As students of political science know, elections are won or lost well before Election Day itself. A long, difficult road of preparation precedes the casting of ballots. How successfully a political party organizes on the local, regional and national levels determines whether the ultimate prize of governing is won.
In today's enterprise software market, the equivalent of a national, if not international, political campaign is underway to decide who governs the IT architectural model in the era of the Web. What's at stake is the definition of the relationship between software technology and the business, a governance model that will flow from the underlying IT infrastructure.
SAP, the market leader in enterprise software, gets this -- in spades. Both strategically, with its top-down architectural message, and tactically, at the grass roots partnership level, SAP has been working feverishly to ensure its election to the top spot in the software infrastructure governance race.
In May, SAP announced a major advance in its campaign to set the agenda around its enterprise services architecture (ESA), the company's blueprint for services-based business solutions. Ten companies -- including such pillars as Cisco in networking, EMC in storage, Adobe in document management and Computer Associates in systems management -- said at SAP's Sapphire conference in Boston that they would make their products "ESA-ready." In addition, a record 140 partner suppliers demonstrated their connections to SAP at Sapphire.
A month before, SAP and Microsoft announced a broad agreement, called Mendocino, that will enable Microsoft Office users to access SAP functionality through Office. Add to these developments SAP's progress in convincing software developers, now numbering about 130,000, to create products for the NetWeaver platform, which underpins ESA, and in forging links to automation platforms from such suppliers as Siemens, Yokogawa and Invensys, and the campaign strategy starts to come into focus. What SAP is doing is the equivalent of working precinct by precinct, constituent by constituent to galvanize support for the SAP architecture.
SAP's campaign to set the IT architectural agenda, enlist supporters from the technology industry, convince IT buyers in manufacturing companies (which account for more than half of SAP's base) and others to cast their budget votes for SAP, and win the election to govern how systems and businesses work together in the years ahead is clearly building momentum.
Now it's all about convincing buyers that architecture and technology can match up with the imperatives of cross-functional business processes deployed horizontally; that these processes, powered by reconfigurable technology, can create advantage and even innovation; and that real power will come from how well connected a company can become.
And it's that connectedness that's the real essence of SAP's broad campaign to create a huge network of users, software developers, suppliers and partners supporting the ESA architecture. Years ago, the image of SAP was that of a hard-wired system to which you had to conform. But SAP "broke the egg" and is now in the process of creating an even bigger omelet, and one that its competitors have yet to reckon with. In the software industry for the next few years, it will be anything but politics as usual.
What's your view of SAP's campaign? Write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.