Gartner's last CIO research showed that 80% of IT costs go to maintenance, and just 20% is spent on systems improvement. Alvin Paules, SAP Africa solutions manager, quoted these figures at HP/SAP's Tech-Ed today, as he tried to point the way to delivering value with scant resources.
Providing further detail of this dilemma, Paules added: "Of that 20%, 60% is spent on integrating new functionality into existing systems, and only 40% on the new functionality itself. So all in all, only 8% of the IT budget goes to innovation, which doesn't help the IT department at all."
NetWeaver to the rescue
Paules used this background to give delegates a taste of NetWeaver, an integration framework and application platform, which he said "reduces the 80% and allows new functionality on an annual basis".
"Integration is a key challenge. There needs to be an easier way to do it, which is where NetWeaver comes in."
NetWeaver has three integration layers, namely people (any-device access, portal-based user-interface with roles-based views and collaborative technology), information (business intelligence, knowledge management and master data management - or MDM) and processes (business process management/modelling or BPM).
"There is no complex spider-web integration model, but a more elegant central integration bus with the applications and enterprise systems or silos around it each connected to that." Underpinned by an application platform, this integration stack accords NetWeaver the status of a "composite application framework", he said.
Using the example of Sanlam's expansion beyond life assurance into many smaller businesses, Paules said its version of MDM involved data consolidation according to business rules and integration into databases, data harmonisation via BPM and final achievement of data integrity across Sanlam's environments.
SAP has a second version of its MDM offering. "As with all these technologies in such a complex partner landscape, start with it internally, master it and then extend it across the ecosystem," he said. "The odds that coding standards are the same across enterprises is minimal. That is why you start at home."
Robbed of ROI?
Return on investment (ROI) with NetWeaver is achieved via an architecture that goes beyond a Web services approach, Paules continued. "We propose an enterprise services architecture." This entails going beyond Web services' "wrappering" of existing application functionality and exposing it in new ways, via a browser interface. "We encapsulate Web services to provide not just technological abstraction, but enterprise abstraction."
He added that this is the core value of NetWeaver; it allows companies to react quickly to a change in business climate, by effecting process changes that involve different systems without changing the underlying technology. "You can do this at the enterprise high level."
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