SAP Labs

About the company

SAP is the third largest software company in the world and a world leading company in enterprise software. SAP invented the ERP program (Enterprise Resource Planning) – as system planed to take care of all business and organizational resources: Human resources, Finance, Supply, Customer Relationships (CRM), Sales and distribution, and much more.

At 2001 SAP acquired the Israeli company TopTier (founded by Shai Agasi) for 400 million dollars. A short time before the acquisition I started working at TopTier and later on at SAP Labs as a C++ developer. TopTier’s product was an Enterprise Portal that became SAP Portal 5.0. The idea of the product is an intranet web application that allows employees to access any enterprise system in the organization through one unified location on the net, saving the effort of maintaining lots of clients for the different systems. During the years the lab grew from 120 employees to over 800 workers and the Portal was integrated into a much wider J2EE platform called SAP NetWeaver. This platform includes several modules that together provide a powerful integration environment:

SAP J2EE Engine – A powerful Enterprise J2EE Server

SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) – The SAP Portal

SAP BW/BI – A Business Warehouse system

Visual Composer – a modeling and composition tool

SAP NetWeaver Studio – The SAP Java IDE (based on Eclipse)

SAP XI – Exchange Infrastructure, an EAI system

Interesting projects I developed during the job

In the first two years I focused on the first version of the Portal called EP 5.0. This version was based mainly on the TopTier Portal and written in Microsoft technologies: VC++, COM/ATL, IIS, ASP and SQL Server. Our first task was to turn the Portal to a more generic platform. We added multi language support (that forced us to rewrite some parts of the code), and converted the Database layer to support Oracle instead of just SQL Server.

The Next tow years I joined the developing team working on the new SAP Portal (version 6). This product is the same portal used today in NetWeaver and is based purely on Java/J2EE. SAP did a quick move and converted the programmers from C++ MS oriented to true Java developers. A combination of recruiting new employees, natural turnovers, and professional courses turned the entire group to a Java development lab. The team I worked for was focused mainly on developing external connectors to a wide list of third party applications: Lotus Notes, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and other systems using mostly the JCA standard.

Israel Oil Refineries

About the company

ORL is Israel’s largest oil refinery and is traded on the Israeli stock exchange for over a billion dollars. The company provides most of the oil and energy products in the Israeli market.

Interesting projects and development during the job

ORL holds an SAP ERP system and external systems based on different technologies: ASP, VB, J2EE, and more. As a consultant I planned and developed interfaces to integrate the different systems to a unified environment based on Web Services. The project included writing code in different environments: Oracle JDeveloper (on an IAS server), SAP NetWeaver, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Paz and Paz Refineries

About the company

At 2006 Paz, one of Israel’s leading energy companies acquired one of the 2 refiner centers originally owned by ROL. The acquisition for over 1 billion dollars caused a major challenge for both IT departments: ORL and Paz. On the one hand ORL needed to break up the enterprise IT systems that served both centers. And on the other side, Paz needed to integrate the IT systems with their main systems and make everything synchronized and working.

Interesting projects and development during the job

As a consultant I assisted both companies in converting their Java/J2EE applications, mostly based on Oracle JDeveloper/IAS and SAP NetWeaver and integrating them to other IT systems already in use. I also helped compile a road map and specs for some of the applications since Paz decided to rewrite some of the systems so they will suite better their needs.

Advantech & SAP Turkey

About the company

Advantech is an Israeli leading IT company and an SAP partner. The company includes 4 divisions: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Java.

About the project

I worked as an instructor, teaching official SAP courses in SAP Istanbul, Turkey. The curses were on SAP J2EE Administration, JDI, and other NetWeaver topics.

GigaSpaces

About the company

GigaSpaces is a startup company developing distributed caching solutions for Java and J2EE applications. The GigaSapces grid technology provides the ability to store Java objects on different servers in the grid and helps optimize large IT systems in different enterprises.

About the project

During my work as a freelancer at GigaSpaces I developed a component for transferring and serializing objects between Java and .NET systems with special care for high performance and multi threading environment.

InterBit and SUN Microsystems

About the company

InterBit is the official SUN authorized training center in Israel. InterBit gives courses in all Java areas including: J2EE, Hibernate, Spring, Advanced Java, Extreme Java, Design Patterns and also Solaris, Linux, PHP and other open source technologies.

About the job

As an InterBit freelancer instructor I taught different Java courses some of them at hi-tech companies such as: Comverse, Amdocs and others. Among the courses and topics were: Basic Java, Advanced Java, Extreme Java, Design Patterns, JDBC, RMI, JNI, JMX, Multi Threading, Memory Management & Performance, Developing Eclipse plugins (RCP), and more.

Danshir Systems

About the company

Danshir is an Israeli software and IT company, and an SAP partner. Danshir specializes in ERP projects mostly with SAP systems.

About the position

During 2007-2008 I founded and managed the Java & NetWeaver group and Danshir. The position included recruiting and training new personal, managing projects, recruiting new customers, and providing consulting services for enterprises.

Interesting projects

SAP Enterprise Portal at Haifa University

Haifa University is an Israeli academic institution. The university employs thousands of temporary workers, most of them as research assistance. Our project was developing a Portal based wokflow system, allowing the workers to report time sheets and managing the process of approvals by the different managers. The system included reports, alerts, and other controlling processes. The implementation was done with SAP NetWeaver Java WebDynpro technology, using the SAP R3 (ECC) and Oracle database as the data sources.

SAP Portal and Java development at Netafim

Netafim is a world leading company for agriculture and water systems. The company has centers in 18 countries around the world.

I developed for Netafim Java WebDynpro applications and consulted the IT department regarding their strategy and development plans on the SAP Portal and NetWeaver J2EE systems.

Developing an Enterprise Management System at CNW

CNW is an international courier company. The company focuses on special deliveries that need to ship fast like: micro chips, medical equipment, etc.

CNW has an inside J2EE management system managing all core business processes: shipments, orders, deliveries, flights, pickups, and more.

About the position

My team at Danshir took over the development and maintenance of CNW’s system while I managed the team and designed the architecture. The development was based on open source products: JBoss application server, JSF with JSP and Servlets for the UI layer, EJB for persistence and MySQL as the Database.

Informatica

About the company

informatica is a world leading vendor in the field of ETL and EAI tools. The Informatica Israeli R&D center is based on the startup company ItemField that was acquired by Informatica for 55 million dollars. The Israeli center is responsible for developing a unique engine for processing unstructured data in various formats: binary, XML, word, PDF, etc. The engine is capable of parsing data form different sources and converting it into structured data that can be used in standard databases like RDBMS, ERP, etc.

About the job

As a principal software engineer and a technical leader I took part in designing and developing the Informatica Data Exchange product (DX). the DX is a system for users to manage their data flow process according to a rule based engine. The product is based on Java and takes advantage of different technologies such as: SPRING, Hibernate, JMS, Maven, and much more.