Organisations today are facing a wide range of challenges. Dynamic and changing markets call for companies to react efficiently and flexibly. To gain a competitive edge in the long term, companies must implement new strategies quickly and develop new marketable products and services in innovation cycles that are becoming increasingly shorter. This is according to Pebbletree NetWeaver business unit manager Dr Manfred Hertenberger.
"As a result, companies are under pressure to continually optimise and restructure existing business processes or replace them with more efficient ones. They must meet highly demanding challenges in a timely and a cost-effective manner, which calls for process-oriented, flexible IT systems that they can modify quickly and flexibly to meet new conditions and requirements," he says.
Dr Hertenberger says IT is a strategic tool that companies need to sustain their future and increase their competitiveness. "Key requirements for an innovative IT landscape include technological openness, functional modularity, and powerful development tools."
To help its customers meet these requirements, SAP has developed the SAP NetWeaver platform and provides a wide range of integrated technologies and components for a service-oriented architecture.
With SAP NetWeaver, Pebbletree can assist its customers in becoming more competitive, providing the foundation to enable and manage change. They can now flexibly and rapidly design, build, implement, and execute new business strategies and processes.
Organisations can adapt quickly enough to respond to new challenges or seize new opportunities with SAP NetWeaver. A comprehensive integration and application platform, SAP NetWeaver works with existing IT infrastructures to enable and manage change. The platform enables organisations to drive innovation by recomposing existing systems while maintaining a sustainable cost structure.
SAP NetWeaver unifies integration technologies into a single platform and is pre-integrated with business applications, reducing the need for custom integration. The platform is based on industry standards and can be extended with commonly used development tools such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE); Microsoft.NET; and IBM WebSphere.
Dr Hertenberger says SAP NetWeaver makes change sustainable by helping organisations contain costs and reduce risk as business evolves. "One can also add innovative, industry-specific business processes with reduced risk to existing systems and a strong return on investment."
The platform is the technical foundation of mySAP Business Suite solutions SAP xApps, partner solutions, and custom-built applications - including composite applications - provide the best way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP software. It also enables Enterprise Services Architecture, SAP`s blueprint for service-oriented business solutions.
SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI) provides adapters for diverse applications to communicate and exchange information. It provides business process management to monitor and react to complex system events and also enables business integration. Furthermore, it integrates SAP and non-SAP applications. XI is a middleware platform that may be utilised without any additional SAP applications. Due to this capability, SAP XI provides a platform for integration for customers who have not yet explored SAP`s application portfolio.
SAP NetWeaver supports the most important business processes and provides tools to help one understand how these processes work. One of these tools is the solution map that was built using input from customers and industry analysts, plus the technical expertise SAP has acquired through extensive business experience and research.
"SAP solution maps are multilevel blueprints of processes. They help customers visualise, plan, and implement a coherent, integrated, and comprehensive information technology solution. The SAP NetWeaver solution map highlights various IT processes supported by solutions from SAP and its partners. With the SAP NetWeaver solution map, one can quickly identify how to address business problems with IT practices supported by SAP NetWeaver," he concludes.
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Pebbletree Consulting is Dimension Data`s SAP Application Specialist that focuses on strategic business consulting, developing business models in support of current and future corporate business strategy. Pebbletree`s solution approach is underpinned by the deployment and optimisation of SAP Software Solutions. The company`s core competency lies in the understanding of the extended supply chain, and its extensive experience and exposure to the business intelligence environment.
Pebbletree Consulting is established in South Africa as an SAP Service Partner and SAP Business Partner.
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