SAP leads industry in driving customer evolution to enterprise SOA

At the annual SAP international customer conference beginning today in Paris, the company's executives will detail new tools, strategies and the industry's first services-enabled ERP suite designed to simplify and expedite customers' road maps to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).

Addressing more than 5 000 customers and partners, SAP executives will announce plans for the industry's first enterprise SOA appliance created to help organisations simultaneously upgrade core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality while also starting to benefit from new, innovative composite applications and technologies that leverage the speed, flexibility and innovation that flow from a services-based approach.

SAP executives will unveil plans for a composite application hub that will facilitate the exploration, distribution and deployment of hundreds of innovative composite applications built by system integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), SAP and customers. The announcement will be made at SAPPHIRE '06, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Paris, France, from 30 May to 1 June.

"SAP is focused on simplifying our customers' evolution to enterprise SOA," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and member of the executive board, SAP AG. "Customers want a reliable and stable environment to manage their core processes while at the same time the ability to rapidly innovate around that enterprise core. SAP's strategy allows customers to concurrently focus on the functionality gains from their ERP upgrade, while leveraging our enterprise SOA appliance to unleash powerful innovation from new composite applications, without disruption."

During his keynote at SAPPHIRE '06 Paris, Agassi will highlight how the planned enterprise SOA appliance will contain hundreds of SAP xApps composite applications that are preloaded and ready to run-helping customers gain a complete, standalone composition environment based on SAP NetWeaver and in parallel with their ERP implementations.

Agassi will also outline SAP's plans to offer SAP's ecosystem of partners and customers a network or "hub" of co-innovation, enabling access to the thousands of current and planned composite applications from SAP and its ecosystem. The enterprise SOA appliance will be linked with the central SAP xApp hub through a live connection, providing customers with a continuous stream of innovation from SAP's vibrant ecosystem, which includes hundreds of partners creating composite applications and tens of thousands of SAP customers.

"As the market moves to broad acceptance and completion of enterprise SOA, the pace of innovation will continue to increase, and our xApp hub will facilitate seamless discovery and access to this important next big wave of innovation," said Agassi. "The xApp hub also provides a very important channel for our partners to be able to expose their innovative, new products to the largest base of business customers in today's market-the SAP customer base."

SAP expects the SAP xApps hub to be available later this year, with additional details forthcoming at the company's SAP TechEd technical education conferences scheduled this fall.

During his SAPPHIRE keynote address, L'eo Apotheker, president of Customer Solutions and Operations and member of the executive board, SAP AG, will encourage customers to take the necessary steps to strategically align around an enterprise SOA blueprint to drive business innovation and fuel growth. Discussing the new, simplified and alternative graphic user interface (GUI), as well as user access options such as SAP NetWeaver Portal and Duet software - the first joint product from SAP and Microsoft - Apotheker will guide audience members through the benefits afforded by the latest release of mySAP ERP, which, for the first time, fully leverages an enterprise SOA approach. Apotheker will declare mySAP ERP 2005 as the cornerstone of future SAP applications, and a key milestone in customers' road maps to enterprise SOA.

"Customers have been carefully watching SAP deliver on its enterprise SOA road map since it was unveiled in early 2003," said Apotheker. "Now, with the general availability of mySAP ERP 2005, customers have the foundation to bring the benefits of real-time business information and processes to information workers around the globe. We are now in a position to bring our world-class business processes to information workers in their user experience of choice-empowering them to instantly benefit from SAP. Duet, which allows information workers to access selected SAP business processes via Microsoft Office; "Project Muse", which offers a simplified, alternative, rich client user interface to SAP; and our new mobile and voice-powered applications provide a variety of access options to customers due to the flexibility afforded by enterprise SOA. There has never been a better business case for customers to invest in the future than with the fully services-enabled mySAP ERP 2005."

"In order for companies to maximise the benefits of enterprise SOA, it is imperative that customers take the first step right now in moving to mySAP ERP 2005," said Henning Kagermann, CEO, SAP AG. "With 300 product enhancements to the latest version of our ERP offering, along with service enablement and intuitive user experiences for information workers, SAP's best-in-class ERP will help customers to build a solid foundation for the future in core operational areas. SAP has the right road map and the right products to help our customers around the globe build the strongest foundation to more flexibly meet the changing needs of the business. The combination of mySAP ERP 2005 and the innovative power of the SAP ecosystem make this the very best time for customers to take their first step towards enterprise SOA today."

To learn more about enterprise SOA, visit https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/developerareas/esa. Visitors can access information about the SAP program designed to help customers adopt enterprise SOA and providing a set of combined software and services in a formalised, step-by-step approach to help manage the strategic transition. Additionally, visitors will find information about the enterprise services workplace on SAP Developer Network, which offers educational tools and access to the new 500 productised enterprise services announced at SAPPHIRE '06 Orlando (See 17 May 2006 press release, titled "SAP delivers industry's first productised enterprise services.").

* Held this year in Orlando, Florida and Paris, France, the SAPPHIRE conferences bring together customers, prospects, partners and SAP experts with a combination of educations presentations, executive visionary keynotes and partner exhibitions. The combined events held this month in both cities have reached more than 20 000 participants, who have visited SAPPHIRE representing companies of all sizes from more than 40 countries across the globe. For more information: www.sap.com/sapphire