Usability, adaptability and scalability are the three key areas driving the future development of SAP, co-founder and CEO Dr Hasso Plattner told the Saphila 2002 conference at Sun City yesterday.
Plattner, speaking during the opening session of the two-day conference, said the company has been working over the past couple of years to make SAP's offerings user-friendly and more capable of meeting the needs of a range of different sized companies.
He admitted that the company had made mistakes in the past but is now well on the way to making the interaction between users and the SAP suite more productive and pleasant.
The new user-driven focus at the company resulted in the MySAP.com strategy. "The role-based portal is perhaps the most important part of our strategy. The portal is an absolutely necessary element in building effective systems ... and we have to personalise systems for users.
"Users are not locked into one system only. Because they are in sales doesn't mean they only need access to the CRM [customer relationship management] application. In reality, users use other systems as well."
Personalising the experience for users based on their requirements means they are more likely to use a wider range of functions related to their area of work, he said.
Plattner added that the company is catering to the needs of both its traditional enterprise clients and small businesses with its SAP Business One and SAP All-In-One options.
"The Internet has taught us valuable lessons. The last four years have been characterised by dot-com wonderdrugs but now that the boom is over we can re-focus on conservative business values. But there is still 'new stuff' out there and we have to talk about it."
The most important of these is the need for integration. "We don't so much need more functions in our boxes as much as we need functions between systems."
Plattner said today's systems need to be open to collaboration with other systems. "Web services are an important part of this as systems are able to serve other applications."
Another key area of development for SAP is usability. So much so that with CRM 30.0, a separate interface team of more than 40 was established to ensure a consistent look across all the applications. "Our look was often better than our competitors but we were never consistent, which was a problem." One that Plattner is taking very seriously.
Looking ahead, he highlighted voice input and mobile devices as key areas of development for the company.
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