SAP transforms e-business with new mySAP technology for open integration

SAP AG has detailed its open-standards-based infrastructure that enables unprecedented technical interoperability and drives collaborative business in a heterogeneous IT world.

The foundation for all mySAP.com solutions, mySAP Technology enables collaboration across business processes and among users within and beyond company boundaries by integrating applications and Web services from different vendors on one common, reliable and open Web infrastructure. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd 2001, SAP's technical education conference sponsored by SAP Labs Inc and currently on in Los Angeles.

The mySAP Technology infrastructure solves a long-standing dilemma for CIOs - whether to purchase natively integrated applications from a single vendor or custom-integrated applications from different vendors - by providing support for both approaches. Customers benefit by reducing their cost of ownership, adding flexibility to their technology infrastructure and protecting existing investments, with no need to "rip and replace" current systems.

"The nature of business and collaborative processes is continuous change and will include applications provided by many different vendors in various technology environments," said Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of the executive board, chief executive officer and co-founder of SAP AG. "Publishing a suite of application programming interfaces is a first step but no longer sufficient. The e-business platform itself has to offer the flexibility to change. SAP, SAPMarkets and SAP Portals together provide this comprehensive business infrastructure to meet the challenge of building a collaborative economy."

mySAP Technology consists of three elements driving collaborative business: Web Application Server, exchange and integration infrastructure, and portal infrastructure. All three elements enable compatibility with technologies from other vendors. For example, the portals infrastructure ensures interoperability with other portals regardless of the underlying technologies deployed. The same interoperability exists for the exchange and Web Application Server elements of mySAP Technology.

"SAP has established a leadership position in ERP II in both market share and product breadth that will be difficult to surpass over the next three years," said Yvonne Genovese, research director at Gartner. "SAP's strategic direction is to provide tools that will enable users to integrate applications and processes internally, between enterprises and with third-party applications."

The SAP Web Application Server provides Web services through platform-independent, maintainable business Web applications and technologies. These encompass Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and ABAP as well as connectivity with other technologies such as Microsoft .NET. In addition, with Web Dynpro, the Web Application Server provides a high-performance, easy-to-use Web development tool and runtime environment for professional Web business applications.

The portal infrastructure provides user-centric collaboration based on data unification and role management capabilities that deliver relevant information to users, easing navigation and allowing people to work smarter.

With a common, seamless point of entry across disparate systems and information sources including any back-end system the user is presented with only relevant information and can make the best decisions based on previously invisible informational relationships. The exchange infrastructure provides process-centric collaboration based on shared business knowledge for designing, configuring, changing and executing collaborative business processes.

With mySAP Technology, customers benefit from both the strong heritage of SAP and the new world of open integration. The traditional strengths of scalability, broad functionality and mission-critical performance provided by SAP are now extended to J2EE. SAP is the only solution provider able to combine a comprehensive, open and integrated Web services infrastructure with the applications and data that companies need to rapidly adapt to change. With this development, SAP turns the concept of a virtual enterprise into a business reality.

mySAP Technology powers the mySAP.com e-business platform with one common infrastructure for integration within and beyond company boundaries. The architecture enables open integration of any application and Web service from any vendor in any technology environment, helping organizations to be far more efficient and cost-effective by leveraging and extending existing assets while enabling flexible collaboration internally and externally. mySAP Technology reduces the pain of abrupt, disruptive shifts in technology with continuous, evolutionary improvement. As a result of this evolutionary approach, customers can modify, enhance and adapt individual Web services without changing other services, mitigating the need for the huge technology platform shifts and upgrades of the past. This allows companies to protect existing investments and add new functionality that can be easily designed, built, deployed, accessed and combined with existing Web services and syndicated across division, company and geographic boundaries.

The collaboration made possible by mySAP Technology is essential for increased corporate agility and flexibility to respond to ever-changing business opportunities and market dynamics. It can help to reduce transportation and logistics costs, dramatically cut cycle times, achieve new levels of service quality and order accuracy, enhance visibility over product movement, and score big gains in asset productivity. The bottom line is that the efficiencies and collaboration capabilities brought about by mySAP Technology will result in substantial reduction in cost of ownership for SAP customers.

"At Shell, we are continuously working to use technology in innovative ways that help to reduce our overall operating costs," said Alan Matula, general manager of Projects and Solutions with the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies. "By utilising this important new Exchange technology from SAP, we expect to deliver significant results in the form of improved services and process efficiencies throughout our value chain."

"The delivery of strategic, often mission-critical business functionality and processes via an open, standards-based infrastructure is crucial for organizations hoping to enable cost-effective internal and external integration with other systems and business partners," said Michael Barnes, senior program director at Meta Group.

"To attain the highest levels of corporate agility, companies will increasingly look for a stable, scalable and cost-effective equilibrium between adopting new software, standards and solutions, while simultaneously upgrading and maintaining custom legacy environments."