BOSTON -- Looking to shore up the management capabilities of its NetWeaver service oriented architecture (SOA) and to demonstrate widespread support for the two-year-old initiative, SAP today announced new marketing and joint-development agreements with several key technology vendors including Cisco Systems Inc., Computer Associates International Inc. and EMC Corp.
SAP said these vendors, and others including Mercury Interactive Corp. and Veritas, will produce versions of their management systems that can tap into the enterprise services layer of SAP's NetWeaver architecture. Enterprise services -- currently under development by SAP -- spell out specific, business processes that are commonly used by manufacturing and other SAP customers.
IT management systems that are enterprise services-ready would be able to understand and take into account the relative importance of a business process as they manage related data or network traffic, said SAP product and technology group president Shai Agassi.
All of the new IT infrastructure management partners will deliver enterprise-ready products by the end of this year SAP said. Cisco, for example, said in a statement that customers will be able to take advantage of real-time business event visibility and increase security, integrity and business process innovation as a result of the planned integration between Cisco applications and SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA).
Similarly, CA said it plans to use ESA to link its Enterprise IT Management software products with SAP NetWeaver and to develop xApps which run on the NetWeaver architecture.
Security software vendor Symantec Corp. -- which recently merged with Veritas -- also said it is discussing opportunities to develop versions of its products that work with ESA.
SAP customers and analysts, while encouraged by SAP's NetWeaver SOA initiative, have criticized the relative lack of management tools for the environment.
SAP made the new partner announcements at its annual Sapphire conference here, a gathering of some 8,500 customers, partners and employees. The conference followed a similar meeting recently in Copenhagen where SAP announced major joint development agreements with Microsoft and Macromedia.
At Sapphire Boston, SAP also reiterated its roadmap and timing for the continued rollout of NetWeaver. By the end of this year all of SAP's application products will ship with the NetWeaver infrastructure, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said. Also by the end of the year, SAP will make available to ISV partners 500 or so ESA business process definitions.
SAP will also make NetWeaver along with a repository of the business process definitions -- now referred to as the Business Process Platform -- available in 2006. And, by 2007, SAP will begin to ship all of its applications with the completed Business Process Platform.
SAP also used Sapphire to reveal that the first product to become integrated with the Business Process Platform will be the company's MySAP ERP All-in-One product for small and medium-size businesses.
Separately, Kagermann told reporters in a press conference that, as a result of its push to a service-oriented architecture and model-driven applications, SAP expects to explore new approaches to product pricing which may help SAP realize premium prices for its new applications and infrastructure.
"We would be willing to shift to value-based pricing, although customers are hesitant," said Kagermann. The SAP executive did not define what SAP means by value-based pricing.
Kagermann also predicted that the industry overall will eventually see a shift to what he called pricing based on "end-to-end business process scenarios" rather than discrete enterprise applications.
SAP also announced that it has completed development with Intel and Hewlett-Packard of a business intelligence hardware engine that will accelerate execution of queries against SAP's business warehouse suite of products.