SAP Touts NetWeaver 2004 As Tightly Integrated Platform

When first launched in January 2003, NetWeaver included a loose confederation of SAP applications. It now comprises a tightly meshed platform of components that include SAP Enterprise Portal, Business Intelligence (formerly Business Information Warehouse), Master Data Management, Web Application Server and Composite Application Framework.

"NetWeaver is one product, one package, one price," said Ori Inbar, SAP's vice president of product marketing for NetWeaver. "Everything is user pricing and engine pricing. Now customers can get the functionality of the whole thing for what used to be the price of one component."

>> 'NetWeaver is one product, one package, one price,' says SAP executive Ori Inbar.

Inbar declined to elaborate on pricing, although a Forrester Research report distributed by SAP described NetWeaver as "free for licensed MySAP users and cheap for R/3 customers."

The report described SAP's strategy as using NetWeaver "as a loss leader to lower the cost of building, deploying, integrating and accessing SAP applications,and then [to] sell more applications."

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Certainly, the latest version of SAP's server,which integrates SAP with non-SAP apps, enables a service-oriented architecture and manages composite applications,comes with a fair amount of bang for however much buck SAP charges.

NetWeaver now supports SAP's Auto-ID infrastructure, piping data between RFID readers to SAP back-end applications. And a new embedded business-process engine orchestrates message flows between systems. The server's business intelligence function provides similar business-planning and simulation features pushed by Hyperion and Cognos.

In addition, the Master Data Management component,which culls information from across data silos, reconciles that data and then puts everything in the same format,competes directly against IBM's newest acquisition, Trigo Technologies.

"The main difference is IBM provides a project to solve the problem, [and] we provide a product out of the box to solve the same problem," Inbar said. "IBM is one of the greatest partners that SAP has and vice versa. But it's true that on the NetWeaver level, there is some overlap and competition between us."

NetWeaver is slated for general availability in the third quarter.