SAP Bolsters SAP NetWeaver® to Maximize Agility and Competitive Advantage

Continued Enhancements and Platform Expansion Further Build Up Core Foundation, Enabling Innovation Without Disruption

SHANGHAI . - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new and enhanced offerings, tools and components to its SAP NetWeaver® technology platform that will help customers further maximize their investment and competitive advantage through a consolidated IT landscape. With more than 46,700 productive systems, the adoption of SAP NetWeaver continues to grow as customers continually rely on a strong foundation for SAP applications with the ability to add on, customize and update around a stable core. The availability of the new SAP NetWeaver® Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver PI) offering, the latest release of the Adaptive Computing Controller tool and the growing demand for the recently announced SAP NetWeaver® Business Process Management component further expand this comprehensive offering, which provides a powerful platform for innovation without disruption to mission-critical core operations. These additions to the integrated, open platform demonstrate SAP’s commitment to ensuring customers successfully execute their service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2008, being held in Shanghai, China, Nov. 5-6.

“Integration-centric business process management suite products have captured a central role as the foundational middleware component in many leading enterprises, and firms are using them with increasing frequency to deliver game-changing solutions,” wrote Forrester Research in the October 2008 report, “The Forrester Wave: Integration-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q4 2008.” “It is becoming increasingly clear that the availability of these types of tools is enabling enterprises to simultaneously improve operational efficiency and support business innovation… The SAP NetWeaver technology platform has moved into the leadership ranks based on several key enhancements to service-oriented architecture capabilities.”

New SAP NetWeaver PI Offering Ensures Flexibility
Companies are increasingly seeking a single-platform approach to end-to-end process integration to streamline execution, automate workflow and reduce operational costs. To enable customers to more effectively manage integrated business processes, SAP has introduced a new SAP NetWeaver PI offering, which is the single SOA middleware offering that provides the complete integration solution by delivering an Enterprise Services Repository, an enterprise services bus and more than 3,000 pre-packaged integration scenario templates, technical and application adaptors to support end-to-end process integration across a business network. Growing at the pace of 2.7 new customers a day and with more than 2,800 licensed customers, SAP NetWeaver PI continues to gain momentum among companies looking to bypass the traditional technical integration bottlenecks to quickly deliver positive business impacts.

Swiss Post faces not only the competitive pressures of a deregulated postal market, but also market shifts as more customers substitute traditional mail with electronic and hybrid mail services. Their customers also want more flexible, reliable services, challenging Swiss Post to leverage emerging new technologies to differentiate through better customer service and operations.

“To sustain competitive advantage, we needed a flexible IT platform as a foundation for innovation in customer services, and SAP has delivered,” said Gerald Eder, project manager, Swiss Post. “We were able to quickly connect 20 SAP applications and 10 non-SAP applications to the production environment, including our Oracle billing application, using SAP NetWeaver PI. With SAP NetWeaver PI, we can now provision new Web services in a technologically independent way. By reusing SAP’s pre-packaged integration templates, we can reduce our development and integration efforts by as much as two-thirds.”

Energie Baden-Württemberg (EnBW) is the third largest energy supplier in Germany. Faced with industry deregulation and stricter legislation, EnBW needed to exchange information with partners, resellers, competitors and government agencies on a regular basis. EnBW used SAP NetWeaver PI, with embedded Enterprise Services Repository and pre-packaged integration scenario templates, to enable developers to work more efficiently than in the past.

“We used to improvise and create work-arounds for some of the thornier issues, but thanks to the wide range of functionalities SAP NetWeaver PI offers and the flexible enterprise services it delivers, we can now develop solutions tailored exactly to our needs,” said Markus Hautschek, professional analyst, EnBW.

Recent SAP NetWeaver Addition Helps Reduce Operational Costs
The latest release of the Adaptive Computing Controller tool from SAP provides the capabilities for managing SAP systems as a central point of control for flexibly assigning computing resources to run any service on any server at any time. This latest addition to the SAP NetWeaver platform enables customers to move virtualization to a higher level of abstraction and automation with one single tool. The tool sits on top and controls lower-level IT-infrastructure offerings from SAP partners in its open ecosystem. The Adaptive Computing Controller tool is able to operate physical as well as virtual servers in the datacenter.

“The Adaptive Computing Controller tool from SAP was the key driver to significantly reducing the operational costs and dramatically increasing the flexibility of our IT infrastructure,” said Remy Otzenberger, Technical Competence Center head, MARS Information Services, A Division of MARS Incorporated.

Business Process Management Planned Addition to Enable Differentiation and Innovation
The upcoming release of SAP NetWeaver BPM will provide customers a standardized, unified environment for the implementation and management of complex, multifaceted business processes. (See May 6, 2008 announcement titled, “SAP Ushers in New Era for Business Process Management.”) A rigorous beta program of SAP NetWeaver BPM, developed under the codename “Project Galaxy,” has shown tremendous momentum with 44 customers already signed up who have tested the beta component since the launch earlier this year.

“The new additions and enhancements to SAP NetWeaver further demonstrate SAP’s commitment to providing a comprehensive technology platform that simplifies customers’ use of IT,” said Hervé Couturier, head of development for SAP NetWeaver, SAP AG, and executive vice president, Product Group, Business Objects. “We will continue to deliver ways in which businesses can maximize their agility and competitive edge through our integrated, strategic platform.”