SAP NetWeaver makes people, platform and application integration easy

Utilising its more than 30 years' experience of facilitating business processes and performance management for more than 20 500 customers in 23 industry sectors, SAP has brought to market an integration tool, NetWeaver, that automatically creates the coherence of data, people and platforms organisations have been trying to achieve at great cost through third-party vendors.

In the CRM space, for instance, organisations spend R3 on consulting and implementation services for every R1 they spend on CRM licences.

US-based IT thinktank Meta Group estimates that, of the typical CRM services cost, roughly 60% is spent on integrating systems and data.

Says SAP Africa CRM specialist, Phillip Swanepoel: "It's common cause in the information economy that you need a single view of both your customer and your operations to be able to make decisions with strategic value. So, it's no longer a question of whether you integrate your data, processes and people - it's a question of how to do it most cost-effectively.

"Building interfaces for point-to-point systems or between different systems is costly and cumbersome, in terms of development, management and maintenance. But ripping and replacing old systems with pre-integrated systems is even more costly.

"Which is why SAP has designed NetWeaver to co-exist with both SAP and non-SAP legacy systems - enabling a gradual, controlled transition that pays its own way. At the same time, it is building NetWeaver into all its own products, so that future SAP clients will get all NetWeaver's benefits at no extra cost. For clients with existing SAP systems, there is no implementation cost for integrating those systems using NetWeaver."

The advantages of SAP NetWeaver in, particularly, the customer relationship management (CRM) space are clear. "With NetWeaver, you give your people the tools, the momentum and the innovation incentive to create new opportunities, new markets. That's because NetWeaver doesn't just deliver a toolkit to link CRM information to other parts of the organisation. It delivers a built-in infrastructure including the portal, analytics and Web services support.

"Also, because NetWeaver is a SAP product, it inherently understands what the ideal outcomes of your business processes and value chains are and sets about facilitating those outcomes by enabling the processes and value chains to deliver the required information to the correct user in the most comprehensible form. In other words, it makes the beneficiation of knowledge easy.

"At the same time, it reduces the number of internal and external resources you need working on your systems, slashing your total cost of ownership as well as your technology risk.

"All of which lowers your business risk and boosts your agility in the market."

SAP NetWeaver's portal infrastructure provides users with a role-specific, consistent and integrated view of the applications and business processes to which they need access, as well as personalisation for the end-user.

Its information warehouse infrastructure enables the sharing of business intelligence (BI) data and its master data management platform supports a single view of operational data through cross-referencing.

It embraces Internet standards such as HTTP, XML, and Web services and supports WS-I basic profile, allowing several Web services standards to work in harmony.

It enables cross-component workflow as well as delivering a mobile infrastructure for mobile devices regardless of hardware.

And, says Swanepoel, NetWeaver provides an unmatched high-growth business opportunity for technology partners, independent software vendors and system integrators.

SAP NetWeaver has already proved its worth in international organisations such as Audi, Hella, Ratiopharm and the Waters Corporation, and is being implemented locally at Sasol - where it will be used to support production processes already being managed with SAP Enterprise Portal, Business Intelligence, SAP Exchange Infrastructure and SAP Web Application Server.