Customers Choose SAP as Process Orchestrator of Choice Leveraging SOA-Enabled SAP® Business Suite Software

Empresa Municipal de Transportes (EMT), Public Bus Company in Madrid, Among the More Than 1,200 Customers That Have Adopted SOA-Enabled Business Applications from SAP

PHOENIX, Ariz. - With more than 1,200 customers that have successfully adopted service-oriented architecture-enabled (SOA-enabled) applications from SAP - core components of SAP® Business Suite software - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) has turned the buzzword into real business value for its customers. Some of the world’s most innovative companies, such as Empresa Municipal de Transportes (EMT) in Madrid, are realizing the tangible benefits, unleashing hidden potential that exists across their enterprises while obtaining greater process flexibility and integration. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2009, the company’s largest ecosystem education event, being held October 13-16 in Phoenix, Arizona.

With SOA-enabled business process platforms replacing client-server architectures, SOA is fast becoming a market standard for making IT more modular at the service of the business. At the same time, SOA opens up the door for running IT in the cloud using services from multiple vendors on demand as well as on premise. Companies are selecting SAP software to help orchestrate their business processes by leveraging the SOA-enabled capabilities of SAP Business Suite.

SAP customer Empresa Municipal de Transportes (EMT), Madrid’s primary public bus provider, demonstrates how SAP’s approach to SOA can be used to optimize and automate maintenance and warehousing. To further improve the quality of its service to Madrid transit riders, EMT sought to increase the service time of its buses via process optimization. In total, EMT has managed to put 10 percent more buses on the road for daily routes, reduce repair cycles by as much as 80 percent and increase efficiency in repair locations by 30 percent. As a result, EMT has significantly improved quality of customer service for Madrid’s citizens.

“SOA allows us to follow a paperless approach, automate distributed critical business processes and optimize operations and systems,” said Mario González Fernández, head of Information Systems Division in the Direction Economic and Financial, EMT. “This in turn will provide an efficiency improvement.”

Customers can augment SOA-enabled applications from SAP with any desired business content, as their interfaces are based on open protocols. Furthermore, customers are able to use and re-use semantically rich business content, reducing their time to innovate business processes. Today, SAP Business Suite customers have access to more than 2,800 enterprise services for easy consumption. These services can be composed into consistent and stable business processes that help reduce project costs for implementing “own practices” that operate in both heterogeneous and hybrid IT landscapes.

Staying Ahead of the Competition: Greater Flexibility and Integration With Service-Oriented Architecture
From an analysis of 377 SAP customer projects related to SOA, four main SOA use cases emerged: 53 percent of customers use SOA primarily for process innovation, 29 percent focus on usability, 14 percent use it for business network enhancements and four percent for technical implementations.

“These results reflect how SAP customers are seeking ever more flexible and modular IT solutions that are easy to consume and that deliver tangible results like a higher degree of business agility and sustainability,” said Dr. Carsten Linz, global head of the SOA Adoption Program, SAP AG. “At the same time, SAP customers require that such IT solutions result in a lower total cost of ownership and investment. Our aim is, based on our process expertise, to help customers orchestrate business processes in the best possible fashion across functions, organizations and partners in order to uniformly deliver on the guaranteed service level with the customer. This gives us the opportunity to become the customers’ process orchestrator of choice - our key differentiator.”

CIOs at the SAP TechEd 2009 events in Phoenix and Vienna will share their SOA successes and experiences during the executive panel “Service-Driven Enterprise 2.0.” In cooperation with the ASUG CIO Summit of America’s SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) and the Premier Customer Network (PCN) program, executive panels at SAP TechEd in Phoenix and Vienna will provide key SAP customers with an exclusive forum to learn more about SAP’s vision and strategy for next-generation service-oriented architecture.

SAP® TechEd 2009 in Phoenix, Vienna, Shanghai and Bangalore
More than 12,000 SAP customers, partners and technical experts are convening at SAP® TechEd 2009, the company’s largest ecosystem education event, to gain the inspiration and skills needed to maximize impact on their organizations at a time when companies need both skilled professionals and agile, efficient IT solutions that can efficiently adapt to change. In its 13th year, SAP TechEd 2009 is being held in Phoenix on October 13-16, and will be held in Vienna on October 27-29, Shanghai on November 11-12 and Bangalore on November 18-20. For more information, please visit www.sapteched.com. Join the conversation via Twitter at #sapteched09.