SAP expands commitment to open solutions

SAP AG announced late last week that it will accelerate the delivery of open, collaborative application solutions. Collaborative applications use open integration technology and enable customers to maximise the return on their existing IT investments, even in heterogeneous environments. The company announced it has created a new business area to focus on the next generation of collaborative solutions and that Shai Agassi, in his new role as a member of the SAP Executive Board, will be responsible for this business area. Extending the SAP Executive Board to focus on the next generation of collaborative solutions, demonstrates the strategic significance to the company.

The business area will combine the development, market strategy, professional services, and business development personnel of the formerly independent SAP subsidiaries, SAPMarkets and SAP Portals. It will also derive strategic field initiatives and solution centres.

Simon Carpenter, General Manager of mySAP.com, SAP Africa explained that SAP AG will be folding SAPMarkets and SAP Portals back into the mainstream company as a focused business area. "This announcement bodes well in terms of SAP Africa's ability to extract even greater synergies from our technologies and applications for our South African customers. In fact, in some respects SAP Africa is ahead of the game because we have always treated the SAP Portals and SAPMarkets offerings as just one more aspect to our solutions set and have always woven them very tightly into the fabric of the SAP Africa business model," said Carpenter.

The next generation collaborative solutions business area, will focus on providing an open integration platform that unifies people, information, and business processes. On top of this platform, which combines portal, business intelligence, knowledge management, and exchange technology, the new business area delivers collaborative, analytical, and commerce solutions that run within and across business boundaries.

Hasso Plattner, co-chairman, chief executive officer and co-founder of SAP AG commented: "Two years ago, SAP sent two scouting boats - SAPMarkets and SAP Portals - ahead to explore the evolving waters of openness in business software and found that the greatest benefit for customers comes from open collaborative applications residing on top of open technology in heterogeneous landscapes."

Hasso added that SAP has the advantage of understanding how quickly the market has evolved from a technology play into an applications game. "We will continue to focus on developing collaborative solutions that are built to run with other companies' products to best meet our customers' needs."

SAP is uniquely positioned to drive the collaborative application market because it not only understands the processes within key software solutions such as CRM, SCM and ERP, but more importantly how processes cross the boundaries of these solutions, within and outside an organisation. Collaborative applications tie into multiple existing heterogeneous applications, unleash the power of teams, and thus improve business relationships across the value chain - while maintaining the flexibility to add new applications and systems in the future.

Shai Agassi, executive board member of SAP AG, commented: "To address this market transition, we have converged our teams and this unified team will move forward to execute on this vision. SAP is clearly in the lead position to bring to the market the next-generation integration platform and a new breed of collaborative applications with the foundation based on this platform."

"The key to our customers' success is the accelerated delivery of these collaborative solutions," said Henning Kagermann, co-chairman and chief executive officer of SAP AG. "This realignment means SAP has set a course to mine the opportunities generated by SAPMarkets and SAP Portals to create more value for existing and future customers."

The SAP Supervisory Board appointed Shai Agassi to the SAP Executive Board on 17 April 2002.