Dr Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of the executive board, CEO and co-founder of SAP AG, yesterday discussed "Solutions for the new New Economy" in his keynote address at eLink 2001, currently underway in Berlin.
Plattner was the driving force behind SAP's move into the client/server arena. Today, he has overall responsibility for the mySAP.com Internet strategy. His focus is on marketing, communications and public relations.
SAP has worked with Commerce One previously; in 1997, the enterprise resource planning vendor was a key investor in the e-marketplace. But as Plattner admits, the two could not combine their offerings to work more closely together.
It was a textbook design flaw in the MySAP.com business-to-business purchasing system, he says, which meant that Commerce One's offering only worked with the R/3 system and later evolutions. The two split up, and only joined forces again after 1999.
Plattner recalls the tide change that swept through the industry at the time; customers began losing interest in the hosted marketplace environment. "So we changed direction, and began supporting independent marketplaces."
MySAP.com became a direct competitor of Commerce One, and as Plattner says, though there were victories, there were more losses, due in part to the fact that MySAP.com was still more a software company than an e-marketplace enabler.
Commerce One CEO Mark Hoffman approached Plattner last year with the suggestion to partner again. Plattner thought it was too late, but Hoffman persisted, and in the end, the companies found their markets and offerings overlapped much less than the former had previously thought.
"The world is turning around. Companies that consider each other enemies turn out to be far more compatible than they thought. The last 18 months have been like a hurricane - everyone has been crazed by the potential.
"The new world of collaboration means we can link any marketplace to any other. But we must reach a level of standards that can be shared globally. We are no longer limited to building only to the limits of what our own systems can handle."
Plattner believes the next generation of collaboration will focus around product design; systems will be built around buyers, suppliers and customers to enable collaborative product development.
The first joint versions of Commerce One's Enterprise Buyer and Market Set will be available in the second quarter.
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