SAP CEO Kagermann Declares Enterprise SOA Delivered; Tells Developers They Have Great Opportunity to Engage, Contribute and Make Significant Impact

Kagermann and Klaus Kreplin Detail Technology and Tools SAP Provides Developers to Deliver Enterprise SOA-based Solutions that Drive Innovation for Companies of All Sizes

MUNICH, Germany.- Standing before 4,000 developers, partners and customers, Henning Kagermann, CEO, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), and Klaus Kreplin, general manager SAP NetWeaver and corporate officer of SAP Group, spoke today about the innovative power that enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) has brought to the market and how hundreds of thousands of developers are better positioned than ever to create the next generation of innovative solutions because of SAP’s leadership. Kagermann and Kreplin described SAP’s steadfast commitment to delivering continuous innovation to the market, with enterprise SOA-enabled offerings based on the solid foundation of SAP’s business process platform and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform that are fully available to the market today.

Kagermann and Kreplin emphasized how SAP’s unique heritage of business process expertise coupled with the delivery of business process platforms for industries has made the company’s value proposition more compelling than ever. The keynote presentations were made at SAP® TechEd ’07, SAP’s largest ecosystem education event, being held in Munich, Germany, Oct. 17 - 19, 2007.

Henning Kagermann: Enterprise SOA – Put the Power to Work Today
Henning Kagermann kicked off the 11th annual SAP TechEd by discussing the next major business trend in the industry – business network transformation. First discussed by Kagermann in his keynote address in April this year at SAPPHIRE® ’07, SAP’s customer conference, this movement is coming from the drive by companies to build a network of trading partners, customers and suppliers to leverage best thinking, make best use of existing resources, stimulate co-innovation, accelerate product innovation, quicken delivery of products and introduce services based on the evolving needs of their customers to gain significant competitive advantage. SAP is helping customers understand and optimize their business processes in real-time as they realign their business networks and leverage a strong IT infrastructure to support the interconnections of those networks. Kagermann explained to the SAP TechEd audience that a solid enterprise SOA foundation is a fundamental requirement to fully engage in business network transformation.

Highlighting his company’s success at delivering on its commitment to offer the full SAP® Business Suite on enterprise SOA in 2007, Kagermann explained to SAP TechEd attendees how business network transformation requires accelerating innovation. At the same time, he said, customers want a stable core for their mission-critical applications. SAP delivers on these requirements by providing continuous innovation via enhancement packages on top of the stable enterprise resource planning (ERP) core – an industry-first approach. At the same time, Kagermann outlined the benefits of the latest version of SAP NetWeaver, which allows companies to achieve even faster innovation while leaving the current version of SAP applications unchanged.

“SAP has the right vision for companies of all sizes, delivering open, flexible solutions that help businesses connect to efficient global networks and gain competitive advantage,” said Kagermann. “There are many powerful arguments for companies to make the transition to enterprise SOA today – flexibility, innovation and agility among them. At the same time, as businesses look to deepen their networks of trading partners, a strong foundation like the SAP platform provides the assurance that companies can best take advantage of true business network transformation. This approach is not some future vision or promise: it is fully available from SAP today.”

Klaus Kreplin – Unleash the Power of Enterprise SOA Today
Klaus Kreplin told SAP TechEd attendees how they can exploit the promise of enterprise SOA because SAP has now provided all of the building blocks: standardized, ready-to-run enterprise services, an established common language of business and SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (SAP NetWeaver CE) to flexibly extend SAP Business Suite applications. SAP has fully established enterprise SOA by evolution in the large enterprise space through its market-leading SAP® ERP and SAP Business Suite applications, as evidenced by the record numbers of customers running SAP NetWeaver and migrating to the latest versions of its business solutions. And, in the mid-market, the company’s introduction of a complete on-demand business software solution, SAP® Business ByDesign™, provides an immediate path to fully leverage enterprise SOA, along with the already successful SAP® Business All-in-One solution – all built on a common technology platform.

SAP is fostering business networking through enterprise SOA and a business process platform. The four elements of SAP’s business process platform are available today: the new SAP NetWeaver® Composition Environment to plan and build flexible and innovative business processes; process components that implement those services in a robust and reusable fashion; the new Enterprise Services Repository (ES Repository) with deep business semantics going above and beyond simple registry capabilities; and an integration platform to integrate and run service-enabled business applications. The innovations available within the SAP NetWeaver technology platform today help establish a strategic platform that fuels business process innovation without disruption for existing applications and at the same time keeps up with the speed of change required by businesses.

To tackle SOA challenges like flexibility, productivity and integrity, customers can now leverage SAP NetWeaver CE to compose processes across systems and organizational boundaries and extend industry processes to collaborate across companies. Developers gain significant productivity increases, as they can now access all development artifacts from one view, while gaining full development and lifecycle support. SAP NetWeaver CE combined with Enterprise Services Repository supports customers in their efforts to innovate quickly without disruption on top of a stable core.

Klaus Kreplin continued by explaining how business process management (BPM), standards-based modeling with deep semantic integration, generated process flow models and human interaction management will be embedded in SAP NetWeaver CE. Extending its footprint into the BPM market, SAP will use the technology offerings from Yasu Technologies to enable SAP customers to consistently apply business rules to their business processes across heterogeneous computing environments.

“Tens of thousands of companies are leveraging SAP NetWeaver as their platform of choice to integrate SAP and non-SAP applications,” said Kreplin. “In this consolidating marketplace, customers are showing a clear preference: to integrate their heterogeneous application landscape on the same platform that also runs their mission-critical SAP applications.”

Kreplin urged SAP TechEd attendees to gain the skills and credentials to help their companies and clients be ready to take full advantage of the power of enterprise SOA. He suggested developers be prepared for the innovation, flexibility and agility of enterprise SOA that is available from SAP today. Kreplin then challenged developers to gain experience in understanding the proper governance for services in the enterprise, assuring a continuum of innovation built in an environment that is stable and able to be maintained throughout the customer life cycle.

“SAP’s service and support personnel are uniquely experienced in governance of IT systems, and we look forward to helping SAP TechEd attendees and their companies leverage best practices in this regard,” said Kreplin.

Kreplin cited the massive adoption numbers of enterprise SOA solutions from SAP, as well as the strength of the SAP Developer Network (SDN) community, as some of the reasons why SAP continues to win in the marketplace. SAP has more than 13,000 SAP NetWeaver customers, with more than 18,000 productive systems and over 900,000 contributing SDN community members. SAP continues to make it easier for developers to engage with SAP solutions and recently announced that the company will offer individual developer licenses for SAP NetWeaver through its online community (see Oct. 2, 2007 press release titled, “SAP Offers Individual Developer Licenses for SAP NetWeaver Through Online Communities”).