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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Sunday, May 13, 2007 4:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | SAP's top executives emphasized stability and confidence at its annual Sapphire conference -- highlighting an SOA-enabled product roadmap -- while the company continues to deal with a range of challenges and changes. |
| Keywords: | SAP product roadmap, Shai Agassi, Henning Kagermann, SAP Sapphire, A1S, SOA, ERP, Hasso Plattner, Leo Apotheker, Microsoft Duet |
As 15,000 customers, partners, and employees gathered in Atlanta for SAP's annual Sapphire conference in April, the enterprise software market leader, uncharacteristically, was contending with a wide range of challenges and changes. Less than a month earlier, Product and Technology Group President, executive board member, and CEO heir apparent Shai Agassi announced his departure from SAP. That move left the company to anoint a new successor to CEO Henning Kagermann and to appoint new leaders for most of its product development functions. At the same time, even as SAP's growth has slowed, it faces increasingly successful and aggressive competition from arch-rival Oracle Corp., which, in March, sued SAP, charging theft of Oracle corporate data. And SAP was fielding mounting questions from customers about its strategy for delivering increasingly popular on-demand applications and its plans for the A1S product for small- and medium-size businesses, which is still in development. Given all of the pressure on SAP, it was perhaps not surprising that the company's top executives at Sapphire chose to emphasize stability and unflinching confidence in the future. "Our approach to innovation has not changed," CEO Kagermann stated in his keynote address. "We co-innovate; we innovate fast...we want to innovate without risk. That means we will do it without disruption to your business...and we will give full transparency. That means we will give you always a five-year roadmap and we will execute." [Click to continue] |
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