Do not pick a SAP-Primavera integration vendor without reading the below. - Let me start out with a confession: I am biased towards certain vendors. This is not due to short-term self-interest, but because I have been designing and implementing such solutions for years and have analyzed the market carefully. In my professional opinion there are not many reasons to look beyond Pipeline Software, Primavera, or SOALogix.

Professionally and personally I respect all three of these vendors and have great personal relationships with key people in these organizations. As a matter of disclosure, I also have been instrumental in designing the predecessor of the current Pipeline solution, and am still working with Pipeline which has modelled some of its packaged solutions on my "best practices" models.

But my personal interest goes beyond a specific vendor. The overall value of the implemented solution is only to a small degree determined by technology and application aspects. Much more important is the overall system and process design and how the technology solution vendors are able to reflect the complete set of overarching requirements.

This document looks at the offerings of Pipeline Software, Primavera, SOALogix, Impress, TCR, Prometheus Group, and also reviews the option of building an interface inhouse.

Let's get down to it: My Recommendations

In short my recommendations are:

• Pipeline Software if you are looking for a reasonably priced platform-independent, highly functional and high-performance solution that directly addresses the buisness problems at hand, with quick deployment times due to lots of out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Primavera if you want to minimize the number of vendors that you are dealing with, and if you are looking for a solution totally based on the SAP-XI platform, jointly supported with AP, and offering the name and commitment not just of Primavera but - at least to a degree - of SAP as well.
• SOALogix if you do approach your selection from a technology angle more so than a process one [which I usually do not recommend] and are looking for a low-end (compared to IBM, SAP or BEA) integration framework and EAI tool sitting on standard technologies like XML and Java that gives you scalability to rapidly design integration solutions with minimum overhead - but also not necessarily purely project management, SAP, or Primavera centric.

Let me explain some general points about this below. The various solutions on the market (including those I do not recommend) are evaluated in more detail in a solution paper that you can download under our solution menu.

General Points:

Over the years I have compared the capabilities of SAP-Primavera integration vendors from many angles. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of them were nearly irrelevant and that angles are less important than the overall solution design and the big picture. Having said that there are a number of points that clearly set the offerings apart from each other.

1. Technology needs to be Java and Web-standards based.

This is what should be considered a no-brainer as both SAP and Primavera, as the rest of the IT world, are moving into that direction. Strongly ABAP¹-based solutions should be discounted almost as a matter of principle. All my above recommendationos are strongly web-based. This point basically eliminates TRC of the Prometheus Group as a viable option for most situations, as valuable as their services or software solutions otherwise could be in other areas of managing SAP-centric projects.

2. Integration software vendors should not also be platform vendors.

Integrating SAP with Primavera is a niche market, although a big one. By its very nature a vendor needs to make a choice between focusing on being a technological integration company or a solution vendor selling applications to resolve specific business issues. This is why IBM or SAP or BEA are not in the SAP-Primavera integration market - they sell technology platforms. It is also the reason why Pipeline and Primavera excel most by being focused on integration processes instead of the need to support their own platforms (like Impress or also SOALogix).

3. Software vendors should be integratioon experts.

This may sound like self-evident, but too often internal IT departments or external service-focused organizations try to take on the development of solutions. Also, this is where Prometheus Group does not come out too well. They are SAP development experts and to some degree even process experts, but do not seem to have come out with a packaged product yet. The strongest scores here get vendors like Pipeline Software and SOALogix, with Pipeline having focused on SAP integration for many years while SOALogix coming from the Primavera and EAI direction. Impress can also be mentioned here, but their play has never been straightforward, with it somewhat wobbling between being an integration application and an EAI platform.

4. Software vendors should be project management process experts.

Processes are more important than technology. Technjologies need to be open, thin, allow tailoring of solutions, and so on. Understanding project management, however, and as it pertains specifically to SAP and Primavera is much more critical. Whenever a vendor focuses too much on technology as a sales argument a warning flag should go up. End-users need to be satisfied, data needs to be made available for effective decision-making, double-entries should be eliminated - this is what we try to achieve. The bits and bytes are secondary.

A vendor of integration software applications addressing a specific business problem should not have any technical challenge with any coherently expressed, consistent and logical business process. If they do then it is a sign of underlying design issues, technical and functional limitations, or inexperience.

Please contact us to request our Vendor Comparison Study. You can get more information abou tit on the "Our Solutions" section of this web page.

¹ ABAP - SAP's proprietary programming language "Allgemeiner Bericht-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor"