Of all the news that came out of the 12th annual SAP^® TechEd conference held last week in Las Vegas, nothing resonated as loudly and as clearly as the heightened importance and growing need for SAP business process experts (BPX).

As always, there was considerable buzz at TechEd surrounding the usual customer win and new product announcements (a là Kraft and BusinessObjects^® Metadata Management XI 3.0, respectively), but the greater portion of energy and excitement at TechEd 2008 emanated from developments and concerns relating to the SAP BPX community.

SAP launched the SAP BPX community in 2006 as an offshoot of its well-established software development network (SDN). Today, the SAP BPX community is more than 425,000 members strong. Equally impressive is the collective creativity and productivity of the SAP BPX community, which recently culminated in what I believe is a first-of-its-kind community-authored book focused on a specific enterprise technology topic: Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert.

The fact that this book was created utilizing a public wiki writing platform is a testament to SAP’s leadership when it comes to pioneering new technologies. It also says quite a bit about the intellectual capital collected in the SAP BPX community.

SAP also announced at TechEd a new BPX certification program. As described by SAP, the program provides a holistic business process management methodology that covers all aspects of business process innovation -- design, implementation, revisions, monitoring and optimization.

The SAP BPX certification program also provides a disciplined approach and direction for business process execution that more fully prepares business process experts to help their companies (or customers) adapt more quickly and effectively to changing business needs.

It should come as no surprise that SAP is making bold moves and hammering hard on the need for qualified, well-trained business process experts. The present and future demand for BPXs far outstrips the current supply despite the impressive growth and collaborative effort of the SAP BPX community.

SAP has gone on record to say that it anticipates a global shortage of 30,000 - 50,000 skilled SAP professionals in the coming years. AMR analyst Bruce Richardson puts this number in the neighborhood of 70,000.

Ironically, this talent crunch –that is arguably the greatest challenge SAP and SAP customers face today and for the near future – is a direct result of the speed and efficiency with which SAP has succeeded in ushering in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) era.

SAP has long since completed the transitioning of its Business Suite applications to the SOA-enabled NetWeaver business process platform, and for SAP customers still running R/3, upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 is no longer a question of ‘if’ but rather a matter of ‘when.’ And with the window on extended maintenance for R/3 all but closed, the decision as to ‘when’ must clearly be made sooner rather than later.

To be sure, the paradigm shift brought about by NetWeaver and SOA can no longer be held at bay as an airy futuristic theory. It is very real and very much upon us right now. Unlike many of its competitors, SAP has truly delivered on the SOA promise, providing a wealth of model-driven tools, composite applications and enhancement packages all designed to help its customers capitalize on the many benefits of SOA -- with fast and efficient business process change and innovation topping the list.

Today’s SAP solutions and the business process innovations they enable are far removed or abstracted from the code-mired, application-centric solutions of decades past. Accordingly, the talent and training BPXs bring to the table is markedly different than that of their predecessor SAP professionals.

Deep business insight and advanced understanding of global business process design come together in the BPX who is increasingly tasked with creatively and strategically bundling enterprise services into composite applications that can be snapped together to adapt an existing or create a new business process. For a company to get the most from its SAP investments, this BPX must also possess in-depth working knowledge of all SAP modules and the full NetWeaver stack.

A focused, collaborative and sustained effort from SAP, the SAP partner ecosystem and SAP customers is required to hire, train and groom enough BPXs to satisfy the strong and growing demand for this new breed of enterprise technology professional.

In lieu of today’s clear and promising career opportunities for BPXs, and adding to this the fact that skilled SAP professionals typically command the highest pay in the enterprise technology world, the SAP BPX ranks are sure to grow quickly over the next several years.