Services architecture, growing partnerships mark metamorphosis

At Sapphire '06, the annual SAP user conference, what the company's executives were most interested in talking about—by a long shot—wasn't ERP, but rather the enterprise services architecture (ESA), its service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"ESA is the core of our business. It solves events that extend from one end of the enterprise to the other," said Shai Agassi, president. "Three years ago, when NetWeaver was launched, 90 percent of influencers said we had no chance in middleware. Today, we have 10,000 big customers."

SAP committed to ESA because its customers' IT operations expenses were stifling innovation, explained CEO Henning Kagermann. "NetWeaver was the means to reduce costs, and it evolved into a composition platform. When the road map is complete, NetWeaver will be a business-process platform."

The focus on ESA at the event was so intense, in fact, that someone asked whether SAP would lose sight of ERP and industry verticals. But no, said Agassi, "ERP 2005 plus NetWeaver is an initial instance of ESA," and within the core enterprise system, functionality is now found for 26 industries, from banking to public sector to utilities.

Kagermann noted also that SAP will remain a provider of complete applications, and that users want suites, but that it's now opened up to working with a range of partners by means of ESA.

SAP today has three ERP product lines: mySAP Business Suite, which includes ERP, CRM, SRM, and SCM; mySAP All-in-One, defined by process templates specified to meet a specific industry's best practices, and meant for midsize manufacturers; and SAP Business One, for smaller companies.

Denver-based Schumacher Elevator is a family-run company that recently installed mySAP All-in-One. Jeff Schumacher, VP and CFO says, "SAP could streamline implementation so it was integrated and scalable, which helps us grow. We're small by SAP standards, but what helped us stay on time and on budget was that we didn't deviate from the approach."

Considerable discussion also was heard at the conference about Duet, the joint product from SAP and Microsoft that allows users to interact with SAP enterprise systems through the familiar Office interface.