Update on the petition to SAP regarding #PowerBuilder

The petition for SAP to do something positive with regard to PowerBuilder is doing well.   We've just passed 1,500 signatures, which was the latest goal.  I've revised the goal to 2,000 signatures and changed the goal deadline to October 21st.  That's the first day of SAP TechEd in Las Vegas.  It is our intent to meet with SAP management at that event and provide them with the signed petition as well as additional information we believe may be able to convince SAP to take more interest in the product.

If you are a PowerBuilder developer and you haven't signed the petition yet, please do so and pass the information along to other PowerBuilder developers you may know that may not know about it.  You do not need a Facebook account to sign the petition.  Instead, you can create a causes.com account directly at:   https://www.causes.com/signup



You can help with the "additional information" part.  What we're looking for is the following information:

HANA

• Are you familiar with SAP's HANA database?


• If so, what additional PowerBuilder or HANA features would be required to facilitate migrating your current applications to it?


• If so, what else (other than new features in PowerBuilder and/or HANA) would facilitate your migrating your current applications to it?


• If not, how can SAP best demonstrate the value of the product?

Other SAP Products

• What other SAP (and non Sybase) products is your company already using?

PowerBuilder

• What are the most important feature/improvement that SAP should focus on with regard to PowerBuilder?

You might also be interested in the following statistics concerning the responses so far to the petition.  The first is a breakdown of the response by country.  The data are a bit stale, as it was done a few days ago before we broke the 1,500 signature goal.

The European countries are hard to distinguish when the results are shown on a global basis, so I've got another image that shows them specifically:

In fact, the top 10 countries as far as total responses as of a few days ago was:

• 312 United States


• 102 Germany


• 80 India


• 65 Canada


• 61 Mexico


• 56 United Kingdom


• 55 China


• 43 Columbia


• 39 Belgium


• 34 Australia, Ecuador, and Switzerland

Twelve countries are listed because of the 3 way tie for 10th place.

I also did a breakdown for the continental United States on a state by state basis.  The data here is a bit more recent:

One final note.  I've tried to outline the reasons for the petition earlier.  That included my references to what were supposed to be PBDJ editorials that would have appeared in April and June.  However, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was the failure of SAP to include PowerBuilder at this year's TechEd.  In 2011, Sybase held a separate TechWave event co-located with SAP TechEd in Las Vegas.  In 2012, the other Sybase products were represented in SAP TechEd, and Sybase held a separate co-located PowerBuilder Developer's Conference.  One of the things covered at that conference was a new release of PowerBuilder that was in the works: version 15.  In 2013 however, SAP has neither included PowerBuilder in TechEd itself, or taken any action towards holding a separate event.   Given that a new major release was supposed to be nearing completion at this time, it is inconceivable that SAP would not either include PowerBuilder in SAP TechEd or have another co-located event to support it.