SAP AG yesterday unveiled enhancements to its NetWeaver services-oriented technology stack that improve the platform's business process management capabilities.
The new platform, NetWeaver 7.1, was introduced to customers and development partners at SAP's annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas. The enhancements, developed under the code name NetWeaver 2004s, give users of SAP's Business Suite enterprise applications the same SOA features that underlie SAP's recently announced Business ByDesign on-demand offering for small and mid-sized companies.
NetWeaver is a collection of service-oriented products and technologies that SAP is using to transition its enterprise systems into model-based, service-enabled composite applications. In its early versions, NetWeaver was focused primarily on easing the integration of different enterprise systems. Increasingly, however, SAP has been adding features that let NetWeaver define, manage, and monitor end-to-end business processes. This week's announcements further that direction.
In a press conference at TechEd, SAP Executive Board Member Peter Zencke said 18,000 customers have now deployed NetWeaver and that SAP's revenue from NetWeaver products grew by 50% in the first half of 2007 compared with the same period last year.
The most significant new feature in NetWeaver 7.1 is NetWeaver Process Integration, a replacement for the Exchange Infrastructure element of NetWeaver. NetWeaver Process Integration includes a new event-processing feature. So, in addition to helping users integrate applications, the Process Integration product will help them monitor business events and resolve alerts, SAP officials said. The new Process Integration feature also supports higher throughput and industry standards, such as Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM).
The Process Integration portion of NetWeaver 7.1 will be available at the end of 2007, said Peter Graf, SAP marketing senior vice president, at the TechEd press conference.
Available now as part of NetWeaver 7.1 are two other previously announced features: the Enterprise Services Repository and the Composition Environment.
The Services Repository will allow customers and partners to store, manage, and govern services, business processes, and business object models that, increasingly, are strung together to make up SAP's enterprise applications. The Enterprise Services Repository features a services registry that complies with the UDDI 3.0 standard.
The new 7.1 release of NetWeaver also includes what SAP calls the Composition Environment, a set of development tools that allow SAP users and partners to build services-oriented applications using services, business process, and business object definitions stored in and managed by the Enterprise Services Repository. The Composition Environment is based on Java — specifically Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5. It also integrates with development tools based on the Eclipse open source platform.
In a separate announcement at Tech Ed, SAP introduced an enhancement to its Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) suite of tools. The company said it has upgraded the Access Control portion of the GRC toolset with a new Web service that will allow SAP and partners to integrate their identity management products with SAP's GRC products. SAP said it would use the Web service to integrate its own identity management tools — which are part of NetWeaver — with GRC. The company also is working with partners Sun Microsystems and IBM to integrate their identity management tools with the GRC applications.