SAP’s major announcement and Agassi’s four-step plan

SAP is using the bully pulpit this week to make all sorts of statements and announcement, and the industry media is noting it all. As the international educational forum SAP TechEd ’06 kicked off for the first of three installments in its third year of running, Las Vegas was a party for the SAPpers.

Capturing the most imaginations online, of course, was the simplest and most easily expressible notion: Namely, that SAP software would be receiving no major updates until 2010. The promise comes right from the horse’s mouth – SAP product and technology group president Shai Agassi – and reveals an interesting new strategy tack for the CRM crowd.

"…through 2010," said Agassi, "new functional enhancements to [mySAP] will be made available as extensions in a series of optional enhancement packages. These include: composites for new processes, an enhanced user experience, enterprise service definitions, enterprise services implementations providing industry-specific capabilities and technical enhancements. …this application will continue to provide a stable yet evolutionary business process platform as companies move into the era of enterprise SOA."

Agassi stated that SAP would instead release optional enhancement packages to mySAP ERP 2005 until the major upgrade four years from now. It is generally figured that the move is designed to encourage adoption of the company’s flagship software as the competition with Oracle Corporation intensifies.

Under the current business schema, SAP plans to have its business suite 100 percent service-enabled by 2007. Until then, SAP executives will urge customers to use the software vendor’s NetWeaver platform to begin piecing together a service-oriented architecture. With standard maintenance of SAP R/3 software set to expire at the end of this year, SAP executives are trying to convince their customers to begin upgrade projects now.

Along with the major announcement, Agassi also introduced the “Discovery System,” essentially a package of software components that allows SAP users to test a system design, creating services using Java-based tools.

A NetWeaver Composition Environment was also unveiled, packaging the Web Dynpro development environment and SAP Visual Composer. SAP executives tout the toolset for easing the building of custom composite applications.

SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment has been built upon existing familiar SAP tools and technologies already familiar to SAP developers, including the SAP composite application framework tool for service composition, the Web Dynpro development environment, and the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer.

In theory, the environment should enable partners and customers to build and run composite applications spanning mySAP ERP 2005, SAP NetWeaver 2004s, and non-SAP applications and systems. The composition environment for SAP NetWeaver features Java EE 5, including the new persistence model provided by EJB 3.0 as well specifications related to composition such as Java API for XML-Based Web Services 2.0. The composition environment also leverages Eclipse 3.2, including the Eclipse web tools platform.

And last but by no means least, Agassi was on hand to deliver the opening keynote address. Agassi’s theme was on outlining the changing role of IT in the light of the shift to enterprise service-oriented architecture and how the IT community can accelerate innovation and value.

To frame everything, Agassi took a highly positive attitude in declaring that developers have the opportunity to create innovation at a pace, level and efficiency never thought possible before by taking a few critical steps. Agassi offered four steps “to prepare for the coming enterprise SOA evolution”: solidify your foundation, modernize your core, optimize business use, and drive strategic differentiation.

“Solidifying the foundation” refers to tidying in the IT realm: Necessary items to be ticked off the “to do” list include clean up and manage master data; consolidate business processes, instances and applications; map major and minor business events; assess IT skills and competencies; and consolidate hardware.

“Modernize your core” simply means to have a road map in place to upgrade. “Optimize business use” is a call for developers to simply the user experience (the Chump’s certainly down with this one).

“Drive strategic differentiation” got a bit more play from Agassi, who interestingly claimed that "more than 95 percent of business is common across all companies, in all industries.” This five percent difference is what provides the strategic differentiation that should be exploited, and ultimately run on an SOA system.

Agassi also feels that “During the coming year, it will become increasingly important to standardize around enterprise SOA definitions.”

In his keynote Agassi described a new category of experts inside companies whose focus is on business model innovation. Business process experts are individuals within an organization that are “managing new and unique business processes in order to differentiate their company in the market.” At SAP, said Agassi, is a distinct community in which business process experts can communicate and collaborate with one another, a community that has grown to more than 30,000 members within four months.

SAP TechEd ’06 is a three-part ecosystem education event featuring lectures and hands-on sessions. The Las Vegas leg was this week; Tokyo will play host Oct. 5 and 6; Amsterdam, Oct. 18 to 20; and Bangalore, Nov. 8 to 10.