SAP ranked highly for its open, standards-based Web infrastructure

According to a report from Forrester Research*, organisations with a diversified IT landscape can benefit immensely from SAP's Web services platform.

Late last year SAP announced its entrance into the Web services technology market with the introduction of its open, standards-based Web infrastructure that aims to drive collaborative business in a heterogeneous IT world.

The new, open-standards platform is designed to push collaboration in the Web-based exchange of e-business applications using mySAP Technology, that integrates applications and Web services from a variety of vendors on a common Web infrastructure.

According to Jonathan Pletschke, application manager for SAP Africa, the company leapfrogged its competitors. "We are the first enterprise application vendor to use our knowledge of business processes to connect organisations to each other over the Internet using standard Internet protocols.

"SAP took an open-stance approach to accessing and using e-business applications, trying to make it easier for our customers to coordinate the use of different systems such as customer relationship management or supply chain management. SAP's Open, Standards-Based Web Infrastructure offers the easiest, most cost-effective way to integrate e-business software and customers," said Pletschke.

Since October 2001, more than 35% of the global 3 500 firms reduced their IT budgets*. Although caution and scepticism characterise predictions on business investment in IT through out 2002, Forrester identified three areas of SAP technology that hold the most promise for cost-conscious organisations. The three areas are SAP portal infrastructure for personalised multi-application access, SAP exchange infrastructure and SAP's Web application server.

Today, employees need unified, immediate access to relevant data, irrespective of which application actually holds the data. In its report, Forrester highlighted that although portals are not easy to build they are worth the effort. The portal infrastructure from SAP AG, SAP Portals, Inc, and Yahoo, Inc, unifies access to vast amounts of information and provides a platform for user-centric collaboration across the enterprise.

According to Pletschke the benefits of adopting SAP's portal infrastructure includes low cost of ownership, improved flexibility and increased productivity. "One of the most significant benefits of SAP's Portal infrastructure is that allows for easy integration between both new software and legacy applications irrespective of the manufacturer. Additionally, it integrates any content from virtually any application or Web resource, allowing the users to pull data from one application to another without the need to retype anything."

Exchange infrastructure provides a platform for process-centric collaboration across internal and external systems as well as across company boundaries. In Forrester's report it was noted that the SAP exchange infrastructure hub connects all collaborative participants, without having suppliers abandon their own applications.

"SAP's exchange infrastructure is based on open standards, it protects investments by allowing evolutionary implementation of new systems and the flexibility to integrate any existing component," adds Pletschke.

SAP's Web Application Server offers a platform for application components providing Web services, based on open standards. It supports Internet standards including protocols such as HTTP and HTTPS, Internet document standards such as HTML and XML, and server-side scripting with JavaScript and ABAP. Forester's report stated that it will reduce the integration costs of a private hub by 15% for both new and existing SAP customers that migrate to Web services.

*Forrester Data Overview "SAP's Web Services Will Enable Huge Cost Savings"

**Forrester Data Overview "Benchmark North America: Business Technographics Data Overview"