SAP CEO Previews Architecture Extensions

As part of an effort to provide a more transparent view of SAP's development plans, CEO Henning Kagermann said the software vendor will outline a three-year development plan designed to make it easier for customers and partners to align their strategic investments with the company. SAP also will extend the Web services architecture it laid out last year to include business-process management and modeling tools that can be used to unify business processes across multiple SAP and third-party applications, he added.

Speaking at an exclusive roundtable of editors from publications owned by CMP Media, the publisher of CRN, Kagermann took pains to differentiate SAP's approach to business-process integration from IBM's approach.

"I don't believe we will see customers composing business processes from components provided by four or five companies," he said. "There has to be one throat to choke, [a company that] will take it upon their shoulders to compose everything. I honestly believe the way IBM is doing this is the wrong way. You can only develop a world-class integration platform if you have a lot of application know-how."

At the core of SAP's integration approach is a set of EAI tools marketed under the name Netweaver, which competes with platforms from IBM, BEA Systems, WebMethods, Vitria, Sun Microsystems and others. The Netweaver tools serve as a foundation on which IT organizations can build composite applications that are closely aligned with realtime business processes, Kagermann said.

"You will no longer see a separation between transactions and analytics in a few years," he said. "People went out in the market and persuaded clients to give a lot of money for plumbing for integrating SAP modules. That is not necessary in the future."

Kagermann said he expects business partners to leverage SAP's service-oriented architecture to deliver on-demand application services that will be supported directly by SAP. Such an ASP model relies on one provider of code for customers and partners, rather than on a company such as IBM to aggregate many components from multiple software vendors to create a solution to be offered under a pay-as-you-go business model by SAP partners, he said.

To underscore that point, the Germany-based software vendor last week reaffirmed its alliance with Dell, Round Rock, Texas. SAP agreed to support Dell's effort to migrate applications to lower-cost Windows and Linux platforms provided by Dell (see story).

"We will give you the flexibility to use it as a service or run it yourself," Kagermann said. "From a robustness point of view, we will provide guarantees. But that doesn't mean we have to run our software."