Now Available: New Release of SAP NetWeaver®; Once Again Deliverable: Innovation Without Disruption for SAP Customers

SAP NEWSBYTE - - Fulfilling a promise made at SAP® TechEd 2010, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced today that the 7.3 release of the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform is generally available to customers worldwide. In more than 150 ramp-up projects thus far, this latest release helps customers more quickly and easily adapt business processes without increasing costs. And in conjunction with the best practices SAP delivers within its applications, customers can use SAP NetWeaver 7.3 to adapt their business processes as needed.

As with the company’s long-proven delivery model of business software enhancement packages — the latest of which was recently announced at the SAPPHIRE® NOW conference — SAP NetWeaver 7.3 helps companies innovate how they operate without disrupting operations to undergo system upgrades. For example, a purchasing request that spans multiple systems can be modeled using business process management tools to orchestrate the process between systems.

The first full release of the technology platform in five years offers new features and enhanced support for open standards across all of its major components, including:

*A unified platform for all Java-based SAP NetWeaver usages with greatly enhanced Java support: Java EE5, Java-only ESB and JMS pub/sub-capabilities, simplifying system landscapes and reducing cost of operations
*Simplified application services and workflows to enable new initiatives such as mobilized business processes
*Enhanced support of open standards for simplified integration with any software system
*Reusable business rule sets with Microsoft Excel integration, lowering cost of development for business rules
Enhanced integration between the SAP NetWeaver® Portal and SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse components and the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio to help ensure SAP customers can benefit from the superior capabilities of the industry-leading business intelligence solutions

“The business process management capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 7.3 will help to reduce the time to develop new standards.” said John Harrickey, CIO, at CSA Group. “We can achieve this through better collaboration with internal and external stakeholders, simpler task-specific user interfaces, and by having greater visibility into the process execution.”

Since the official general availability date of May 30, 2011, went into effect, all SAP customers with SAP NetWeaver licenses have access to the installation files on the SAP® Service Marketplace extranet.

“We have received a lot of positive feedback from our ramp-up customers,” said Björn Goerke, senior vice president, Technology and Platform Core, and head of development, SAP NetWeaver. “We are seeing our technology strategy validated one customer after another. With the new release of SAP NetWeaver, we truly deliver on our promise to bring innovation without disruption to our customers. We will continue to evolve the platform and add innovation along the dimensions of in-memory computing, cloud computing and mobility.”