Agassi identifies software trends

Product & Technology Group president / SAP executive Shai Agassi continued his lecture series on the software industry’s future last week in Santa Clara, Calif., in front of some fifteen hundred attendees. Given at Software 2006, Agassi’s talk was the second of the series, following the March 8 International CeBIT Summit in Hanover, Germany. Agassi seeks to examine current trends and their impact on future development, specifically SAP’s. Stating that a necessary move is to shift into business event management, Agassi explained that the transition had to be made to this from information management and, before that, resource management.

Agassi spoke of five trends he sees as representative and key to understanding the future. First, Agassi addressed the question of flexibility. The executive noted that, to deliver flexibility, “a single, unified platform that provides a repository of coherent services” must be created. Unique applications can therefore be built atop the platform.

Another shift Agassi reported on is the recent market shift to industry-flavored suites. Whereas previously (“long behind us,” said Agassi) point solutions were key, today they are waning, and, as Agassi sees it, sales of which will be extinct altogether within five years.

Business process content, continued Agassi, must be an integral part of the user experience. Keep it simple, stupid, was a credo of the Clinton For President campaign back in 1992 which Agassi believes to work in the CRM arena as well. Described the most demanded solutions to be “basic, simple and powerful,” Agassi emphasized that complexity must be set firmly in the background.

Agassi spoke of the no longer secret factor of ecosystems as well. Citing numbers of some six million new visitors per year and growing, he stated that the SAP platform ecosystem is absolutely critical, and will be thanked for “greater acceleration in our partner ecosystem space.”

Going further with the speed metaphor, Agassi stated his belief that I.T. “will become strategic to the business.” Since innovation will not slow, adaptation of firms, too, will need to hasten. I.T. infrastructure will require further and further adaptability as well.

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