought their report templates are quite limited, at least I can drag a text box component on the report or define the styles of report contents visually, ;-)

Here some constructive suggestions to IBM Alphablox team

* Provide new project types in design studio that do
1. Alphablox Relational Report Creation (With tons of wizard, of course)
2. Alphablox Analytics Report Creation (With tons wizard, of course)
3. Alphablox Cube (With the real time capabilities to see cube data, etc)
- Trust me, Query Builder is really not enough
4. Alphablox Custom Component/UI Component Creation

I wish that next time when I want to customize the behavior of the MemberFilterBlox to inform users that their selection is not valid due to constraints such as security, I only need to :

1. Fire up my design studio
2. Open the Alphablox project that contains the web page that have the specific PresentBlox/MemberFilterBlox,
3. Double click on the blox, brings me a selection list of events to listen

OR

3. Right click on the blox, go to "Customize Event Handler", then "XXX event"

4. Select the event, and then it generates the handler method skeleton for me to put in my code.

All linking between the event handler and the framework event pipelines should be handled internally by the boilerplate, I don't want to be bothered about that.

5. Lastly, from Tool Palette, drag a Message Box dialog out to the editor

6. Skeleton message box server side codes automatically generated for me, I just need to put in the title and message, etc.

7. Press a button/key to preview with live data.


So, think about my imaginative way and compare it to the current way of doing the same thing, which one is more developer friendly and productive you say?

Even better, convert all the bloxs to JSF compliant component or provide a JSF wrapper for them. This will allows any JSF supported IDE to develop Alphablox applications.

Alphablox Strikes Back - Part 1

As of current moment, latest version of IBM Alphablox is 8.4.1 that comes with DWE 9.1.1. Anyway, I'm using 8.4.0.1 which I installed the fix pack separately after DWE 9.1.

Check out the relevance fixes applied in 8.4.0.1 below:

Fixes for customer-reported issues (APARs) in the Alphablox 8.4.0.1 release

APAR Abstract
PJ31104 Column sort option on an Alphabox Cube bookmark is not being applied when the bookmark is restored
PJ31413 When it meets the following requirements, an alias and a peculiar name cannot change over
PJ31309 legendStyle should be a valid chart property
PJ31310 Legend incorrectly visible on dial charts
PJ31290 BookmarkMatcher performance makes it unusable
PJ31211 More errors drilling down on waterfall members
PJ31222 Dial charts don't work on Japanese and Chinese windows
PJ31231 ReportBlox interaction stops after query is issued via a select list
PJ31233 The default query in Query Builder is translated
PJ31247 Histogram Pareto (sorted histogram) checkbox does not persist
PJ31311 Incorrect axis information on Waterfall Chart
PJ31407 Traffic lights fail with aliases and removeSuffix
PJ31414 PersistenceBlox and DB2 Connection staying open
PJ31439 Toggling parentFirst and parentLast gives incorrect order
PJ31483 Using an FormEventListener to display the visibility of a MemberSelectFormBlox causes the PresentBlox Menu/Data list not to appear
PJ31490 Cannot get user credentioals from Windows 2003 Active Directory LDAP
PJ31494 Default for setAxisLabelLayout documented incorrectly
PJ31520 Placing 5 slicer dimensions on the PageBlox cause adjacent cell to be black on selection
PJ31526 Excel template - Too many different cell formats
PJ31523 Render to XML of DataBlox fails
PJ31302 resolveMember does not work against [cubeName].memberName with relational cube
PJ31537 ReportBlox PDF requests Chinese font for Japanese data
PJ31545 render=html causes sorted headers to use larger font
PJ31563 Member Filter only contains calculatedMember if in first position
14739,344,000 & 19917,49R,000 WL SERVER CRASHES WHEN CONNECTION ATTEMPT IS MADE TO SSAS (MSOLAP 2005) IF DOMAIN IN USER NAME OMITTED
PJ31575 FATAL error if connecting to WebSphere before initialization complete
PJ31589 Shipped EMail bean class files generate bad table+chart email attachment
PJ31615 getChartCurrentDimensions returns incorrect members if dimensions moved via data layout panel.
PJ31428 Grid lines broken in PDF file when using expand/collapse mode (or other images in cells)
PJ31626 Code conversion error (mis-mapping) problem in ABX with Essbase bridge.
PJ31633 NullPointerException when replaceMembers is called on SerializedMDBQuery
PJ31648 y1FormatMask cannot handle division
PJ31668 DBCS not working in ReportBlox in FastForward to Excel
PJ31247 Histogram Pareto (sorted histogram) checkbox does not persist
PJ31693 Alphablox loops when BFO does not find a useable font.
PJ31682 java.lang.NullPointerException at com.ibm.icu.util.TimeZone.getDefault(TimeZone.java:700) with icu4j_3_4_2
PJ31707 GridBlox columns misaligned in portlet with BiDi
PJ31324 axis labels overlap in histogram, horizontal with 90 degree angle
PJ31044 cellFormat not() clause fails when multiple members are specified
40,951,122 Repository Conversion Utility Memory Consumption Prevents Upgrades
PJ31138 PageBlox Diminsions and PageBlox members containing DBCS as null characters
PJ31139 Wide ReportBlox PDF output overlaps
PJ31140 Suppressed rows showing on chart legend - regression
PJ31141 Specifying a page break on a column member breaks after first row member
PJ31158 ReportBlox should use the external PDF server
PJ31159 Regression - editing a cell with String data causes ParseException
PJ31160 Refreshing page which deletes and defines DataBlox crashes server
PJ31161 No ChartBlox.getHistogramOptions()
PJ31162 PDF pageBreak property is one member off
PJ31148 PresentBlox render=printer produces incorrect HTML when used to create the body of an e-mail message
PJ31129 render=printer concatenates previous Blox component
PJ31242 nullPointerException on render=printer in frameset
PJ31268 Scrollbar within table nearly disappears when screen is resized
PJ31315 Error when member filter page is started
PJ31388 Negative Scale error using Oracle database
PJ31364 Support for spanning of data cells
PJ31374 Rapid connections to the Alphablox server causes RenderManager Could not find object
CSD PJ31358 within a PresentBlox no longer makes a toolbar disappear.
PJ31363 alphablox calc editor issue
PJ31390 Regression: Traffic lighting doesn't work properly with textual data in cells
PJ31386 Formatting issue when export to default Excel template is selected.
PJ31416 PDF rendering breaks if report is more than one page
PJ31452 Invalid scope built for format mask and traffic lights when member contains parentheses
PJ31454 Sort is retained on wrong member when sort on opposite axis is removed
PJ31470 Wrap cells containing very long strings of data for PDF so that data does not overlap
PJ31482 Cube Manager dialog will not start
PJ31476 Combo bar/line charts do not display line against RDB data
PJ31500 Using percentage format mask multiplies value by 100 in Excel
PJ31511 Excel properties tab shows garbage for DBCS in PageFilterDimension and PageFilterSelection
PJ31538 Change of behavior in QueryFilter object
PJ31590 Collapse not working on mergedHeaders if inner dimension is drillable
PJ31579 Issue with render=xls with GroupBlox (ReportBlox)
PJ31624 MSAS dimensions are showing up as parents when they are leaf members
PJ31647 Show siblings will only perform a single level drill down with AsyncDataNavigation example

Some of the reported bugs do affect me, for example, the sorting order missing after restoring from bookmark, is really an annoying one when your customer desires a ranking report.


The Export to Excel toolbar (The one on the top right corner) functionality doesn't work anymore. It keep on gave me error message that says "Unable to open xxxx". I'm not sure whether installing 8.4.0.1 causes this because I didn't test out that function in previous releases.


After a round of debugging, the root of the above problem was the missing of a page directive in /war-root/excel.jsp, maybe due to accidental editing. Now the function works fine.