point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
February - 2006 - issue > Jobs in U.S.
Greener Pastures for Indian SAP Professionals
Sanjeev Jain
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Early last year when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, businesses across the world were left with just two major Enterprise Resource Planning software makers Oracle and SAP. Since then, Oracle has grown by acquiring Siebel Software and a controlling stake in i-Flex.

Both Oracle and SAP have battled each other to capture the world's business markets and SAP has made great strides towards making its presence felt in the U.S.

Today, the Waldorff, Germany based SAP is betting strategic value outside its traditional markets in Europe and most of Asia i.e. U.S. A focus on increasing market share has yielded results. In the U.S. - the world’s biggest software market where SAP generates nearly a third of its revenues - SAP’s market share increased to 41 percent from 38 percent a quarter earlier and globally it rose to 58 percent from 55 percent.

Increasing market share has led to demand for SAP consultants in the U.S., which the country cannot fulfill. Indian SAP professionals looking for greener pastures abroad can tap the U.S. market. "The demand for SAP Consultants is good now in India and U.S. across all verticals," says Shaikh Arafath, a SAP consultant based in Bangalore.

However jobs are open for those with a good degree of exposure to SAP. One needs to have enough experience when it comes to functional exposure and experience. "The requirements for functional consultants is that they should have minimum 5 years of domain experience in relevant fields," says Arafath. However Kishore Dadlani, a Canada based SAP consultant says, "Functional experience over 10 years and exposure to 5 years is good for positions in SAP."

Besides experience, to gain a SAP consultants job in the U.S. one needs good knowledge of business processes and a good amount of SAP training. Apart from that good communication skills, project management skills and capacity to solve problems will be handy. One can learn these three aspects by job experience in general and SAP project experience in particular. Let alone experience, in-depth knowledge of SAP R/3 and other SAP products such as BW, APO, CRM are very exciting both in terms of the IT and the business property.

Today the business side of SAP looks very exciting. There is lot of money to be made, as most companies are hiring consultants. With earlier SAP module maturing and most jobs migrating to support from implementation, companies do not want to spend on buying new software. For most of them hiring a consultant is a cheaper deal.

If one is looking at contract jobs in the U.S. then one can expect to get, with 2 years of experience, $60-80 per hour. Professionals with experience between 3-4 years can expect $100-120 per hour and those with an experience of 5 years or more can get anywhere between $120,000-$150,000 per annum depending on the city they live in.
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook