SOA figures prominently in SAP transformation
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
SAP used its Sapphire 2005 user conference, held in Boston in May, to deliver a status check to 8,500 attendees regarding execution of the enterprise vendor's version of a plug-and-play service-oriented architecture (SOA). Partners clamoring aboard were in great evidence, including Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard.
Although details surrounding pricing, support, and delivery haven't been fully addressed, Michele Cantara, a VP with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, asserts, "They're reinventing themselves and I couldn't have predicted how swiftly they're moving" in terms of filling tactical gaps in the vendor's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), built on the NetWeaver platform.
"SAP knows that to win, it has to create a strong ecosystem, and they can't do it alone," Cantara adds. "They are leveraging strengths in enterprise business applications to create an ecosystem and exert influence over it."
ESA, announced in 2003, was extended this year under the banner Business Process Platform, or BPP. Termed by SAP CEO Henning Kagerman as "the next big thing," ESA is a flexible environment for creating composite applications—or xApps—to support creative business processes.
Attendee consensus was favorable, though tempered.
"The dream is the right dream, but it has to become reality. It will take several years of hard work," says Steve Poquette, director of application services for Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing, who cites NetWeaver as an example of an SAP product that was announced two years ago, but is just now gaining traction.
Jim Sweetman of Dow Chemical, Midland, Mich., agrees. "There is a tendency in IT to overpromise," maintains Sweetman. "SAP's BPP concept is the logical step in taking business processes to the next level. The emphasis is more on the connecting lines than the functional boxes."
Some analysts believe ESA will reduce integration costs, which will accelerate building out of the SAP ecosystem. According to Bill Swanton, a VP with Boston-based AMR Research, "It will make it much easer for small IT vendors to add composite applications. It's evident in the number of partners participating at Sapphire."
One such partner is real-time performance management vendor OSIsoft. According to Mark Brown, general manager of the SAP relationship, the power of ESA is in its amplification of the collective value proposition. "We're all competing for depleted IT budgets, but SAP and its partners can offer a vendor-managed solution that achieves more of the customer's core objectives."
Plant automation vendor and SAP partner Wonderware concurs. "It increases the number of customers who can afford this," says Claus Madsen Abildgren, a Wonderware marketing manager. "They all have the need, but it's been too complex and too expensive."
On the Microsoft front, the flexibility and power of the joint initiative to tightly link SAP applications with Microsoft Office, code-named Mendicino and announced in April at Sapphire Europe in Copenhagen, was demonstrated.
So with this year's user event behind it, how does SAP stack up in its ongoing footrace with Oracle? According to Gartner's Cantara, it remains to be seen.
"SAP's ESA could shift the landscape against Oracle," she says. "SAP is out in front in building an ecosystem, while Oracle has taken more of an acquisition strategy. But it's still early in declaring a winner. [ESA] needs more momentum and buy-in. It has to go beyond SAP. It has to be the way people develop and integrate most applications apart from SAP."
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