Thursday, December 13, 2007

Last and at least Sapphire key note from Shai Agassi

Here’s some abstract of Shai’s key note as he supposed to present it before he left SAP AG. For full version see his blog.

At first Shai is struggling with critics who say that SAP could invest in area where SAP was really good – in its business processes, they programming language (ABAP) etc in order to improve it like transformation of ABAP to more object oriented languages of it instead of getting in to JAVA industry and trying to become a big JAVA application server vendor. Shai says that approach to new technologies like JAVA, web service architecture and so on was “essential for the continuous success of the company”. On other hand there could be a “back to basics” approach in field of ABAP and implementation of business processes improvement. As a evidence that his strategy (JAVA path) was right he claims that Oracle followed SAP by announcement of Oracle’s Project X which has similar foundation as SAP’s xApps strategy.

According Shai there are 3 axis plus x-factor of thinking how SAP employed beyond the development of their products during last years:

1st: functionality axis that what SAP is developing for last 30 years, this is what SAP built as transactional modules and they continue with those modules nowadays as a genome.

2nd: NetWeaver axis as an open platform, with its documented web services to enable many of Independed Software Vendors to build solutions that target SAP backend.

3rd: SAP simplification axis, in order to exclude consumption of SAP solutions – “SAP tax”.

x-factor: SAP ecosystem a chain of partners, software vendors and others who can contribute to innovation and effectiveness of SAP platform.

Shai believe that SAP software is not only covering more and more functionality but more important is getting this software simpler to deploy, improve usability and make it open by using open standards.

If you attended this year Sapphire you can compare if the key not presented by somebody else has something to do with this Shai’s virtual key note.

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