Not that it’s any surprise, of course.  I’m sure SAP could see it coming.  It’s just that SAP would love to close the books on the roughly five-year-old court case.

“We are disappointed that Oracle has passed up yet another opportunity to resolve this case,” SAP spokesman James Dever said, putting it mildly.

During the trial, Oracle accused SAP and its long-defunct subsidiary TomorrowNow of intellectual property theft on a massive scale, and asked for $1.7 billion in damages. Oracle said it arrived at the figure by calculating the actual cost of the licenses that TomorrowNow would have had to purchase to legally acquire the software it downloaded.

The jury largely agreed, awarding Oracle $1.3 billion in damages. The judge subsequently reduced the damages to $272 million. Instead of taking the deal, Oracle is opting for a do-over, hoping for a better outcome this time.

But as Digital Trends’ Geoff Duncan points out, SAP’s guilt wasn’t in question, and still isn’t:

Oracle isn’t risking that SAP will be found innocent of infringement in a second trial-SAP basically threw itself on the mercy of the court last time around-but it hopes for an interpretation of the law that would see it awarded the full $1.3 billion. And maybe then some, with interest.

What might this mean in terms of the continued animosity between Oracle and SAP?  All Things Digital’s Arik Hesseldahl wonders:

The case has caused a lot of personal enmity between Oracle and SAP, as well as with Hewlett-Packard, especially during the 11-month period when former SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker was CEO of HP. Apotheker’s first days on the job at HP were marred by his apparent absence from HP headquarters, in what couldn’t help but look like an attempt to avoid being served with a subpoena. Maybe Oracle will try again.

Although SAP would prefer not to see Oracle’s lawyers in court anytime soon, it can at least take solace in that it’s not alone.  As Fox Business points out, Oracle is still trying to stick it to Google.

On Monday, SAP announced the first round of the “incremental updates” it’s going to make available to SAP customers.

The changes include, according to SAP:

• Improved analysis of suppliers’ performance within the SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SAP SNC) application
• A new marketing user interface (UI) that allows users to interactively compile target groups for marketing campaigns from multiple high-volume data sources
• A new UI in the SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM) application that includes enhanced functionality for worker safety and risk management
• Simplified receipt submission processes within SAP Travel Management
• Better batch handling, cost planning, and label printing for manufacturers
• Embedding of consume-to-cash processes within the CRM application

SAP did not say when the changes will be made available to customers, only that they’re currently in ramp up. That said, though this initial list doesn’t yet include enhancements involving some of their newer technologies around mobility or in-memory computing that SAP said would make its way into the rotation, it’s a pretty solid start. Will the quarterly enhancements pay off as a way to increase satisfaction among its customer base? We’ll see.

Roughly 42% of respondents to a recent SearchSAP.com survey are using SolMan as opposed to third-party tools, nearly twice as many as in last year’s survey.

Tony De Thomasis, the SAP NetWeaver practice lead at Acclimation, an Australian IT consulting firm, whom I recently spoke with about the Service Desk application within Solution Manager, said he’s also seeing growing adoption of Solution Manager as companies try to rein in the total cost of their SAP environments.

“Everyone’s trying to reduce the amount of money that’s being spent on third party solutions. They’re looking to consolidate on to the one infrastructure management platform,” De Thomasis said.

The newly released Solution Manager 7.1 — which De Thomasis contends is a vast improvement over previous versions — is another driver behind the change, he added.

“There’s also been a lot of development in the new Solution Manager 7.1, from an enhanced tools perspective, a nicer user interface, and there are a number of new benefits around testing, monitoring alerting perspective, and for change management,” De Thomasis said.

But despite the growing number of bells and whistles available in Solution Manager, half of all respondents indicated they’re using Solution Manager only for internal support and communicating with SAP global support. Usage falls significantly when it comes to change management when implementing new functionality (38%), upgrading to ECC 6.0 (35%), adopting new enhancement packages (33%), lifecycle management (33%), application performance management (32%).

Customers not fully utilizing Solution Manager are nothing new, of course. Back in May at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla., I ran into Tim Smoker, a Basis administrator for the High Cos., a construction company out of Lancaster, Pa. Even though SAP had just announced that Solution Manager 7.1 was newly generally available, Smoker said he was at the conference to learn how to get more out their existing deployment.

Smoker guessed his company is only using roughly half of Solution Manager’s functionality, mostly for basic monitoring and issue tracking. Smoker told me he wanted to use Solution manager to manage overall system performance.

So, why aren’t more customers using Solution Manager for a broader range of purposes?

De Thomasis thinks that it’s mostly an education issue. “There’s a lack of knowledge.  People just aren’t up to speed yet on 7.1 and what it offers,” he said.

Solution Manager’s relatively unsexy nature tends to get less attention within company walls compared with other technologies., he added.

Yet, compared with some of SAP’s other technologies like HANA and Gateway, which forces customers to learn things like the JQuery JavaScript language, the impression that Solution Manager is difficult to use is a tad unfair.

“These things are hard,” De Thomasis said.  “In comparison, Solution Manager is a walk in the park. A lot of this stuff is based in BW and CRM offerings, commonly known disciplines and initiatives that have been around for years. For someone to say it’s hard, I mean, come on.”

“The workforce performance tools market has become increasingly strategic and critical to our customers’ success, and datango is a proven leader in this space,” Markus Schwarz, senior vice president and global head of SAP Education, said in a statement.

SAP expects to close the sale of the emerging company in the first half of 2012. Founded in 1999, datango received the Deloitte “Fast 50″ award last year and was recognized as the 26^th fastest growing technology company in Germany.

In an FAQ posted on the datango site, the company says that “certain” employees are expected to join SAP, while datango will retain employees related to its KPS business as well as those needed to assist existing datango customers.

In his blog today, Josh Greenbaum advised that “SAP is doing something significant in the acquisition of Datango,” because datango provides an approach to enterprise training that includes simulations that companies can use for training beyond just the initial software implementation.

Read the press release.

I met up with him later in the afternoon to follow up on this (and to discuss the state of the Red Sox, but that’s another story). What makes the energy side the biggest area for sustainability right now?

As you can probably tell if you heat your home with oil or drive a car, energy is rising in term of cost - there is quite a bit of volatility in pricing. In fact, Bolick estimates that the pricing volatility has increased 50% from just ten years ago.  Plus, governments are starting to look at legislation to force companies to comply with energy-efficient processes. For example, next year Australia will levy a carbon tax on its 500 largest companies in an effort to get them to limit emissions.

As a result, companies are trying to manage their energy costs while accounting for the volatility. Now Excel spreadsheets might be good for managing your fantasy football league, but not so good at monitoring energy use and connecting this use to business processes. But how do companies use SAP sustainability applications to keep energy costs in check?

Bolick gave the example of Valero, an oil and gas company with 16 refineries. The SAP sustainability application was able to bring real-time energy manufacturing intelligence to devices on the shop floor. Executives can look at dashboards to see energy consumption and shop-floor workers can look at the real-time data and check if they are meeting their energy goals. Bolick commented that in the first year of using SAP sustainability technology, it was able to “save $120 million in the first year and expects to save up to $200 million going forward.”

In another example, Bolick told how Lockheed Martin uses SAP Carbon Impact not in a day-to-day approach, but to benchmark how energy efficient their buildings are and ensure compliance with Energy Star requirements.

In the end, Bolick explained that SAP is “a core believer in applying sustainability to mitigate economic, societal and environmental risk while increases profitability. For us, what is most important for business is that they’re putting effort into these strategies and initiatives” to improve business processes.

StreamWork, SAP’s collaborative decision making (CDM) platform, is just that - a way to help teams of users drive projects forward through document sharing, instant messaging, and by using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses within the application to reach decisions collectively. Because it’s integrated with BusinessObjects (BOBJ), users can upload and share copies of spreadsheets, Crystal Reports and Crystal Dashboards to help inform decisions.

SAP’s is bringing BI reporting capabilities into the collaborative fold as part of the decision making process. Pureplay BI vendors, meanwhile, are approaching the issue from the opposite direction, adding  collaborative tools and social components to their platforms.

“We’re starting to see that as an area of feature enhancements within BI platforms,” said Rita Sallam, a Gartner analyst who recently published a report on the CDM market.

For example, BI vendor Qlikview now allows some users to send instant messages and collaborate within certain individual reports. Meanwhile, Panorama, offers that same functionality but also gives users the ability to suggest collaboration participants based on their profiles and the content of the report.

Are the two sides, with two different approaches, both heading toward much of the same functionality?

“I think they probably are,” Sallam says.

But did SAP take the wrong approach?  Should they have added a CDM component to BOBJ given that BI is a primary focus for the company and its users?  Sallam says no.  Sallam added that SAP’s strategy will take a big step forward with the next version of StreamWork, which will allow users to embed live BOBJ reports - not merely static PDFs, for example.

“What they’ve done is part of a broader strategy with their apps as well,” Sallam said.  ”StreamWork also integrates with CRM, and they’re [also] doing that to compete with companies like Salesforce.com.“

“It’s very easy to create crappy training,” he said.

Michael’s company recently won an e-learning award for his company’s SAP courses built on interactive simulations of SAP modules. It’s not a live environment, but it feels like it, he said. The courses include voice over instructions, tests, and online web sessions where users can ask questions of an instructor.

He may not be objective, but he may have a point about the level of quality of some education providers. SAP isn’t easy to learn by any stretch of the imagination, but is e-learning a viable option, especially as many companies are looking to avoid spending money on pricey classroom instruction?

A lot of companies think so, Michael said, and what they provide is a far cry from SAP’s e-learning courses.

“SAP has e-learning courses that they offer, but they’re very different from what we do.  They’re death by PowerPoint,” Michael said.

Others are looking to get in the e-learning game.

Next year Klee Associates, a company that runs ERPtips and has traditionally focused on classroom training, is rolling out an e-learning product of its own that allows users to work through training modules integrated with their live ERP system, according to David Haynes, the company’s ERP solutions manager.

“We just want people to do the exercises in a live environment, actually make mistakes and feel the consequences for that,” Haynes said. “Simulated environments aren’t actual systems, they’re screen captures of systems.”

The idea is that companies will still want to do classroom training up front, but deploy the company’s e-learning program for keeping employees up to speed, as well as on-boarding new employees.

Others, like independent SAP analyst Jon Reed who covers training issues on his site jonerp.com, are still sold on the advantages of classroom training, especially when the instructor also works as a consultant and can speak from real-world experience.

“I remain biased toward classroom instruction, if the instructor is awesome,” Reed said.

As a part of its efforts to demonstrate to developers that the technology is all that it’s cracked up to be, SAP has set up a virtual sandbox environment to let developers bang on HANA’s in-memory functionality as much as they want - and to show them they have their IT interests at heart.

“The goal of the sandbox is really to show that as for SAP, we care about developers and we rely on them to be successful,” said Anne Hardy, vice president for platform evangelism and developer adoption at SAP. “We want to make sure that we excite them. We also want them to believe that they can do business with SAP.”

The move wasn’t made in a vacuum, of course.  Rather, the move is a broader effort to speed adoption of HANA. Last week, SAP announced it is making HANA available in a simplified Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS) format to make it easier for businesses to adopt the in-memory technology. Developers can upload their own data for testing, or use generic data SAP includes in the system.

ASUG News’ Courtney Bjorlin outlines some of the other details on how this all works:

To host the sandbox, SAP has rented space in a public data center: Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS) in Santa Clara, Calif. Boxes are shared by multiple users, with varying levels of isolation done in some cases. Developers access them through a virtual image that contains all of the tools they need to play around on HANA. This is provided by CloudShare, a vendor that specializes in providing virtual development and test environments. [Developers] log into that image and can develop based on guided exercises, Hardy explains, as well as come up with their own development ideas.

So how’s it going so far? Hardy said that SAP sent out a little more than 200 invitations to developers and about half have signed up so far.  Feedback, which she says has been mostly positive, is going to be used to firm things up before the sandbox goes public next year.

Some of the complaints they’re taking into account, Hardy said, have centered around developers wanting more client tools like Advanced Analysis for Office, Dashboard Designer, Webi, and Data Services. She said people are looking to go beyond what’s currently offered by SAP, which includes HANA Studio and BusinessObjects Explorer.

Others have complained about access limitations. Right now developers are only able to access the sandbox for 30 days or 120 hours of usage. Some have declined SAP’s offer to participate for that reason, Hardy said.

The biggest complaint, however, is that data can be hard to upload.  Due to security reasons, developers have to upload the data to the client server image, which is prone to slow speeds and timing-out. From there, developers have to upload the data onto the server.

The exercise has given developers a chance to test the limits of the system, Hardy said, noting that at least one person loaded data beyond what’s been documented in an effort to get the system to crash.

Hardy told me that SAP considers the sandbox to be another way smaller, more resource-strapped businesses can play with the technology at a fraction of the cost and time involved in setting up their own environment.

“With some of the new technologies, we are moving away from only taking care of the bigger customers and partners, but also the smaller shops,” Hardy said.

Like the existing RDS applications, which are designed to be part of larger enterprise applications that address a certain function or specific need, the RDS packages for HANA are centered around more straightforward use cases. So far, that includes deploying the SAP CO-PA Accelerator software, or using HANA for faster BusinessObjects reporting, according to Phillips Hofmann, head of SAP RDS communications.

SAP is also launching an RDS package for the Sybase mobile sales application for SAP CRM.

Like with other RDS applications, the new packages are designed to take some of the guesswork out of deployment, and allow customers to get things up and running in eight weeks. Hofmann declined to say how many customers had purchased the packages, or what the cost was. However, the cost of the HANA appliance is not included in the RDS price.

“The goal of it is to make it so that you have the transparency of what the pricing is, the timeline, everything.  It’s like a Happy Meal, where you know what you’re getting,” Hofmann said.

“This is the one [enhancement] we’re going to get the most out of,” said Sackstein, the president of Virtual Graffiti, a California-based provider of software applications and consulting services that specializes in network security.

Although Virtual Graffiti went live on BusinessOne a couple of years ago, it had been holding onto Microsoft Dynamics CRM, waiting for SAP to offer the same campaign management functionality. Just back from a BusinessOne conference where he was able to learn more about the entire slate of enhancements, Sackstein figures SAP has finally gotten around to delivering what he needs, especially since the company’s business model is heavily reliant on marketing campaigns.

Sackstein said that with minor modifications, the SAP CRM module is able to track any invoice tied to any campaign - anything from printing costs for a mailer, to room rentals for sales presentation breakfast meetings.  Then there’s the roughly $1 million the company spends on Google ads a year.  When a sales lead comes in, it’s tied to one of those campaigns, so that the company can see how much it’s spent on those campaigns, versus how much it’s getting in return.

“It kind of completes the circle,” Sackstein said.

While Microsoft was able to track spending on marketing campaigns, Sackstein’s company couldn’t integrate it into their accounting operations, meaning that costs were tracked separately, Sackstein said.  Once everything is configured with the new system and the modifications are made, Sackstein said, all that information will then live in the company’s ERP.