In a bid to bring more predictability and less risk to ERP system upgrades, SAP AG yesterday disclosed that mySAP ERP 2005 would be the company's core service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform through 2010, an environment that customers will be able to extend with scheduled, but optional, enhancement packages.
The announcement, made at SAP's TechEd '06 conference in Las Vegas, came as the enterprise software leader moves to shake off the effects of a disappointing fiscal second quarter in which product sales grew at a slower-than-expected 8% compared with the like period last year. The upgrade revelation also came as SAP showcased its entry into the enterprise search arena and talked up its new Business Process Expert online community while showing off new products to allow companies to build composite applications and more effectively evaluate the business benefits of an SOA without disrupting their existing ERP environments.
SAP's new approach to updates appears to be aimed at coaxing reluctant customers off older SAP R3 environments with a promise of platform stability for at least the next four years, while also getting older mySAP ERP accounts to accelerate their move to mySAP ERP 2005, which debuted in May. mySAP ERP 2005, along with NetWeaver and its enterprise services architecture (ESA), serves as the only SAP business process platform on which the new enhancement packages will run.
In a keynote address to 15,000-plus customers and third-parties attending TechEd -- and countless press and analysts who listened in via the Internet -- Shai Agassi, SAP's Product and Technology Group President, said SAP's goal is to simplify how it delivers business process innovation via internally developed offerings and third-party products built with NetWeaver.
The new approach replaces point releases, which contained broad sweeps of functional and services improvements, with enhancement packages that will be released once every quarter or two and will be packaged around themes, Agassi said. They will include new functionality -- such as talent management and financial collaboration capabilities -- as well as ways to streamline implementation of shared services, industry-specific enhancements, usability upgrades, and enterprise services.
The new approach, Agassi noted, will provide SAP customers with a more flexible and coherent roadmap to plan around. "This allows customers to effectively innovate on business demand -- not on technical demand or a release schedule," he added, noting that customers can install and turn on or off any enhancement as they see fit.
The first enhancement package is scheduled to be available this December, SAP said, but the company did not disclose product details nor the impact the new approach would have on maintenance fees.
Analysts said the changes made sense given the industry's move to incremental upgrades popularized by Oracle with its E-Business Suite, as well as user companies' reluctance to undertake forced marches to new software releases every year or so.
Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang called SAP's strategy "clever," noting that the company is telling customers that the only way to adopt a "self-paced" upgrade schedule is to migrate to mySAP ERP 2005. And, by enticing customers to adopt the latest mySAP release, which is the only platform that supports SAP's new business intelligence accelerator, its upcoming Muse user interface, and Duet -- software co-developed with Microsoft that enables users to access SAP ERP data through their Office applications -- SAP is providing added incentive to build transformative business processes that embrace knowledge workers, hence potentially pumping its maintenance revenue stream by increasing the number of seats licensed per account.
"This could actually hasten the tipping point to mySAP ERP 2005 and help people realize it's much easier to use," he noted.
SAP's partners and customers appear to be on board, Wang said, judging from the reaction at TechEd. "Ecosystem partners know they can invest more from an R&D perspective knowing the core platform is not a moving target."
That should help accelerate migration to the mySAP ERP 2005 release, which had 107 live customers as of last month, SAP officials noted during a press conference that was also webcast. They noted that many more have licensed the latest release but have yet to implement the software. There are abut 2,100 customers using all versions of mySAP ERP, the officials added.
The mySAP ERP 2005 adoption rate is slow compared with SAP's typical curve, but not bad compared with industry averages, Wang stated.
SAP's new Enterprise Search tool, meanwhile, was built in house and enables users to search structured SAP enterprise application data residing in databases as well as unstructured information housed in e-mail, word processing, and other productivity applications. The tool is said to deliver business context by considering the enterprise schema and data model as well as the role, preferences, and intentions of the person conducting the search, SAP said.
SAP Enterprise Search is available via a free trial download and is expected to be commercially available sometime in 2007. Developers who download and install the application now can create new interfaces and add search grammar to tune the solution to the unique needs of their enterprise, SAP officials said.
In other TechEd developments:
- SAP unveiled the Discovery System, a software environment the company said enables customers to build a sandbox within a pre-configured system to test new composite applications and map a path to SOA adoption. Among the early adopters is Lockheed Martin, a Managing Automation Progressive Manufacturing award winner in the data and integration category.
- SAP said its new Business Process Expert online community, which was unveiled at its SAPPHIRE conference in May, now includes 30,000 members with titles ranging from business analyst, business consultant, and process consultant to application consultant and process developer. Members have access to business-process-focused blogs, discussion forums, articles, best practices, business scenario models, change management insights, and SAP tools. Additionally, the community offers specialized vertical and horizontal topic areas to help business process experts leverage the expertise of peers in similar job functions and industries. The community's first industry-focused topic area recently debuted, focused on consumer products.
- The company also previewed NetWeaver composite application development tools, which combine in one environment a new framework, development kit, and a composer for building and adapting composite views used by business process experts. No release date was provided