SAP - Latest Trends

SAP is a software that has been in existence for sometime. In 1972, five former IBM employees the name was Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther. They are launching a company called Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing in Mannheim, Germany. Their vision: to develop standard application software for real-time business processing.

Some of the software that are used are SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver, Enterprise Services Oriented Architecture, All-in-One, Business One and Business by Design.

Initially SAP had R/3. There were a common database and there were a range of applications to choose from. Now over the years SAP has made many changes in its software. It wants it to be more flexible and useful to the users. SAP's Net Weaver is a development tools and a package of integration technology. It has simplified programming models. There has been a great change because of Net Weaver. The developers can now create varied applications. They now have a platform where they can integrate and build new types of applications. It is vendor neutral, that is, it can be used along with IBM WebSphere if one wants to. SDN or SAP Developer Network is a portal which has tools and provides service to interact for all the users with one another and with the technical staff. In this manner there will be a way to get the views and opinions of people at SAP. Earlier, this people could not easily get in touch with the officials at SAP.

The need of the hour is having a unified platform of services that help in flexibility in IT operations. This is on aspect that the people at SAP are working for. There is also need that the businesses use only the services that they want and they pay only for that. For this new models are being thought of.

People want simple and easy to use solutions that are also powerful. Accessing back office data is important. People also want easy to use interface without any complexity.

All aspects of businesses have to be thought of. Costs have to be reduced, performance has to be improved and all types of software that help the management of businesses have to be provided. Data input and management has to be taken care of. SAP has now made all its products available under a new web interface that is called mySAP.com and has added many e-business applications to it. In January 2007 it became a publicly traded company. There are new versions of R/3 that has been provided for IBM's AS/400 platform. Recent versions of R/3 manage financial, asset, cost accountancy, production operations, materials personnel, plants and archived documents. It runs on many platforms including Windows 2000. It is an internet enabled package.

The software industry has changed in the last few years and so have all the small, middle and large businesses. To address their growing needs SAP is trying to grow with them and make various changes to accommodate their wants. The latest trends adopted by SAP will go a long way in making it easy for all kinds of businesses to use software that is best suited to them. This will also address all the issues faced by the different types of businesses.

Five software trends for SAP Outlines

Shai Agassi, President of the product & technology group for SAP In a speech at the Software 2006 event, Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group and executive board member for SAP, said the first of the core trends is the need for a single unified platform to give a repository of coherent services, enabling flexibility in the IT operation. He said this conception is at the heart of SAP's ESA implementation. The second is the move to industry-specific application suite as different to horizontal and best-of-breed capability because Agassi said customers will get a higher level of value from vertical suites. Under the accessible application and license suite structure, clients pay for everything regardless of what they really use. In an SOA world, customers pay only for what they use, which has revenues implications for vendors. SAP, along with other enterprise application vendors, having to consider new revenue models based on processes or highly rough services.

Agassi also stressed the importance of being able to access back-office data from a recognizable environment, pouring business process content into the user experience users are presently comfortable with. "Our customers want basic, simple and powerful solutions, and this can be achieves through delivering an easy-to-use interface and hiding complexity in the background," he said. Agassi also highlighted the need to make use of portals or alternative interfaces such as mobile devices, RSS, RFID, analytics, and embedded devices, to bring related business context to the preferred user interface.

The seeds of a future fight with Microsoft recline in this trend because Microsoft is setting itself up as the vendor with the user interface capability for accessing back-office applications.

Fourth on list was an confirmation of the importance of the partner ecosystem. "We believe ecosystems that reuse common services deliver more, faster and cheap innovation than any single vendor," said Agassi. Partners are serious to the future success of any enterprise application vendor because of their skill to reach wider and deeper and create the critical mass that reduces the risk perceived by customers buying into the vendor-based technology.

Finally Agassi reiterated a common SAP theme that IT will become increasingly strategic to the business as the pace of process modernization accelerates. "The industry has changed more in the past five years than in the previous two decades," he said. "And we don't see the pace of innovation slowing anytime soon. As we approach this next wave, businesses will be challenged to adapt faster to changes in their competitive landscape in order to serve their customers' ever-changing needs. The companies that have invested properly in IT infrastructure will have the ability to handle the market changes; the companies that invest in enterprise services architecture will accelerate ahead of competitors."

The five themes overlap with those identified by Microsoft's Bill Gates in his keynote at the recent Microsoft Convergence conference when he emphasized the importance of a familiar interface, SOA applications, collaboration technology, business intelligence, and composite applications in terms of the development of its Dynamics range of business applications.

The biggest SAP trend for 2007

The biggest trend is that SAP is affecting to advance its use of Analytics and will evolve into presenting its Customer Performance Management functionality across finance and operations management. These new advancements in applications and capabilities will become necessary for SAP to maintain relevance with senior executives but to also help customers derive more value from existing investments. With a foundation year of new applications in Analytics and now an speculation and focus in Performance Management, SAP is recognizing the importance of supporting not just the business processes but the management processes that can distribute improved results and effectiveness of organizations.

SAP additional developments

SAP is moving to drive more value in its applications through significant advancements in the process and event drive architecture of SAP NetWeaver. The movement from transaction-centric architecture and systems to event-driven can help organizations move toward more automated and intelligent applications that improve the value and supply chains of industries. Integrated inter-enterprise processes are part of the next decade of innovations in ERP and CRM application suites and are essential to fulfilling the vision and promise of enterprise services architecture from SAP.

SAP's key competition in ERP is Oracle, Infor and Microsoft at one level of mega application providers and then down to Epicor and Lawson. Each of these providers is working to maintain its existing customer base through new versions of its applications and new underlying application platform and capabilities. The places of significant new growth are in analytics and Business Intelligence and the underlying integration of these applications with information management needs of organizations. These application companies are continuing to build, buy and partner to expand these capabilities to stay competitive with SAP. In addition, the focus on Performance Management and new classes of applications for finance and operations is now advancing from many of SAP's large and small ERP competitors providing engines of growth and value for existing and new customers.

With the Internet, the user becomes the focus of software applications. SAP develops SAP Workplace and paves the way for the idea of an enterprise portal and role-specific access to information.

Currently, more than 12 million users work each day with SAP solutions. There are now 121,000 installations worldwide, more than 1,500 SAP partners, over 25 industry-specific business solutions, and more than 41,200 customers in 120 countries. SAP is the world's third-largest independent software vendor.

Today, with enterprise services-oriented architecture and the fundamental integration and application platform, SAP NetWeaver, SAP is providing our clients with solutions for end-to-end business processes. With SAP NetWeaver, your company can combine people, information, and processes within the company and beyond.