You may have heard that COMSYS has over 5,300 consultants working across North America, Europe, and Asia - but did you know that each and every work day, over 200 other functional and technical SAP consultants help over 30 of our Fortune 500 SAP clients? As a COMSYS SAP consultant, you help build a diverse, skilled and experienced consultant base that help enable our clients to configure and manage SAP to meet their business requirements. Your expertise helps build a broad base of SAP skill sets, including overall SAP Project Management, FI/CO, MM, PP, SD, HCM, BW/BI, APO/SCM, SRM, CRM, EHS, GTS – among others! We also have multiple technical skill sets, including ABAP, Basis, Java and Portal, XI, and GRC. You are also part of a growing SAP practice. The COMSYS SAP practice has been able to nearly double revenues year over year.  And, to facilitate our continued success in 2008, the COMSYS SAP practice has targeted and made significant investments in several SAP verticals, and will be specifically marketing these capabilities over the coming year. These include: Administration and Infrastructure (Solution Manager, Archival, Technical Upgrades) Governance, Risk, and Compliance Business Intelligence Global Delivery (Offsite Implementation, Follow-the-sun Production Support, Development) Additionally, COMSYS continues to offer staff augmentation and strategic staffing capabilities to our clients. Our specialized SAP Recruiting Practice ensures that each client is rapidly presented with a multitude of professional and technically qualified candidates. Our clients (and you!) can take advantage of over 200 recruiters across the country, with the ability and proven capability to rapidly fill the SAP skills our clients require to address their business needs. In 2008, we also took the COMSYS SAP Services Partner relationship to the next level, and have made significant inroads introducing COMSYS Account Managers and Managed Services Directors to SAP Account Managers. COMSYS has also made introductions with the SAP Professional Services Organization. Both COMSYS and SAP will be looking to leverage our respective organizations for continued success! COMSYS has an SAP Demonstration Environment at our Kalamazoo facility which helps support the SAP practice by providing a platform for SAP solution demonstrations and SAP solution scenario testing. The environment has installations of ECC, Solution Manager, and GRC (Governance, Risk, & Compliance). The ECC environment includes a comprehensive suite of functionally focused clients including FICO, SD, MM, and PP among others.  Our current focus is with our Solution Manager Demonstration environment and the solution scenarios provided by SAP Solution Manager. SAP Solution Manager provides customers with best practices related to: Global Strategy and Service Level Management Business Process Management Management of SAP Technology Software Change Management Support Desk Management The best practices are accomplished through Solution Manager work centers. The work centers that we are configuring and testing in our Solution Manager environment are: System Administration System Monitoring Incident Management Job Scheduling Management Business Process and Interface Monitoring Service Delivery Change Management Solution Landscape and Operations Setup Implementation & Upgrades With our demonstration environment, the COMSYS SAP practice is able to build installations and solution scenarios that allow our SMEs to use systems and solutions that are current with SAP’s marketing initiatives. This is important because not only does SAP functionality change from version to version for SAP products but also from patch level to patch level. By identifying and working with these changes, especially on the technical side, we are better able to provide solutions to our SAP customers. The demonstration environment also provides a platform for showing customers how COMSYS can implement SAP solutions that meet their requirements. This could include demonstrations of configured scenarios in our demo environment or adding screenshots of our environment to presentations or marketing material. Since this is a demonstration environment and it’s landscape needs to meet the requirements of our COMSYS SAP practice it will be constantly evolving and changing. There are already plans to add additional SAP products and functionality to the demonstration environment.  Please stay tuned! In February, Sun officially completed its acquisition of MySQL and said the purchase would open new opportunities for solution providers to spread the SUN message. This acquisition was called “…the most important acquisition in Sun history, and the most important acquisition in the modern software industry," by Jonathan Schwartz (SUN CEO). But how does this affect SAP Customers who use MaxDB? Let’s look at some facts: MySQL controls about 50% of the open source database market Customers include FaceBook, YouTube, eVite, and Nokia. Sun estimates that there are 11million MySQL users worldwide - with most of MySQL revenue coming from OEMs who embed the MySQL database into hardware/software. In terms of MaxDB, a MySQL variant, SAP says it has roughly 250 customers who run SAP on MaxDB. This isn’t a big percentage given SAP has 46,000 customers worldwide. In an interesting story recently, SAP showcased a prototype bundle of their All-in-One ERP stack on SUSE Enterprise Server 10 tuned for Intel’s Quad Core with a MaxDB backend. This bundle will allow customers to receive both ERP and DB support from one vendor. No pricing has been released, but we all know that MaxDB is the lowest cost option when purchasing your database from SAP directly; roughly half the cost of MS SQL or Oracle. What does this acquisition mean? We can only hope that MySQL, with the *financial* support of SUN, will begin to make inroads to the enterprise market. The prototype bundle mentioned above is targeted at midmarket manufacturing and distribution companies, which happens to be one of the largest market segments out there. Only the future will tell. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as more information comes our way.